Workshop overview

User onboarding isn’t just a quick tour—it’s a make-or-break moment for your product. A great onboarding experience helps users succeed, engage, and keep coming back. A bad one? It drives them away forever. In this video, Joe from Lyssna breaks down the do’s and don’ts of user onboarding, sharing real-world examples and practical strategies to improve activation, retention, and long-term success.

About the host

Joe Formica leads workshops and creates educational content at Lyssna, bringing over 10 years of experience in UX and education. His practical, hands-on teaching approach has helped thousands of designers develop their skills and create better products.

Transcript

Welcome everybody. Good to see you all here. Thanks for joining. Depending what time zone you're in. Little Friday morning workshop. This 1 is going to be a little bit quicker than usual. But packed with some really good stuff and on one of my favorite topics and something that I've worked on quite a bit.

So we're going to be talking about user onboarding. Doing some examples, some quick activities and hopefully having everyone leave feeling more confident and ready to put this stuff into action. I think we got most everyone here and we got a lot to get into. So I'm going to go ahead and get started. And if more people join.

They'll catch up or catch up on the recording. Alright, like I said, last time, give me a thumbs up on the reaction. You can hear me, see me, and see my screen. I think we're all good with this. We are recording. I got the chat open. Wonderful. Let's get started.

My name is Joe. I'm going to be your instructor today. I am the design advocate at Lyssna, and I've basically been a product designer, researcher for 10 plus years, and I, in that time, most of that time, I've also been teaching research, product design, running workshops, courses through all different areas, but as probably some of or found this through Bite Size UX, and that's pretty much what I'm doing here.

At Lysna running a lot of and creating a lot of educational material to help build better products, help you get more out of Lysna if you're using it and giving you some hands on skills to apply to, whatever you're working on. In my time as a product designer and researcher, I've worked on products of all shapes and sizes.

I did a lot of freelance work and jumped around from all different types of projects, all different types of teams, subject matter area. Skills and focuses of the project. So I've seen a lot of the different scenarios and challenges as well that come up in different areas of research and product design.

And I say that because I like to bring a lot of that experience into our workshops, talk about some projects that I've worked on, if they're relevant, and I'll definitely be doing a little bit of that today, because onboarding specifically is something that I have spent a lot of time working on. I used to get.

Hired to do onboarding experiences quite a bit and learn some lessons from them. And that's why we're here today. No matter what topic we're talking about or what we're doing a workshop on. My goal is for each of you to leave. With real tangible still skills confidence and feeling ready to put the stuff into your work, whatever you're working on, whether you're a student learning product design, you're in an organization and have this.

Special project coming up or just the day to day things that you're doing and wanting to do them better. I want you to leave not just knowing more about the topic, but feeling like you're ready to put that into action. And a bet will be a better designer, more skilled designer researcher tomorrow.

So I'm going to ask these at the end of class is how I assess how our workshop went. My 2 big questions. Did you enjoy this workshop? I'll ask you that at the end. I want to make sure everyone had a good comfortable time here today and that it was worth it to take some time out of your day or night to join me.

And my second question, the more important one, do you feel like better, more confident designer, researcher, product person than you were 45 minutes ago? So I'll ask you that at the end and hopefully get some thumbs up there. And if not, I'll give you a feedback survey to tell me how we can improve.

All right, some quick tips for getting the most out of our workshop. Everything is recorded. And I will be sending out the recording of the workshop, the slides and some other resources that we talk about. So you'll be able to come back if you miss anything, or if you just want to refresh maybe when onboarding becomes relevant in what you're working on.

You'll have that recording and everything we chat about here today, keep the chat open and active. I'm going to be sharing some links in the chat. We're going to have some really quick activities, but I'm going to be asking you throwing some questions out there to the group and having you respond in the chat.

So do a couple of those. Once we get into it. Also, if you have questions, drop them in there. I'll try to get to as many as I can. Or when if there's a relevant 1, when it comes up. I'll try to hit on it, so feel free to drop them in, but overall, I want this to be interactive hearing from you guys and chiming in and giving me some feedback on the questions I'm going to throw out there.

