Dear Budi: How to be strategic in designing onboarding experience?

Onboarding is about minimizing the setup moment, so users can reach to the valuable moment.

Hi friends,

Here’s a question from the reader who read the onboarding design principles:

Q: Hi Budi. First of all, I really love your newsletter. I get a lot of value out of it. I read your article about onboarding design principles and I find it interesting. Can you share how to apply that principle in real work? My team will work on the onboarding project, but it’s still vague. How can we measure success?

Thanks for the question. In this post, let’s discuss how you can implement it. I’ll share the frameworks and templates to help you put the idea into action.

Budi

Many designers and product managers think about onboarding as the onboarding pages or coach marks. But, it’s not a holistic approach.

When designing an onboarding experience, we can think of two moments: 1) the setup moment and 2) the valuable moment.

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1. Define your valuable moment & core action

Good onboarding design is about minimizing the setup time so that the new users can feel the core value of your product sooner. It’s the moment where users feel, “Oh, this product is actually useful.” Tweet this

Let’s go through a few examples.

Uber: If I want to go to the office from my home, then the valuable moment is when I arrive at my destination. The core action is when I click Order Ride.

Bank app: If I want to transfer money to my friend, then the valuable moment is when my friend receives the money. The core action is when I click Send Money.

Thinking this way helps your team to think holistically. Your onboarding project is successful when you can help more people receive value from the product.

Exercise:

• What’s the valuable moment in your product?

• What’s the latest action in your product that indicates the users are going to get to the valuable moment?

2. Define the setup experience

Then you can think: what would it take for the users to get to that valuable moment? This will help you define the setup experience to evaluate it later.