The Art of Designing Onboarding Screens
Consider yourself as an eight years old kid whose only dream is to go to Disneyland. Your mom tells you that she will take you there tomorrow, and you are super excited to play on different swings that your friends told you about. When you enter that place, you have hundreds of options to select from, and suddenly, Disneyland turns into a maze.
In this digital era, our day-to-day experiences are not very different from that child in a fun-park. Thousands of new apps are introduced on the app store daily, and since we are curious species, we try to explore each one of them.
Moreover, it does not take much time to give our hard critics about that digital piece and move on to the next. Thanks to our less attention span and increased anxieties because of social media platforms.
So, to tackle this situation, digital media experts introduced a term called “User Onboarding.” It was picked from the corporate workplaces where HR departments help new employees understand their organization’s culture.
Learning from companies, Product Managers do not take it lightly, and they make sure that new user does not get stuck in the maze and bounce off within seconds. So, they try to personalize the onboarding experience as much as possible because it is the user’s first impression of an app. When designed correctly, it increases the likelihood of successful adoption.
When users launch the app for the first time, the onboarding process reinforces the app’s value and provides instructions highlighting key benefits and features.
The purpose of these onboarding screens is also referred to as a walkthrough. They are used to introduce the app and demonstrate what it does, given that these are often the first set of screens that set the users’ expectations of the app. Usually, we have three types of onboarding, fulfilling the different objectives like
- ‘Progressive onboarding’ covers the preliminary information about the app
- ‘Function-oriented’ onboarding typically focuses on app functionalities and explain to users the ways to operate the app
- ‘Benefit-oriented onboarding’ is employed to showcase the benefits of the app
In crux, it does not matter whether you choose one option or a combination of them; the primary goal should be to make it as easy as possible to start with your app. Nevertheless, you should make it easy, short, clear-cut, and focused! Do not push your first-time users into a digital maze.
As we move towards a mobile-friendly digital environment, almost all apps in today’s mushrooming mobile market employ some onboarding tactic. However, most of the apps are making tiny yet blunder mistakes in onboarding their users. It includes:
- Asking users to sign-up and approves permissions as soon as they open your app
- Being prone to hyperbole (basically, to exaggerate is to weaken)
- By not providing users with a means to skip past your onboarding slides or reference previous slides, listing obvious functions, and by not tracking and analyzing your onboarding screens
Next time you are designing the onboarding screens, make sure you do not repeat these same mistakes.
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