4 Useful UX/UI Patterns to Improve the User Onboarding Experience

The majority of product managers are aware of how crucial user onboarding is to keeping consumers engaged or converting them from a free trial to a premium plan. But how significant is UX in the context of onboarding?

This post will demonstrate how significantly UX design may impact your onboarding procedures and the user experience as a whole. We'll also look at some of the top UX/UI design patterns and examples, as well as how to use them with new feature launches.

What is onboarding user experience (UX)

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User onboarding UX is the first experience someone goes through when they start using your app or service. The onboarding experience is crucial in making sure a first-time user continues to use your tool and often guides them to their “Aha! moment” as quickly as possible to ensure continued use. 

Onboarding UX/UI design is every experience the user has in their onboarding process. It determines the relationship they develop with your business, the length of their user journey, and their sentiment towards your tool.

The importance of a delightful user onboarding flow

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It’s critical you provide a delightful in-product onboarding flow for newcomers. Your onboarding UX flow is the first time a user has ever really been alone with your tool. It’s the moment when your marketing and sales team step aside, remove the bells and whistles, and say: this is it. 

Therefore, it’s crucial that you continue to make a good impression and live up to expectations. 

The benefits of a smooth onboarding flow are: 

• Higher retention rates
• Lower churn rates
• Higher free trial to conversion rates
• Higher referral rates
• Higher engagement rates 
• Increase in CLTV 
• Higher NPS 

Many of these metrics will determine the overall success of your business and will be a KPI for year-on-year revenue growth.

Designing the onboarding experience: How to recognize UX/UI patterns and choose the best fit for your product

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Recognizing different patterns in UX design can help you build delightful onboarding experiences and drastically reduce the users’ time to value. There are a few UX and UI patterns that you can pick from that will help to design your app and build the perfect user experience for newcomers.

A few common UX patterns you may be familiar with are: 

• Welcome messages: say hello and give your product personality
• Progress bars: let a user know how close they are to completion and keep them around 
• Product tours: show users around their new tool and showcase what it can do
• Profile builds: give users an easy way to build their profile 
• Checklists: let users know what’s left for their onboarding and give them a self-serve mentality 
• Onboarding surveys: get to know users to tailor their in-product experience

The onboarding patterns we’ve mentioned above are just a few to consider within your onboarding flows and at the beginning of the user journey. These patterns are consistently seen among SaaS brands that are leading the market. 

4 inspirational onboarding user experience best practices and examples

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Ready to dive into some UX best practices and see these patterns in action?

Let’s look at some brands that are doing UX onboarding the right way and setting UX best practices you can use to inspire your in-app messaging, interactive walkthroughs, account creation processes, and more.

1. Persona-based onboarding with Trello

Trello does a fantastic job at getting to know their first-time users throughout their onboarding journey. Trello doesn’t stop at getting and using someone’s name; they understand why someone is using the platform and what they hope to get out of it. 

As mentioned in Trello’s onboarding case study from Growth. Design, Trello reported a 36% lift in activation using a mix of personalization tactics in onboarding.  By getting to know someone better, Trello is building a relationship with the user and tailoring the onboarding experience.

As you can see in the screenshot above, the example board name is what Trello suggests after users say they intend to use Trello for marketing. It’s a small touch that makes the app more relevant to the user and encourages a longer customer lifespan. 

Trello also manages to add a touch of personality, a playful way to introduce its user interface, and incorporate a completion bar on the left-hand side of this onboarding screen—all of these are great UX features to create happy users.

2. Onboarding checklists with Zendesk

Zendesk utilizes checklists to give users a better overview of the experience they’re about to have and create an interactive walkthrough. 

They don’t stop there; Zendesk takes things a step further by providing checklists tailored to customer needs. Their ‘get started’ checklist is a fantastic example of managing expectations and ensuring onboarding completion.

3. Greetings from Datacamp

Datacamp keeps things simple with their onboarding UX and starts with a “hello”. They manage expectations and introduce the onboarding process and product walkthrough in a single sentence. At the same time, they manage to deliver a dose of their brand personality too. 

What's more, Datacamp offers users the option to skip their onboarding tour altogether. Perhaps a user doesn’t feel like they need to take it—kudos to your marketing and sales team. 

Just know if you do offer the option to skip an onboarding tour, give users the option to pick it up later. You can do this via a pop-up the next time they log in or an email reminder. 

Lastly, cover anything essential with tooltips, so users can self-learn as they explore your product. Talking of tooltips…

4. Tooltips with Slack

Slack is famous for keeping the user front and center in its communication tool. 

Despite their product needing little to no introduction, they still need to educate users to ensure they hang around. Especially considering users need to decide after their free trial ends whether they’re going to continue using the tool or not—product guidance is critical for retention. 

Slack uses tooltips as a UX onboarding feature, guiding a user through their product and educating them as they do. Many of their tooltips focus on typical jobs to be done. You’ll notice they try to get new users to achieve their jobs as quickly as possible.

Onboarding doesn’t stop in product

Remember, onboarding UX doesn’t need to stop with in-app messaging. You can add barriers around your onboarding flows to keep users engaged when they’re out of your product. 

Consider extending your onboarding flow to customer lifecycle emails, a customer-only social media group, or any other platform where you have communication set up with your customers. 

Onboarding also doesn’t stop with new users. You can borrow certain methods and some new UX/UI patterns to onboard existing users to new features.

How to efficiently introduce new features and keep users engaged throughout the product life cycle

New features keep users around. Suppose your product team is operating with an MVP strategy. In that case, there’s a high chance you’re likely to be listening to user feedback and continually evolving your product, or you could be using fake door testing to validate new feature ideas. 

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When that new feature is ready to go to market, no matter how popular the fake door tests were or how much qualitative user research suggested this feature is a good idea, you need to onboard current users well. 

Closing this UX journey, for now

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Successful user onboarding starts and ends with user experience. Remember, your product onboarding is the first time the user is truly alone with your tool. It’s critical to make a good impression (again) and give them the knowledge and experience they need to succeed with your tool. 

No matter how long—or short—your onboarding is, this process essentially dictates if a user hangs around or not. It’s the first introduction someone has to a product journey. Catch them while you have the majority of their attention and give them exactly what they need to get to their “Aha! moment” quickly.

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