UX Glossary · O
Onboarding
Also: First-run experience
Getting a new user from first contact to first real value, as quickly as the product allows.
Onboarding covers everything between someone arriving and someone getting value: account creation, setup, first task, and the point at which the product becomes worth returning to.
The most common mistake
Treating onboarding as explanation. A carousel of three screens describing features, or a tour with numbered tooltips, teaches almost nothing, because nobody remembers instructions for a task they have not yet attempted.
What works better is getting the person to a real outcome fast and explaining at the moment each thing becomes relevant. A tooltip on a control the user is about to need is useful; the same tooltip on day one is noise.
Setup is the real barrier
Most products need data before they are useful, which produces the worst moment in the lifecycle: an empty product and a form. Reducing that is usually the highest-value work available. Sensible defaults, import rather than manual entry, sample data that can be deleted, and deferring every setting that is not needed for the first task.
Empty states are onboarding
A well-designed empty state does more than a tour, because it appears exactly where the user is stuck and can carry the action that resolves it.
In practice
Measure time to first value, not completion of the onboarding flow. A user who finished every step and did nothing afterwards has not been onboarded.