Don't Waste Time on User Onboarding

Same. 9 times out of 10 I don't want to learn a new tool, just use an intuitive, predictable UI. If I need to "read the instructions" first, your app is probably trying to do too much.

Keep it simple and only use onboarding if your app is truly novel.

On that note, I have nothing against sponsored content. For example, a blog on programming that happens to have posts sponsored by a company that specializes in dev tools or something.

That makes perfect sense!

Sure, some of it can be puff-pieces for the company and they are quite clearly just bullshit but it's easy to leave and go elsewhere if they take the piss.

A banner at the top of a blog post saying "this content was kindly sponsored by " is a great idea and more should do it.

But they don't!

They use ad networks that track the ever-living shit out of every move you make.

That's the issue for me!

Good old SEO?

I mean if your product fills a unique niche it should be really easy to rank high. Get your first few customers like that, then because your product is revolutionary, word of mouth will do the rest.

A real-world example: Monzo, a modern bank in the UK. They only very recently started using advertising, but got their first million customers with nothing but word of mouth. Their secret? Simply making a product that's light-years ahead of what the existing banks provide.

Your product is not revolutionary? Oh then I don't know (actually I do - make a revolutionary product - switch industries if necessary), but you're not entitled to waste my time, attention & privacy with ads just so your business can survive. Being profitable is not a right, I couldn't care less if you go out of business.

It has it's place for the right use case. Superhuman requires you to go through a 30 minute on-boarding one on one with a person. Superhuman isn't the most intuitive if you don't take the time to learn it as it's efficiencies come from keyboard shortcuts and features that differ from established email norms. For this kind of B2B app with a certain level complexity a seamless on-boarding makes all the difference. I never would have use the app long term if not for the process.

If a product wants me to go through a lengthy onboarding session, whether it be with a representative or through some guided tutorial it's an immediate turnoff and I will likely abandon right then and there.

Personal anecdote:

We were evaluating Cisco AppDynamics last year as we were in the market for an APM product and, unfortunately, we are a huge Cisco shop. They wanted to hold our hand and walk us through everything, and the product was certainly in a state where I can't blame them - the agent sucked to deploy, they had a nice little UI to configure things during install but after that it was all editing XML. Sure, I could automate it all with Ansible - but you could tell they knew the UX sucked and they just wanted you to get through the onboarding quick and hope you didn't notice.

We ended up purchasing Dynatrace instead, I started a trial with no intervention from sales reps. They made their happy onboarding path a "game" (they have "quests" in the UI to guide you through the various parts of the product) but otherwise threw you right in with no handholding. The agent was stupid simple to deploy (here's a manifest to deploy to OpenShift, here's a .msi to install on Windows) and it picked everything up automatically and started working. Figured everything else out by just playing with the tool, with the docs as an aide.

// End anecdote

I think onboarding has a place, but it shouldn't hold a user hostage. I really liked Dynatrace's approach, especially as the "quests" were covering different components of the product and could be tackled in any order - they also weren't guided tours but instead directed me to investigate other parts of the tool and perform certain actions, even providing a carrot (free credit) for completing them.