So keep the chat open. You've already done a great job of that. Finally, stay comfortable, hydrated and happy again, quick workshop today. So it's not a marathon, 2 and a half hour workshop, but still take care of yourself. Grab some water. I got a big, this is what I won in our secret Santa at ListenUp.

Nice shout out to Diane for choosing this water bottle for me. Stay hydrated, comfortable, happy, and if there's anything I can do to make it more enjoyable, just let me know. All right, got through it in nine minutes. Record time. It's a Ninja bottle. It's a Stanley bottle, which I know there's the hype around it.

But it's pretty good. It's a pain to clean, honestly, because there's like a bunch of pieces, but it keeps my water nice and cold. It was a good, good free secret Santa gift. All right, let's do it. Everyone. We're all here for the do's and don'ts of user onboarding and we are going to get into onboarding, but we're going to start with a little story slash scenario.

That we're going to be using and looking at quite a bit and breaking down as an example, and a real something very similar project that I've worked on, but a real life example to show not only the importance the impact of onboarding, but showing how the design decisions we make early on can lead to.

Make or break many aspects of the experience for users later. So let's start with that story. All right, we got Sarah Diaz here. Sarah is going to be our, kind of user or the focal point of the story and the onboarding stuff that we're going to be looking at. Teacher and debate team coach at Edgewood Middle School and wants to raise money To cover expenses for her students to travel to the world debate finals.

So Sarah's trying to raise some money to get the debate team their travel expenses. We're gonna imagine that Sarah creates two different fundraising campaigns and landing pages. On 2 separate platforms, we got yo fund me and bro fund me by shortened versions, fictional versions of something like go fund me again.

I'm not giving you a ton of background here, but you can make some inferences. We got 2 different versions. From two different platforms or companies, both with the same intention, Sarah is trying to raise some money to get her team to the world finals and cover some of the travel costs and stuff like that.

Okay. So we're going to come back to this, but I want to share. A link and I want to get actually your feedback on these pages. So I'm going to share this link in the chat

and you can go ahead and click on it. And I'll give everyone a couple of minutes here to just read through it. This is a list of study where you're going to be looking at those 2 pages and asked a couple of questions on them. So this should only take, 3 minutes on this, but take some time read through the scenario here.

You can click start. And you'll see the directions for the preference test. Take a moment to review both designs. Select the option that you think would make you more likely to donate. And you'll see the two options here. You can zoom in on them, check them out, and then make a selection on the one after you make a selection.

I'll choose this 1. If there's a question here, why did you make this choice? Just leave a couple bullet points or a quick note, try to be specific, but nothing. Don't you don't need to write a whole paragraph or a dissertation on it, but leave a couple notes and a little backup or evidence to support why you chose the 1 that you did.

All right, so just give me a thumbs up if everyone can access that everyone click on that link and just make sure you can get there. Good. Awesome. All right, cool. So I'm going to just set the timer on my phone because my little plug in's not working. But I'll give everyone a couple minutes, take three minutes on this, read through it, read through the pages, take a good look at them, make your choice, and leave a couple notes that we'll be coming back to and checking out in a bit.

All right, got my timer on. We'll talk and talk in 3 minutes.

Oh, wow. You guys are fast. I'm looking at privately looking at the results page here and I see we already got a lot of responses. Nice.

All right. So we have 46 people here. So we'll see. We have how many responses 22. nice. Yeah, take your time take a couple more minutes. No, right and wrong answers on this 1, just with all the usability studies want to hear your feedback, your thoughts and, we're going to take a look at this and tie this in to onboarding and what we're talking about in just a little bit.

All right, cool. So if you're still working on that, we're not going to check it out for another, let's say, 10, 15 minutes here. Make sure you get that done. And it looks like everyone's making their way through it. So I'm going to keep moving here. But take a 2nd to wrap it up, drop your feedback in and I'll refresh it.

And we'll take a look at those in time. And in just a 2nd, all right, we are going to come back to that and tie it into onboarding. But now that we got some results rolling in I'm curious and excited. To see your feedback and some of your thoughts on it. We're going to move away from that for a second and talk about what you're all here for.

Onboarding 101. So let's start with just the high level overview. Make sure we're all on the same page here. Onboarding is, or usually happens. During a user's first time experience with a product or maybe a new feature, so it's a first time experience. It can be adapted and used in a lot of different ways, but generally it happens at some point when a user is being introduced or opening up.

a new product or feature for the first time. So this is a little blurry, but just some examples like the Grammarly onboarding here in typical onboarding experiences, we'll see maybe something like this, what kind of a step by step process, some setup steps, a sign in or account creation. You might see something like coach marks here or pointing out or highlighting new features or directing you as a user where to go or how to get started and providing some of those initial hints to get you familiar with the interface.

It could be a walk through, like we're seeing over here with. Gmail or this inbox that gives you some tips and tutorials on how to use it. Basically, there are tons of different patterns and ways to design an onboarding experience, but I wanted to show a couple common ones that you're probably familiar with just to make sure everyone is onboard, no pun intended with what we're talking about here and where this happens in the experience.

So quick thumbs up from the reactions. Everyone knows. What we're talking about with an onboarding experience. You've done these before you've seen them. They look familiar. Awesome. You skip through these slides really quickly. If you're like me, great. Okay. So what is the point of designing and onboarding experience?

Why do we have this kind of separate? Part of the experience that we don't really see again, or the user doesn't really see again, but happens and at a very specific point when they're first signing on or trying something new out when I asked this question to other classes, throw it out to the group. I hear a lot of things like the screens that I just showed you, right?

Highlighting features and benefits. Maybe the purpose is something like slack here where it's giving you a. overview walkthrough of what you can do in the product, get framing some of the names and maybe some simplified designs here to get you familiar with what it does and how it can help you.

Some other common answers or thoughts around onboarding is that the goal is to educate users about where things are and how to use them. We saw this with the coach marks and arrows. This example is from Discord here, where you're seeing maybe some kind of call out or tool tip that's going to direct you and help you get familiar with the navigation or the different features or interface available to you.

Yeah, coach marks down are the, it's an you don't really hear it that much, but that these used to be way more common. Coach marks are when it's like that overlay and pointing you to something I will say in general, we'll get into this, but they don't really work well as an onboarding experience, but I've heard them referred to as coach marks.

Something like this here. So highlight features and benefits, educate users about where things are and how to use them, and also in many cases from a product perspective, funneling users towards conversions and business goals, getting them to set up an account, to buy something, to subscribe to something, to upgrade, to start a premium plan.

And bringing them in as a, a customer in many cases in the onboarding experience. Now, there's more than this, but I think in general, these are the common things that most people think about when we talk about onboarding goals. Those are all common patterns and choices for onboarding.

Those are things we see all the time in onboarding, but it's not the goal. Of onboarding, the goal of onboarding is not to show you where things are. The goal of onboarding is not to highlight benefits or things that you can do. The bigger overarching goal of user onboarding is it's the process of radically increasing the likelihood.

That new users become successful when adopting your product. So that might come through showing them where things are in the navigation. It might come through highlighting those key benefits. Those might be solutions to get to this ultimate goal. But I want to shift how you think about onboarding a little bit from kind of the solutions or patterns or tasks that you're doing.

As the goal and rather thinking of those as a pathway or a method to get to the ultimate goal of increasing the likelihood that new user, that person who just downloaded your app with hopes of doing something becomes successful in that 1st session and. More importantly, every session and every need they have down the road when they're using it.

So I think and your example definition, your onboarding goal, bring value to the user quickly with their initial experience. Yeah, that is a good one. And that is a good way to get to this too, is if they're get a quick win at the beginning, that's a really helpful way to facilitate this larger goal of increasing their likelihood that they'll be successful.

In the short term as you said, and also further along as they're adopting your product. So we want to set our users up for success with onboarding. All right. I'm going to come back to our fundraisers here. We saw a mini scenario of Sarah trying to raise some money to cover expenses. For her debate team to travel, we saw 2 different versions of this fundraiser page.

Yo, fund me and bro fund me. I think I took the names out in the in the study because I didn't want it to buy as bro fund me sounds a little bit maybe not as trustworthy or something, but I had to make 2 different names to distinguish them. So you guys took a look at these. You gave some feedback on them.

And now we're going to take a look at those results. So what you're looking at here, it, wow, we got a lot of responses. Awesome. So what you're looking at here is the backend or study results of the Lyssna preference test that you all just participated in. And I'm going to post the link here. Cause. I published it.

So you guys can all see this and if more results come in you'll be able to see them as well. All right. So let's look at the results. Probably not going to be a big shocker here. So I'm not going to take a ton of time to do it, but we had yo fund me this 1. With 95 percent votes in the preference test, and we have bro fund me with 5%, only two of us.

And one of those is me just doing the example. So I thought I'd give it a, give it, 1 1 check. But I guess someone else like this 1 better. So we see a drastic over performance of, fun. We probably, as most of us expected, just from checking both of them out. More importantly, though, let's check out some of your answers to the follow up questions here.

More personal full cost description builds trust. Personal, more personal and concrete. You can see the student's faces, names. Green button feels more attractive to click, like that. Prefer the detailed description. I'm going to kind of skim through these, but empathy, I can empathize more with the picture.

Use of real photos, real people. Header image felt more welcoming. See what the word cloud gives us here. Personal. I thought that would be right at the top here. So you can check these out on your own. And there's a lot of good answers. Thank you for giving such a such detailed answers on these.

I'm going to check them out in more detail myself, but we can see really just from scanning through this, that there is some pretty common themes here. We chose that 1st 1 and a lot of the. reason is about the transparency, the cost, the personal connection, I think would probably be the biggest one.

So that probably isn't a huge surprise and it's probably not a huge surprise why one outperformed the other so drastically. All the stuff that we just talked about, it's more personal, more of a connection, more trustworthy, more specific about the donation impact and the other one. Much of your feedback was that it was generic, vague, not personal, or compelling.

So this is the surface level reason. But to get to our topic here today, the underlying reason that we're going to look at in this scenario is the onboarding process. We know that the final result, these two fundraising landing pages had totally different test results and would probably raise one would probably raise much more money than the other.

And we're going to see how that actually starts with the two different onboarding processes that Sarah went through leading up to creating these pages. So let's start with the first one, bro fund me, which is the one that only got, we'll say one real vote. Cause mine, mine was just throwing it out there.

And let's imagine the onboarding process here. Sarah is creating this landing page, creating this fundraising page, and is being onboarded for her first time creating it. She's getting a little, some tips and kind of a walkthrough of how to do it. You see a little tip here to upload a cover photo. And after she does that, to give your fundraiser a descriptive.

So that is an onboarding process, right? It's giving Sarah a little bit of a guidance on what to do. And we're obviously not not the most thorough and probably stuff that she could figure out on her own. But for the example, a simple onboarding process that is directing you at or Sarah. at the steps and what to do to create a landing page and to launch her fundraiser.

It is an onboarding process, but going by our definition, it does not radically increase the likelihood that Sarah will be successful in her goal of raising money. Yes, it helps her build out the landing page or gives a step by step walkthrough. Of how to create a landing page and maybe publish it or launch your fundraiser.

But going back to that broader definition, these tips or the little snippet that we looked through, these are not going to do much really for helping Sarah maximize and reach her ultimate goal of raising money and taking her middle school debate team to New York for the debate world finals. Let's look at YoFundMe and the onboarding process.

This is the one that 95 percent of you. Similar, let's say design pattern here with some tool tips and kind of a walk through, but very different in the copy that's being showed. It doesn't just say upload a cover photo. It says. Upload a cover photo. Fundraisers with photos raise three times more money than those without.

Some tips. Capture genuine moments that tell a story. Show the people and causes that donors are supporting. And don't use generic stock photos or graphics that lack a personal connection.

Down to the title here. Give your fundraiser a title. Same tip as the first one or same point of kind of directing you to that, but it's some more tips here. The title is the first thing potential donors see. Make it specific and engaging. Avoid general and vague titles. Use action words that inspire and motivate.

Avoid being too generic or unclear about your cause. And then again, we have some examples.

So you can see from these two that even though they're both technically onboarding processes that are directing you somewhere, that there's a big difference in that ultimate goal of helping Sarah raise money, helping her not just publish a landing page, but actually get set up for a successful campaign.

Her real goal. Of raising money and being able to take her team to New York and covering the travel costs here. Thumbs up. Everyone got that. I tried to keep the examples like pretty simple and not go into too much detail, but all right. Awesome. Amazing. So I wanted to start with that. And. While we have mentioned a lot of these and just looked at a few examples of them, I want to get into some specific do's and don'ts expanding outside of that landing page example and getting into some of the underlying principles that you can apply to just about any onboarding experience.

So let's start with the first one. Don't expect users to blindly trust you or your product, let's say. Instead, If you're asking users to do a task, clearly show how it will benefit them. All right, put a gold star on this one. If you're, I'll send the slides up, but if you're taking notes or screenshotting, this is the one that you want to remember.

I hope you remember all three of them, but. If you're asking users to do a task, show how it will benefit. Let's look at an example here. Going back to a fundraiser example with this one. This is not good. The user clicks a button to create a new fundraiser. And the app funder, we'll call it says, do you want to allow funder to access photos, media and files on your device?

Allow or deny this is asking the user to give you access to, personal things. But the more important thing is it's not telling you why it's not telling you how it's going to help the user help you create a more. Successful fundraiser here and a lot of apps do this. I download a lot and I open them up for the first time and get a million of these permissions and I basically deny all of them because I don't know why I need to do them.

I haven't been given a good reason. So I'm not going to. Just blindly trust that it's going to pay off. Let's say in the long term, this example, not good. This one's a little bit better. Create a new fundraiser. Would you like to allow funder to access photos, media and files on your device? This will allow you to easily upload photos and media to your fundraiser.

I'd say this is about 20 percent better. It's still asking for it. It's not really telling you how it's going to benefit you or make you more successful, but at least it's giving a little context as to why it's asking. It'll probably an obvious answer, but it'll allow you to easily upload photos and media to your fundraiser.

Slightly better here, not just hoping for totally blind trust, but giving the user a little context as to why you're asking and what you'll be able to do if you accept it. Much better, and this is pretty much like the example we just looked at with the fundraiser. Fundraisers with photos raise over 15 times more money than those without.

Get started by uploading a great cover photo that brings attention to your cause. We see something called permission priming here, enabling access to photos that then would launch this permission priming or permission notification that we just saw. And then we see a little confirmation here that you've enabled access to photos.

This is a thousand times better than that first example. It's asking the user to do the same thing, allow access to photos, but it's providing a why they need it, how it's going to make you more successful, and some really clear steps and confirmation to help the user feel confident. Not only that this is a step that's going to help them get to their goal.

But that it's all following a linear process, they're doing it right and confirming and getting a response to the actions that they're taking here. Much, much, much better. Jason Jones, Sarah, is anyone here as a thread up seller? Sorry, you might be in the wrong, you're probably in the wrong workshop, but if you want to learn about onboarding.

You are more than welcome to stick around. All right, so our first don't is don't ask users to blindly trust you. Instead, tell them how the things you're asking them to do are going to help them. Two out of our second do and don't here, our don't is don't get dragged into click counting hell. I'll talk about what that means.

Instead, prioritize setting the user up for success and then make the process as efficient as possible. Don't count clicks. This is something that a lot of clients I've had stakeholders and probably even myself at some point have got hung up on. You want an onboarding experience to be efficient, right?

You don't want to have extra steps in there making the user jump through too many hoops that they don't need to. So you want it to be efficient, but it's efficient. The speed of the onboarding process and how quickly they go through it is not as important is instilling confidence and guiding them to success.

And the example I come back to all the time with this is imagine a dating app that had 3 screens and it said, how old are you? Welcome. How old are you? Gender. And we found some people. We think you'll like quick onboarding process. But is anyone really if you're just answering these 2 questions about yourself, do you really think that you're going to get a great recommendation for the perfect partner?

Perfect match. Perfect person to go out on a date with or start chatting with? Probably not. So an extreme example here. But I think illustrates the point of prioritizing the goal and the confidence that the user has along the way over strictly the time or number of clicks it takes to get them there.

