Welcome to the UX Rundown. In this series, we share quick, actionable UX breakdowns of real apps and websites – spot what works, what doesn’t, and learn how to apply it to your own designs.
Learn how to design onboarding experiences that convert and retain users. This UX design tutorial breaks down real examples from Notion's onboarding flow and contrasts it with a poorly designed travel app to show you the principles that make or break first impressions.
What you'll learn in this UX tutorial:
How to create personalized onboarding flows that guide user success.
The golden rule of user onboarding: show users the benefit, don't just ask for things.
User experience research techniques for testing onboarding effectiveness.
How to redesign signup flows that actually convert users.
We'll examine why Notion's onboarding succeeds with clear value propositions, analyze common onboarding mistakes that cause user drop-off, and show you step-by-step how to test and improve your onboarding using real usability studies. Perfect for UX designers, product managers, and anyone creating user onboarding experiences.
Chapters:
0:00 - Introduction: Why first impressions matter in product design
0:52 - Notion's onboarding breakdown: personalization done right
2:42 - The golden rule of user onboarding: show benefits, don't just ask for things
3:30 - Travel app case study: when onboarding goes wrong
4:31 - Testing the original design with usability studies
4:53 - Redesigning for better user confidence
6:00 - Testing results: dramatically improved user confidence
6:16 - Key principles for successful onboarding
Transcript
As we all know, first impressions matter. Even when it comes to product design. You open up an app for the first time and you're greeted with an onboarding experience. Maybe it's a quick carousel that you swipe through. Maybe it's a tutorial that shows you around, or maybe it's one of those that hits you right away with sign up and give us all your information.
When done well, onboarding gives users a smooth path to their goals. When it's done poorly, it can feel frustrating, tedious, and disappointing. The key idea. Yes, onboarding is a first impression, but it's also so much more than that. It can make or break how successful users are with your product, not just in their first visit, but in every visit after.
I'm Joe Formica, and this is the UX Rundown. In each episode, we take a look at real apps, websites, and features out in the wild to see what's working, what's not, and what we can learn to design better experiences of our own. Let's start with a great example of onboarding. Notion. Right after you sign up in Notion, you're asked a few questions to personalize your experience.
It's a step-by-step flow with clear, helpful copy to help guide your choices. The first couple steps, focus on the user, asking them what they're interested in, and giving them some ideas of how they can use Notion. After these initial steps to get an idea of your preferences, we get to two very important steps.
The first is a prompt to download the Notion Desktop app, and the second is a prompt to sync Notion with your calendar. Often in onboarding experiences, these steps where you're being asked to do something can feel like a speed bump. Notion avoids that by showing the user how it will benefit them.
Notion is 50% faster in the desktop app. Sync your calendar to seamlessly organize your projects and schedule. Instead of just asking you to do something or forcing you to set it up to continue, they give you a clear reason to say yes, and among all the things that Notion does well, that's the big one. A lot of onboarding experiences just ask you for things, your email, your location, access to your data or activity.
And without the proper context, it can cause hesitation or even rejection for the user. Why do you need my location? Why do you want to track activity? And most importantly, what do I as the user get in return? If users don't know why, or better yet how, something is going to benefit them, they're probably going to drop off.
Notion avoids this by following what I think of as the golden rule of user onboarding. If you're asking the user to do something, you don't just have to tell them why. You have to show them how it will improve their experience. It's not just Notion that it's getting this right. Duolingo asks for your email, but only after your first lesson, and they explain that it's to save your progress so you don't lose your streak.
Yelp ask for your location, but they tell you that it's to show you nearby places and events that you'll actually care about. Depop asks you to enable notifications, but explains that it's the fastest way to know when a price drops on an item you've liked. In each case, the ask comes with a clear user-centric reason to say yes.
Have you seen an app or website with a really great onboarding experience or maybe one of those not so great ones? That asks for way too much, way too fast? Leave a comment and let me know. I'd love to check it out and maybe break it down in a future rundown notion and the examples that we just looked at do a great job of onboarding users smoothly and setting them up for success. But let's take a look at an example that doesn't do as great a job and see how we'd improve it. Imagine you're using a travel app called Triply to plan some activities and things to do on an upcoming trip to New Orleans.
You're going through the onboarding experience and it immediately asks you to sign up and create an account. Then it asks where you're going and lets you pick from a few general interests. Finally, you see a bunch of recommendations. If onboarding were just about speed and efficiency, this flow would be great.
It's quick, easy, and really just takes a few seconds before you're getting to those recommendations. But it's also got two major problems. First one, that email sign up right away is a speed bump. I wasn't sure why I needed to sign up or how it was going to create a better experience. Second, the recommendations felt generic.
I only answered a few questions and I didn't feel like there was enough detail to really personalize them. I felt like this onboarding experience could use some improvement, but I wanted to validate it. So I ran a study on Lyssna. In this usability study, we ask participants to walk through that same onboarding and then answer a question at the end to gauge their confidence in those recommendations.
The results and the feedback was pretty underwhelming. Sure, the process was quick, but most users weren't very confident in those results and the activities that they were being recommended. So let's talk about how we'd improve it. Can we make a few changes that will boost the confidence in those recommendations without making the onboarding process too long, tedious, or over complicated?
Here's what I changed in my redesign version. I removed the email signup from the first step. Now the onboarding begins with Where are you going? Then I added a question to ask users how long they're staying, and more importantly, explained why it matters that we can use that to recommend activities that are a great fit for your trip.
Next, it asks who you're traveling with, solo, partner, friends, family, and explains how this helps personalize suggestions even further. I also added some more detailed interest tags so we can give more tailored recommendations based on their actual preferences. That email signup we took out, it's still here, but now it appears when a user wants to add one of those activities to their agenda. Instead of just forcing them to create an account, we give them the benefit.
Save the activities you love and keep your perfect trip plan all in one place. It's a clear value exchange and it makes the ask feel worth it for the user. I ran the exact same usability study with this new updated version and the results flipped. Users felt way more confident about the recommendations.
They felt more personalized, tailored to their trip, and most importantly, they were seeing things that they were actually interested in. No matter what kind of product you're working on, these principles of a great onboarding experience are, set users up for success. Remember that onboarding is more than just a first impression, and it has a big impact, not only on their first visit, but on every visit after.
Explain the benefit with every ask. Go from, give us your info to, here's how this helps you. Finally test and refine. Go beyond completion rates or times to complete the task and use a usability study or any other method and Lyssna to dig a little bit deeper into the user experience. More important than how smooth it was or how long it took, were they confident in the end results, and did they feel set up for success?
Do you have an app, website, or feature that you think I should break down next? If so, leave a comment so I can check it out and maybe include it in a future rundown. And if you like this video, give it a like and subscribe for more real world rundowns like this one. Finally, if you're ready to start testing and improving your onboarding or any other part of your experience, head over to lyssna.com and get started for free today.
Thanks, and I'll see you next time.
