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Principles for New User Onboarding
How to acquire and activate new users
The way you welcome people into your product will make or break the experience for them. It doesn’t matter if you have the best offering ever — If your onboarding falls short, everything else will as well.
In this post, I’ll lay out what I’ve picked up while working on our onboarding flow at Hugo and how you can use these principles to improve your own product. My views on this subject are largely aggregated from a bunch of other helpful resources:
- Reforge Growth Series
- Advanced Guide to User Onboarding
- Strategy and Tactics for Increasing Conversion
- Hacking Growth
DEFINING ONBOARDING
Terms like “onboarding” seem pretty straightforward, but people tend to use them to mean a wide array of different things. My favorite definition is a bit broader than most:
Onboarding is the experience between signing up and becoming an engaged user.
Note that “engaged” will mean different things for different products. The main thing to understand is that onboarding goes beyond that first session. It’s everything in a person’s journey up until the…
