I Studied 1,460 Onboarding Flows. Here's What I Found. transcript

I've studied over a thousand onboarding flows to find out what makes good onboarding and do we even need one? A lot of what I've read says keep it short, but based on what I found, the average app has 25 onboarding screens. The longest categories are finance, [music] health and fitness, and education. Seven out of 10 of these longest apps are actually finance apps as [music] well. Some of the apps with the longest onboarding flows are also one of the most successful ones.

When we look at apps with the shortest onboarding flows, three of them are AI products. So, maybe keeping our onboarding flows short was never the point. The best onboarding seem to follow this pattern. >> [music] >> You sign up, set up your account, you hit the aha moment. That's where you actually feel the product's value. For Airbnb, it's making your first booking. For Netflix, it's finding and watching a show. For Mobbin, it's finding a screen or an animation that you love and saving it to your collection.

So, what are these apps actually doing? The best onboarding screens I've kept seeing had one thing in common. They're not listing features, they're selling the outcome. Timehop does this really simply. >> [music] >> Their welcome screen is just showing the product in action on both their mobile app and desktop. Runkeeper does this with animation. The moment you open the app, you get a feel for what it does without reading a single word.

And Elma [music] goes one step further. It lets you try the core experience before you sign up. I rarely see apps with AI features who lets you try it out before signing up an account. [music] And sometimes it could just be a copy tweak like Superhuman. They turn a boring sign up screen into a pitch with logos on the side as social proof. Some apps skip the pitch entirely and just feel human. This is an app called One Year.

So, in their onboarding flow, they included a founder's note, which had [music] a handwritten signature and a hand-drawn flower in it. It's pretty cute. And Tinder [music] acknowledge when your birthday is around the corner. Airbnb, well, this one's not even in the onboarding flow, but when you successfully list your first space, they show you a video from their CEO. It's a founder's touch at the aha moment. As for Basecamp, they put a personal note from the CEO after you've created an account.

It feels like the product was made with intention. And one of the best onboarding flows add personalization into the flow, and they make it worth your time. 23% of apps personalize during onboarding, with AI apps at only 7%. It seems like AI tools don't ask questions about your users up front. They let the product learn from us instead. Looking at Tide's onboarding, it's short and sweet. You just download the app, answer two questions, watch it customize your recommendations, and it'll prompt you to sign up.

That's it, very simple. Headspace found out that their users come to their app with more than one pain point to solve. So, instead of asking users to pick just one goal that they want to achieve [music] with Headspace, they let them pick more than one. It's only like a very simple tweak, but it led to 10% increase in free trial conversion. There are also other apps that allow multi-intent queries. [music] Focus Flight lets you choose your map style during onboarding.

It makes the app [music] feel like yours before you even started using it. Sometimes, [music] it can be even simpler than that. Dollar Shave Club tweaked the quiz copy to be more conversational. This alone led to 5% increase in subscriptions. Some apps don't just collect answers during the quiz. They actually show you what those answers unlocked. So, in Endless onboarding, you answer six questions, and then they show you this.

You haven't even used the product yet, but it already feels like it's going to work. [music] Byte Pal does the same thing. After the quiz, they build your personal plan and then tell you exactly when you'll hit your goal. Brilliant [music] shows you courses that are personalized to your responses. As soon as you finish your onboarding flow, your home page is already populated with only the content that you want to see.

Here's another one by Speak, a language learning app. They ask you what language you'd like to learn and your goals. Then, in one simple screen, it tells you, "In 2 months, you'll be able to communicate while traveling in France." There's a simple graph showing that speaking helps you reach your goals faster than reading. The [music] steps before this screen already had you speaking instead of typing. So, out of 900-plus apps and websites, 22% [music] of them throws a paywall during onboarding.

Some apps also pair personalization with a paywall. The site pairs a quiz with a one-time offer to drive urgency. Timely does the same with a full page of social proof before showing the paywall. And Focus Flight makes the paywall itself fun. The one-time offer, it's shaped like a flight ticket, and your phone vibrates as it gets printed out. It's a paywall that actually feels delightful. As for Grammarly, based on your quiz answers, they recommend tailored pricing plans.

This alone led to almost a 20% increase in plan upgrades. Okay, some of these onboarding flows are really long, yet they don't feel like it. The onboarding flows that I really love tend to make onboarding flows feel short. Out of 986 apps, Duolingo has one one the longest onboarding flows. And if we zoom in, it goes like this. You get started, choose the language that you want to learn, it learns about you, you start your first lesson, get the satisfaction of completing it, and then you create an account.

By that point, you've already gone through 60 screens before you even sign up. And the crazy part is it doesn't even feel long. Okay, so Bump's onboarding flow is creative. Even the loading states are wild. There's always something going on throughout the onboarding flow. Smooth animations on things like verification that rarely [music] get special treatment. It adds fun. It doesn't feel like you're going through a boring onboarding flow.

Bipul has 61 screens. The onboarding was a lot of fun. It has really amazing animations. The raccoon is quite lovable. And you even get to name your virtual pet raccoon. Throughout the onboarding, they emphasize the value. Like, your personal plan is ready and you'll lose weight by an exact date. And then bam, a paywall. All right. So, another pattern I noticed, some apps don't front-load all the education to you. Cake Equity is a great example.

They're dealing with dry concepts like company equity and vesting schedules, and turns it into something approachable with copy that reassures users from time to time, and tooltips that explain the impact of each step so [music] that users feel like someone's guiding them along the way. Even something as small as a password field that checks off requirements in real time as you type, removes a reason to get stuck. Maybe it's a progress indicator, maybe it's microcopy.

None of this is flashy, but it makes the experience feel effortless. To-do apps does this really well, too. Instead of giving users a blank empty state, they show you something like this with no guided tours, no pop-ups, just a little nudge in the right place. And when Mural replaced pop-ups and banners with a clear six-step checklist, it drove a 10% relative increase in one-week retention. Checklists stick around even after the user dismisses the initial flow.

If you go on Mobbin and do an AI search for onboarding checklist, you will find more ideas like this. Another pattern that I kept seeing is a lot of apps show a custom screen before the notification pop-up. Apparently, it improves accept rates significantly. Here's an example by Brilliant. I'll remind you to learn so it becomes a long-term habit. Cool. Center takes it one step further. It also teases you the notification that you'll receive if you allow it.

This might explain why web onboarding is 21% shorter than iOS. Mobile just has more permission and paywall screens baked in. Okay, this one surprised me. House split their sign-up form into multiple screens and they see a 15% increase in conversions. Maybe the friction we add in one place removes friction in another. Culture plays a role here as well. Users in Eastern markets tend to be more comfortable with information-heavy interfaces.

So, what feels like clutter to one audience feels efficient to another, which is partly why we can't just copy what worked. And I don't think there's one right or wrong way to design an onboarding flow that's best in class. The ones that stuck with me didn't feel like onboarding. What I saw in common in these apps is that they brought users to value quickly. Sometimes it's adding delight to a very long onboarding flow.

Sometimes it's letting users personalize their app experience for themselves. And sometimes it's getting out of the way. So, do we even need onboarding? Mobbin is a place to find design inspiration. The product speaks for itself. Same with AI chat apps. The first prompt is where users find value. For products like these, maybe the best experience [music] is just to let users get in fast and not have an onboarding experience that gets in their way.

Maybe it all boils down to the product. We had so much fun diving into the data, and did you know that onboarding flows are the second most searched on Mobbin? For the next video, I have a feeling that we're going to dive really deep into dashboards and see what the data tells us. So, stick around. Subscribe if this vibes with you.