Essentials of UI Design XXXXV: How Effective Onboarding Flows Can Kickstart Great User Experiences
Our nifty collection of screens and user flows continues to grow on UILand. But we want you to be able to launch your new product or launch a new feature and people can instantly understand how it can benefit them. Be ready to take copious notes as you’re about to learn how to create a personalized onboarding flow that makes significant positive impression in the shortest possible time.
User Onboarding for Beginners
Onboarding is critical for product adoption, long-term engagement, and customer success. A strong user flow in the onboarding process ensures that new users quickly become comfortable using the digital product.
User onboarding ensures that drop-off rates remain minimal while time-to-value is accelerated. Therefore, a well-designed onboarding flow should do the following:
Highlight the core functionality of the digital product.
Make complex tasks easy through small, digestible steps.
Provide real-time feedback and support.
Prevent cognitive overload by gradually introducing features – also known as progressive disclosure.
This is a layered approach that helps users achieve things one at a time, ensuring early wins and creating momentum. There’s an important fifth step…
Personalizing the experience
You need to create harmony between simplicity and personalization. Your user onboarding experience needs to target specific user needs while remaining focused and manageable.
For instance, one user group may prefer ten awesome features. But you really shouldn’t have all ten in your user onboarding flow. This will likely overwhelm the user and make them drop your product quickly.
How about you ask a few preliminary questions to ascertain their priorities? You can build the onboarding experience around the two most relevant features to them. You may then apply progressive disclosure to reveal more actions, features, or steps as they become necessary.
Slack as an Example of Good User Onboarding
Slack is a robust tool for team communication. It has a vibrant UI and clean UX, using clever language to create a smooth and enjoyable onboarding process.
The Slack bot is a chatbot that greets new users, giving them an initial product tour. The interactive walkthrough introduces Slack’s main features while helping them set up their account and first channel.
The flow begins by asking users their company or team name. Other questions follow in a non-intimidating flow. The contextual onboarding experience helps users learn to use the product and master it quickly.
Conclusion
You need to make your product’s onboarding experience make a strong first impression for the user. The user flows on UILand are from companies who have invested heavily in user research. Take advantage of their experience by signing up here.
