Onboarding: Getting Users to the Next Step With FOMO and Storytelling

Created 7 years ago in Product & Design / User Experience

I see product builders make two common mistakes re: new users: (1) thinking of onboarding as an afterthought, and (2) thinking onboarding is over when the account is created.

Creators have a habit of playing with their app as if they've used it for months. But first-time users don't even know if they want your product and have dozens of opportunities to back out of signing up.

A sign-up process isn't a series of forms. It's a marketing and storytelling opportunity to sell your value at each step. To help prospects get excited about clicking to the next screen and taking the next action. In short, each "ask" needs to induce FOMO for what will happen if the user doesn't click forward.

FOMO: Fear of Missing Out (on the value of your product)

Getting your onboarding right is a combination art and science. Bucketing your prospects into "use cases" and "user stories" to provide a compelling story at each step to take action to continue.

Coaching a newbie prospective user along from download to signup to user to power-user is every bit as important as getting the prospects to your landing page, app store page, or Instagram account in the first place. And it involves much of the same work: a process of trial-and-error stabbing followed by analysis and iterative tweaking.

I frequently help digital product builders analyze and iterate their onboarding flows to focus on the largest bottlenecks and the greatest opportunities for value. I've got a decade of experience with my own startups, both succeeding and also occasionally failing when we couldn't get it right.

But the #1 point to understand:
** Onboarding is a storytelling exercise **

Iterate to get it right.