I'm going to go just because of time, I'm going to skip this, but this is an example that I've shared a bit from my own work. If we have time, I'll come back to it. Our last don't is don't assume that the speed bumps for probably everyone here. Um, in product design research, you're going to know assumptions are a don't for just about every aspect of the process.

But I want to show you specifically how that relates to onboarding. There are a handful of. I like to call them usual suspects that frequently lead to drop off things like permission notifications, long forms, logins, signing up, payment, permissions. These are things that are often part of an onboarding experience.

They're a chore or a pain for people to do. And they're usually an area where you will see people dropping off or leaving. The onboarding process. Now, while it's true that in general, these types of things, like making someone create an account is a usual suspect for drop off, they might not be the most important thing to focus on.

It might not actually be the area. that is stopping users from continuing in the onboarding process. So instead of assuming or blaming, let's say some of those usual suspect's chores that people have to do as the reason for drop off, you want to test and uncover those hidden speed bumps, actually see or verify if those are, if that's what's going on, or if maybe there's another area that is halting progress for the user.

Often the biggest speed bumps are caused by doubt, uncertainty, or user feeling overwhelmed, not the time it takes to complete them, or the pain in the butt factor that they have creating an account. An example here if we're creating a fundraiser and we get to this screen, select a category.

Which best describes your fundraiser. This is a very easy screen to complete, right? You're just making a selection from these. There's not a long form. There's not a lot of steps on this. It's quick. Probably wouldn't be the first thing you think of as an area that's going to stop users in their tracks.

But think about maybe some of the questions that come up for a user who's creating a fundraiser and gets to this screen. One, can I change this later? I'm picking a category. It seems important, but I don't really know how it's used. My fundraiser fits into a few different categories. It's kind of education because I'm a teacher and a debate team coach, but it's also a travel related one.

It only takes one click to complete the screen, but the questions that might come up for a user or the hesitation Could be those hidden points that are going to be a way bigger factor in whether they continue successfully and confidently or freeze drop off and leave never to be seen again. I'm going to pull this screen up here, and it's going to be our last activity before we wrap up here today.

I'll put the screen big backup on the screen. Sure. But I want to give everyone. Two minutes on this. Take a look at this screen where a user is setting up a fundraiser and selecting a category. Take a look at some of these little, pieces of feedback here. And I want you to just write out a suggestion in the chat, just a quick one thing based on this that you might change in the design, the copy, the layout, anything that you want that might change this from a speed bump for the user into something that they can go ahead with confidently.

So I'll give you some time. I see the answers rolling in. Take a couple minutes on that. We'll share some of those and then wrap up with some takeaways and next steps. Let's

see. We got multiple choice option. Jesse says, tell the user why you're asking the questions. Let them select multiple answers. Cool. And says select category, use your own nice. check boxes, icons, search, someone said give me some emojis, Alan Maria said add, you can always change it later, nice, Heather had the same idea, Filippo had the same idea, other selection from Robin.

And that was the Andre. This is a good time to bring up your question from before. I saw let's see a couple more search bar. Nice change it late. I didn't think of the search bar. That's a good 1 change it later feel free text or option to skip save for later. Nice. Good answers. Let's see.

I think you got most of the ones that I had here, but saw a couple of these, right? This would be 1 way to improve it clearly connecting this task. To the user goal, select a category, raise more money by getting your fundraiser in front of thousands of donors who have funded similar causes, ties it directly to the goal and the benefit and the reason for doing this again, not just asking users to do it blindly.

This was a lot of good suggestions on this one. Give users the tools to make a confident choice. I saw some good answers here. Maybe something like. Multiple choice, maybe showing other popular causes in animal welfare for you to decide, is this the category that I want to be in? Is my fundraiser similar to these other ones that I'm selecting?

Some of you said multiple choices here. Lots of different possibilities for this, but all in the same theme of giving users tools to make a confident choice. And I was happy to see this one. This is the one I had in mind when I said there's some small tweaks that I think could make a big difference.

Giving users an out, right? No pressure. You can change your fundraiser category anytime. Skip for now. Not locking them in to make that decision at the moment and living with it but giving them the confidence that they can come back to it. And you can imagine just, incorporating all the things I just showed you, a skip button, some context a reason for asking people to do it.

