Daily UI (23/100): Onboarding
When does a mobile app need an instructional onboarding flow?
Never because it doesn’t work.
Okay that’s not necessarily true. According to the NN/g (Nielsen Norman Group), onboarding flows are detrimental to the user experience for 3 main reasons:
Higher interaction cost: Onboarding requires user effort and attention. Even skipping the onboarding screens slows down their progress.
Memory strain: It’s supposed to help users remember how to use the app but our memory isn’t as good as we might think.
May not improve user performance: Drawbacks are easy to see with onboarding but the benefits not so much. For an example, instructional onboarding such as the deck-of-cards method didn’t improve task performance.
So when should you have an onboarding flow? Most of the time the answer should be never.
But if you would like to have one then there are exceptions such as introducing new features to returning users or instructional walkthroughs that allow users to actually perform a task.
Onboarding should highlight the app’s unique features that differentiate it from other similar apps. What it should not be used for is to cover up poorly designed UI elements.
NN/g’’s recommendation is to spend the money on improving the UI making it easier for the user to discover how it works on their own.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I don’t mess around with any recommendations from Nielsen Norman Group.
Why?
Because Don Norman coined the term user experience.
Which means what?
It means that he and Jakob Niesen know what the hell they’re talking about.
This is my solution for today’s UI challenge. It’s meant to be used for an app that instructs the first time user - in this case a UX/UI designer - how to create a user flow chart.
I’ve found that manually creating it in programs such as Miro can be time consuming. I looked at a lot of mind-mapping apps and programs that used similar tools such as Mindmeister (which is the one I use) for inspiration.
Or maybe not. Take a look at the prototype and let me know.
And if you'd like to see more of my work or just learn more about me: