Onboarding

Onboarding is everything a product does to get a brand-new user from first open to first success.

The word is borrowed from HR, where new employees get onboarded; products adopted it for new users. In an app it usually looks like a short run of screens with progress dots along the bottom: a welcome, maybe one permission ask with a polite "Not now" escape, then straight into doing the actual thing.

Where it ends matters more than where it begins. Good onboarding ends with the user having done the thing, not having read about the thing. A guided first entry that takes thirty seconds beats a five-screen tour of features, because a tour is a brochure and a first win is a reason to come back. Duolingo has you finish a lesson before it even asks who you are.

The failure mode is the gauntlet: notifications, contacts, an account, a survey about how you heard about us, all before the product has proven it deserves any of it. Every screen between a new user and their first success is a place to lose them. The empty state waiting on the other side is part of onboarding too, since "nothing here yet, do this first" is often the real welcome mat.

You'll also hear "first-run experience," "welcome flow," "walkthrough," and "setup flow." It's also a user flow, just the one every single user walks exactly once.

When new users sign up and never come back, the first place to look is onboarding.