🛬How do you onboard new users?
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I’m curious how other makers approach this.
The more features a product has, the harder it becomes to explain it without overwhelming a new user.
Do you:
• guide users step by step
• give them a simple starting task
• let them explore everything themselves
• use videos/tutorials
• hide most features until they need them
• or something completely different?
Especially interested in products that are not immediately obvious in the first minute.
How do you onboard users into something complex?
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Replies
Short tooltips at the right moment work better for us than explaining everything upfront.
@jahanzaib_ara Yes, thought about this too. But for a first-time user, how can we identify the right moment to engage them before they leave?
It's useful to cover basics of Education Design/Learning Experience Design - this helps break down challenge of onboarding into specific actionable steps.
Rule of thumb is - you have to identify which specific:
Concepts
Facts
Proccesses
Principles/Mental Models
You need your user to know/understand - to fully understand value of your product.
And when u have these, you can then assign specific guides/tasks, build videos/tutorials, to cover each specific gap they might have.
I've got a whole thing about designing onboarding through the lens of education if anyone's interested.
@iggy_love Oh wow! I’m definitely interested! =)
Please share your experience and resources.
De hecho me esta pasando mucho pero un poco al contrario, hice mi pagina con mucho contenido y ahora me esta costando muchĂsimo abrirme al publico para darlo a conocer todo. A pesar de que esta no se siente como un laberinto, no se si me logre entender.
@diogo_mateus_goncalves_mendez As I understand from the translation, you're talking about your page with a lot of content.
But why do you feel hesitant to share it? Can you please share what you're working on? Super interesting to see!
@adana Sorry for writing in Spanish; I realize I wasn't clearly understood.
I launched the site yesterday. I feel it has a lot of content, but I struggle to convey that to the audience because marketing isn't really my strong suit—plus, I'm new to all of this. It’s a real challenge for me when it comes to getting the word out about all the site's features.
Unfortunately I can't share the link here yet, but if you search for PresupuestoYa, you'll find it in my profile.
@diogo_mateus_goncalves_mendez Ah, I saw your product - really interesting concept!
I think the page isn't overloaded at all, it's actually quite clear.
Wishing you lots of luck! And come, join the marketing conversation we've just started - there’s lots of useful stuff already =)
The simple starting task approach makes the most sense to me. once i get one successful result, am usually willing to explore the rest myself.
@uttam_kumar31Â So, for example, for a management environment, create a project and one task? Does it fit with what you had in mind? Or maybe some interaction with an existing demo project?
We are planning to use AI onboarding tool that will guide them through as they use the product
@alieksia Wow, nice! Is it your own tool, or you integrating an existing one?
@adana It was launched recently on PH - @Nimbia , it caught my attention and I'd like to try it out
(my previous message mentioning the tool was invisible in this chat, so I had to rewrite it, so it doesn't sound promotional, and it got through)
@alieksia Very useful shoutout! I’ve started exploring it. Thanks! =)
We're building Protocall (messenger + calls + calendar in one place), and ended up mixing a couple of these: on first use, we show inline hint messages inside the chat itself explaining what each thing is for, right where you'd actually use it, rather than a separate tutorial you click through before getting in.
The idea was that a tour before you've done anything gets ignored, but a hint that shows up exactly when a feature is relevant sticks better.
@karina32Â I agree that tours are mostly ignored, and I like the approach of using contextual hints.
And what’s unique about Protocall as a chat call product?
We went the other way and made onboarding a question instead of a tour.
Sorti organizes everything people save on their phone, screenshots, links, saved reels, and the hard part was never explaining the features. It was that two users want completely opposite things from the same screen. One is saving recipes she will actually cook, one is saving products she wants to buy in three weeks.
So the first thing we ask is what they actually save. That answer gets stored on their profile and it configures the app, so the first screen they land on already has categories that look like their life.
The second piece is that we seed a small demo state so the app is never empty on day one, and we flag that demo data so it stays out of our analytics. An empty product teaches nothing, and an empty product with a tutorial overlay on top of it teaches even less.
The thing I would gently push back on in this thread is the assumption that a complex product needs a guided path. Ours got easier to onboard when we stopped explaining it and started asking one question.
@linoy_bar_gal Really interesting! I’m more of a demo person, though. I feel like a good demo can help users understand the product much faster.