Web Directions Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

Better Onboarding

When new users arrive at your product, their onboarding experience is the process that welcomes and guides them towards lasting success. But in a team’s quest to address their worries about meeting short-term metrics and feature awareness, onboarding often gets condensed into just a one time, frontloaded flow, missing out on its longer potential. In this talk, you’ll get an overview of what it takes to design a better onboarding experience through guided interaction.

We’ll cover how to fit onboarding into the user journey, why guiding users through interaction is a more effective strategy than relying on passive instruction, and how designing for new users connects to designing a better product overall.

Krystal Higgins

Krystal is a lead user experience designer with more than 15 years of industry experience designing apps, services, and systems at companies like NVIDIA, eBay, and, currently, Google. She connects the dots between products and the people who use them with a passion for user onboarding. She wrote a book, Better Onboarding, to help teams understand how to guide their new users, and shares tips for designing in-product guidance through talks, workshops, and her blog at kryshiggins.com. When she’s not working on tech-meets-humans projects, she enjoys painting and scuba diving.