Mobile App Onboarding 101
Most new users make a decision within minutes of opening your mobile app. Will they ever use it again? It’s your job—and the job of your app’s onboarding experience—to convince them to stick around.
Here’s what’s inside…
Launching a mobile app is hard. Getting people to use that app (more than once) is harder. Luckily, this course breaks it down for you. We’ll cover the basics of mobile app user psychology and motivation, crafting and optimizing your app’s first impression, user onboarding examples from successful apps, and more.
In short, you’re about to learn how to deliver a new user onboarding experience that pulls them in and keeps them coming back for more. Let’s do this.
When you finish this course, you can humble brag about it for weeks and you’ll also get a shareable certification.
Helpful terms
The activation event (also known as an activation metric) is the first point in your product where you deliver the value that you promised your user. The percentage of people who reach your activation event = your activation rate. This is a key metric to track and improve for user onboarding.
Users who log into your app within a given timeframe. Often quantified as Daily Active Users (DAU) or Monthly Active Users (MAU).
In software, the aha moment is the pivotal instance when a new user first realizes the value of your product and why they need it. It’s often accompanied by, “Oh wow. This is awesome.”
When a new user abandons an app after one session. Quantified as the percentage of all new users who abandon the app after one session.
An adjective that describes anything living inside your product (not exclusive to mobile apps).
The Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) theory is coined by Clay Christensen, innovation expert and bestselling author of Competing Against Luck. In the JTBD framework, people try out products because there is a gap between their current circumstances and final aspiration.
A single shared metric that predicts a company's long-term growth.
An in-app experience that welcomes a new user to your product and guides them to value. It’s typically made up of some combination of modals, tooltips, etc.
The act of building value and trust with users before asking them to grant the “permissions” (or access) your mobile app needs to deliver the best user experience.
The concept of placing users in different groups based on use case, behavior, etc., so that they can be better targeted with relevant experiences and information. For example, new users should not get the same messaging as power users who’ve been around for a long time.
The time it takes for a new user to recognize the value of your product or service. When it comes to user onboarding, your goal should be to shrink your users’ time to value.
