How the biggest apps design onboarding: lessons from Figma, Duolingo and more
The guidebook from Figma, Duolingo, and more. From common mistakes in designing onboarding to secrets behind engaging onboarding.
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Q: How today’s biggest consumer apps win in user onboarding? Secret sauce…
Did you know? 60% of users find a bad onboarding experience a dealbreaker, while 70% of users need to watch a video tutorial to understand how an app or website works. (source) Focusing on onboarding is critical to the health of your product.
This week, Ben Shih, Senior Product Designer (Growth) at Lokalise kindly allowed me to share his learnings from analyzing the world’s top product onboarding. Enjoy! 🙏
Follow Ben for more. You can find him on LinkedIn & ADPList.
Imagine you walk into a nice restaurant. The staff greets you with warmth and guides you to your table. But as soon as you sit down, they run away, leaving you alone, and you cannot even find them anymore.
Sounds odd?
Sadly, this is exactly how many product onboarding experiences look today — leaving users confused and unsure of what to do next, even when it comes to making a payment.
Onboarding is arguably the most important experience for any product, especially SaaS ones. According to a study from ProfitWell, onboarding directly impacts your product retention. They studied more than 500 companies and found that customers with a positive onboarding experience were 7.2% more likely to return to the product than those who weren’t satisfied. They also discovered that great onboarding leads to a higher willingness to pay, thus directly affecting your revenue.
Over the last two months, I’ve analyzed more than 20 onboarding flows from various industries and companies. Throughout this analysis, I identified several common mistakes that companies make, as well as observed how successful companies like Figma, Miro, Grammarly, Slack, Monzo, and many other leading tech companies have implemented their onboarding processes. Let’s look into these mistakes and uncover the secret sauce.
The common mistakes in most onboarding
Before we explore what good onboarding looks like, let’s address the common issues with most onboarding today.
Mistake 1 — Onboarding ends too early
How many times have you signed up for a product, only to be bombarded with numerous tooltips at the beginning but then suddenly left in a desert with no more support?
An example is Sketch, the popular design prototyping tool before Figma dominated the market. After you fill in your personal information and sign up for an account, they navigate you to a dashboard without clearly pointing you to any place. Download Mac app? View Documentation? Create Document? None of these sound like features from a design prototyping tool.
Take Spotify as another example. When you sign up for Spotify, they request your information during sign-up, but once you’re done, you’re left on a page with no further guidance.
Elena Verna, Head of Growth at Dropbox, wrote “The biggest mistake companies make is stopping activation efforts too soon, often at the setup moment. Ensure you measure activation through the first habit loop creation, meaning the aha! moment has been repeated several times at the desired frequency of engagement. Only then can you be productive in your engagement & monetization strategies.” (Source)
In simple terms, good onboarding doesn’t end until the user forms a habit of using your product.
Let’s take a look at Linkedin. The main value of LinkedIn emerged when users began to find jobs on the platform through their connections and networks. Hence, from the day you sign up, LinkedIn encourages you to connect/follow as many companies and people as possible to help you form a habit of using LinkedIn.
The same goes for Medium. On the day you signed up for Medium, you might not be interested in reading other articles. However, Medium keeps you coming back through the daily emails they send you and helps you form the habit of returning to Medium to read articles.
Mistake 2 — Onboarding starts too late
Conversely, another common issue is starting the onboarding process too late. Onboarding doesn’t just begin with the user’s first login; it starts the moment a user first encounters your product. You need to plant the seed of future value at the very first touchpoint — whether that’s through a Facebook ad, a referral from a friend, or an invite email from a colleague.
Unfortunately, there are countless apps where there’s a disconnect between the first touchpoint and the actual product.
Here’s an example: I was scrolling through my Instagram over the weekend when I saw this ad from Voiso. With no text describing the product, I became curious, clicked on the ad, and then learned it is an AI-driven contact center software… wait, what? Why would anyone set up an AI-driven contact center on a… phone?
The disconnection between the Ad, the product, and the timing can leave users confused and disengaged right from the start.
A good onboarding process navigates users through a series of “Aha” moments from the get-go, even before they officially sign up. Each “Aha” moment incrementally raises their excitement level, allowing them to feel the real value of your product early on and setting the stage for a fruitful relationship with the product.
Mistake 3 — Prompting users to pay without experiencing value
Imagine the same scenario again: You are looking for a new pair of shoes. You walk into a shoe store, and suddenly, even before you see any shoes or try them on, the staff asks you to check out.
How odd would that be?
Sadly, again, that’s a common pattern in many onboarding.
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