We could test it out and prove it, but I'd be pretty confident in saying that this onboarding experience or this screen versus this 1, this 1st, 1 here is going to have a much better conversion rate a month. And more importantly than that, a much more confident user. who feels excited and ready to succeed in the fundraiser that they're creating.

Got some confetti poppers there. Nice. Agreed. Okay. Yeah. Good. This was like my finale screen of Hey, this is better than this. Good. Glad that resonate with everyone. All right. We're going to wrap up here and I know we're almost out of time and I always go over a couple of minutes, but I'll keep it super quick here for some key takeaways.

And next steps onboarding, it is all about increasing the likelihood that new users become successful when adopting your products. I hope you remember more things and more specific things from this workshop today and employ them, but they all, if you only take 1 thing away, this would be it. It all comes back to this different mindset when you think about onboarding, not just as a tutorial.

or a walkthrough or a first impression, but as a starting point to help users have immediate and continued success when adopting your product. And this really just opens up all the different possibilities for how you can create an onboarding experience. Not that just uses common design patterns, but that's really tailored to what your users are care about and are trying to do.

If you're asking users to do a task, clearly show how it will help them do the thing that they actually want to do, right? We always have to keep reiterating and tying it back to their goal. And just to be even more specific with this, if you're asking users to do a task, think of Sarah. Clearly show Sarah how it will help her raise enough money to take her debate team to New York for the World Debate.

Finals, we want to tie it to the thing that they're actually trying to do. Sarah's goal is not to build a landing page. Sarah's goal is to raise 5, 000 to take her team to New York and everything in our onboarding process should support that some next steps. I'm going to share this in the chat. I'm not going to go through all this right now because there's so much here, but this is, besides joining this workshop, I'll say, this is the best resource for user onboarding ever.

East Teardowns the guy who runs this site and it hasn't been updated in a while, but there's still gold here. You can click through, and this Kickstarter one's good because I took a lot of examples from this. He goes through onboarding processes for apps and websites and dissects them. On another level, they're funny.

They're entertaining. You'll whiz through these and they show so many. He does such a great job of showing so many key aspects of the onboarding process and so many great examples for them. Some are good. Some are bad. Most are somewhere in between. A lot of these teardowns are old, really old, but the principles are still completely relevant and interesting to look at.

I'll just say, if you want to see the worst onboarding experience of all time, I haven't looked at every single one of these, but I've looked at most and I can tell you that United. Airlines is the worst of the bunch. It's probably updated, hopefully, since this was done, but that is the worst ever.

Check through some of these after our workshop today, and I think a lot of things we talked about here will click. Also, last next step is start testing your onboarding experience on Lyssna. Onboarding is a great an area where you can test a great use case for remote testing, for preference testing.

A lot of the features and templates that we have on Lyssna are perfect or even specific for onboarding experiences. I've run lots and lots of studies on listening way before I worked here for onboarding experiences and really doing what we did today. Identifying maybe some of the steps or hitches that come up that can lead to people dropping off or feeling less confident.

So again, don't assume where those things are happening. Give Lyssna spin. Test it out. All right. My 2 big questions. Thanks for hanging a couple minutes late with me here. Everybody. 1st, did you enjoy this workshop? I hope it was 47 minutes. Spent and that I kept you. Entertained and engaged the whole time.

Awesome. 2nd, my more important question. Do you feel like a better, more confident designer than you were 47? Minutes ago, I know we covered a lot in this. So definitely go check back on the slides. Check back the recording, but I really wanted to include principles here. That would apply to certainly any onboarding experience that you're working on.

But also a lot of things outside of the onboarding experience and just generally creating a better user experience here. Got some love in the chat here. Awesome. Thank you, everybody. Thank you so much for joining everybody and thanks for staying a couple minutes late.

I hope you all have a great Friday, whether it's the start of your day. Ish, like it is for me or you're getting ready to enjoy your weekend. Great to have you all here. Thanks for the awesome participation and feedback. Keep an eye out for some upcoming events. We've got a bunch that are on the calendar and a bunch more in the works. All right, hopefully I'll see you on another workshop soon. Thanks again.

Workshop transcript