Design onboarding to deliver immediate value, not explain features

Think about Miro, as an example. If you go through their activation experience and sign up to usage, they ask very limited questions, very targeted. They drop you, kind of, they ask you about your use case, what are you here for? Are here to do a brainstorm session? Are you here to develop a roadmap? And they quickly gave you templates to get started. Just like in maybe five minutes, you finish the entire journey from go to the website and sign up, answer a few questions, and you are already using the template they provided to do the thing you want to do.

Try not to name features. It can be very tempting in practice, even though it sounds easy in theory.

I really like something that is not pasted on top of the experience but something that uses the product to teach someone else how to use the product.

We have some awesome advanced features of really cool stuff you can do with Airtable, automations being a great example. However, users don't necessarily need to get that started on day one. They don't need to learn about the advanced stuff when they haven't even looked at a workflow before.

Really trying to lean into, well, what does it look like in a buyer's hand, in a buyer's home? Maybe that gives the next purchaser a bit more confidence that it's the right size, it's the right color, whatever it might be.

For us, it was taking that first step, particularly with Canva and any I think creative tool. There's a real fear of the blank page. So prior to any onboarding thought from us, we had a blank page. We had a few coach marks that said, 'Here's where you do this, here's where you do this.' And then they'd be left on this blank page and people would freak out.

The words that we literally got out of years at testing were, I didn't know I could be a designer. And that was what we managed to do through several rounds of refinement on the onboarding process. It is lowering the barriers to entry and also increasing the amount of delight.