Onboarding I rebuilt three times
The same flow, three increasingly small versions, and what each one taught me.
The onboarding flow for my current product has been written three times. Each rewrite was shorter than the one before. The current version is two screens. The first version was eleven.
V1: explain everything#
Eleven screens. Diagrams. A tour. The dropoff was brutal. People did not finish, and the ones who did had been confused into politeness rather than informed.
V2: explain less#
Five screens, plus a tooltip pass. Dropoff halved. Activation also dropped, because half the people who finished did not have enough context to use the product. I had moved the confusion later, not removed it.
V3: explain nothing#
Two screens. Name, what you want to do today. The product opens directly into the thing you said. Tooltips appear only on first hover. Activation doubled from V1.
What I had been wrong about#
I had assumed people wanted to understand the product before using it. What they actually wanted was to use the product before deciding whether to understand it. The order had been backwards for a year.