Product Breakdown analyzes different products every week and lists noteworthy product and UX learnings. We believe that the best way to master good product practices is to learn from others.

Onboarding users to an app is analogous to meeting someone for the first time. You want to make a good first impression and hope that they’d like to continue the conversation.

We’ve analyzed lots of apps over the past few weeks and have come across many different onboarding flows. Here are the top methods summarized:

1. The Slideshow

The slideshow is the most common onboarding technique. It involves displaying 3–5 distinct screens that explain the purpose of the app and its most common use cases.

The biggest advantage of this method is that it is easy to build and is great at conveying simple concepts. Unfortunately, its simplicity has attracted the attention of many app developers and as a result, has reduced its overall effectiveness. Users are is now quite likely to gloss over the screens in order to jump right into the app.

IFTT uses the slideshow for onboarding

Dropbox too uses the slideshow for onboarding

2. The in-app tutorial

Many apps have complicated workflows or features that are best explained via an in-app tutorial. Games, in particular, are great examples of this. Its easier to explain the game by making the user play it as opposed to displaying static slideshows upfront. Angry Birds 2 is an example of a game where the first level itself is the tutorial.

Angry Birds 2 starts you off with a tutorial

However, many apps too have borrowed this philosophy and surface in-app tutorials when necessary. Vine, for example, teaches you how to create a Vine when you click on the record button for the first time.

In app tutorials have two distinct advantages:

(a) users are more likely to engage with them as they are in-context

(b) they are great for explaining complex features that are important but not important enough to surface immediately after you open the app for the first time

3. The bot

Social media apps/messaging apps are faced with an interesting conundrum — the only way to engage a user is to get them to message their friends. However, it is quite likely that when a user loads up the app for the first time, he/she probably doesn't have any friends on the app. Hence, to drive engagement and to teach the user new workflows, the app usually surfaces a helpful bot that plays the role of the first friend.

Once you click on Team Snapchat’s profile, the bot allows you to try out Snapchat’s messaging functionality, while also showing you a series of “snaps” which teach you how to use the app.

Snapchat relies on “Team Snapchat” to show you the ropes

Chime too has a really nice onboarding flow that shows you what a “chime” is and encourages you to “chime” the team.

Chime encourages you to “chime” with the team

4. The video

A few applications employ videos to help explain their value proposition. This is especially true if the idea is very novel and has a huge learning curve.

Sunrise loads up a video to explain their new feature ‘Meet’

Sunrise Meet, for example, is a very novel idea and its hard to compress its entire value proposition into an onboarding flow. Which is probably why the company decided to use a video instead.

If you liked this article, you can read more Product Breakdown articles here.