Get Settled into elementary OS with Onboarding

Designed to improve the first-run experience

If you thought we’d dropped off the face of the planet, you probably missed it: we have moved away from Medium and started publishing on our faster, open source, and privacy-respecting blog at blog.elementary.io. We’ve kept this blog post unlisted here on Medium for posterity, but all recent and future posts as of November, 2019 are exclusively hosted there.

We’ve never provided a tutorial or “welcome” on your first run of elementary OS before; our Human Interface Guidelines state that users “should be able to get down to business as quickly as possible,” and that “if configuration is not absolutely required for the first use, they should not be required to configure anything.” We also generally believe that if you need a tutorial, your product is likely too difficult to understand and may lead to long-term dissatisfaction. It’s like being given all of the information you could possibly need for a new career in an five-minute lecture, and then being expected to be a master of your profession; it’s both unrealistic and overwhelming!

Instead, we lean into progressive disclosure and teachable moments throughout elementary OS. We provide tooltips wherever possible that help you learn icons and features at your own pace. We disclose keyboard shortcuts throughout the OS so that—if you’d prefer—you can use more efficient keystrokes when you’re ready. Overall, we have found that this teach versus tell approach has made elementary OS a better product and one that is lauded for its user experience and ease of use.

However, there are several important features we’ve added over the years, and exposing those to users while ensuring they understand their implications has become more difficult. For example, while the Night Light feature we introduced in Juno is incredibly helpful, you’re not likely to discover it on your own unless you read extensive release announcements or like to dig around in your Display settings. For these cases, we’ve built Onboarding.

Where Onboarding Fits In

An upcoming change to the first-run experience of elementary OS is as follows:

Install elementary OS (if it didn’t come on your device already)

Create a user

Optionally set some important and useful features up

Each of these steps is handled by a separate, modular piece of software. Technically the first two can exist without the third, and vice versa. Since the third step is standalone and doesn’t require as much testing and integration as the first two, we’re releasing it to users today as the new Onboarding app.

Onboarding launches the first time you log into your user account on elementary OS (or, if you’re already running elementary OS today, it will run the first time you log in after it arrives via an update). Here’s a look at it today: