Mobile onboarding looks nice, but it’s often a bandaid for poor UX
Three questions to ask before you implement a mobile tutorial
There’s an often beautiful but troubling trend with mobile applications: deck-of-cards onboarding.
These have become so commonplace that it’s a no-brainer for many mobile applications: what could be more critical than explaining your website to first-time users?
How about designing an intuitive user interface? Research has shown that onboarding tutorials, despite their cost, aren’t always worth it: often, the resources would be better spent improving your interface.
However, to understand why this is the case, we need to understand the dangers that tutorials provide. Let’s consider a pattern that often runs into the same problem: the hamburger menu.
Hamburger menus and the downsides of mobile onboarding
Would you rather have a tutorial that explains different categories in a hamburger menu or a more visible menu structure?
You’d want a design that makes things more visible (and easier to use) for users. This is the same reason you might not want mobile onboarding.
Onboarding requires more interaction costs from users: not only are they forced to click through onboarding, but they’re also often asked to memorize information like where specific options are.
Onboarding may also not even improve user performance. For example, the Nielsen Norman group has found that sometimes there are only minor differences in task success and completion times whether users read or skip tutorials.
However, one of the most significant downsides to onboarding isn’t with users: it’s with stakeholders. Mobile onboarding is often a dangerous crutch that results in your team creating worse user experiences.
As a UX designer, one of my most hated phrases is, “We’ll provide the users with training.” I’ve heard it from countless stakeholders to justify bad or bloated user interfaces that are hard to use. They’re expecting a training session that a user did six months ago to help them make sense of poorly designed applications.
Mobile onboarding can easily serve that same function. Is there an interaction that doesn’t make sense or a poorly designed feature? That’s okay: slap an explanation of how it works in the onboarding, and everything will be okay.
That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use onboarding. However, if you use it, ensure it’s done for the right reasons. Here are the questions you want to ask if you intend to do so.
Does the mobile version have unfamiliar gestures?
One reason you might want to have onboarding is if you intend to use uncommon gestures or interactions.
Most users might expect certain common gestures like tapping, swiping, and pinching to do things on your site. However, additional gestures may be built in that your users might not be aware of. This might require you to have a screen that explains these interactions, but it also might signify that you must reconsider your control scheme.
Does it make sense to use Press + Tap for specific interactions, or could this be better served with simple Taps? These are some questions you’ll have to consider when it comes to whether or not you need onboarding.
This also leads to the second question.
Are there going to be unfamiliar processes that users have to learn?
One of the problems with a lot of mobile onboarding is that they point out things that are incredibly obvious to users. For example, this button is how you create accounts; this button is how you search for products and more.
There will always be a specific subset of your users who are new to these everyday interactions, but your primary user often doesn’t need these explanations.
On the other hand, one argument for mobile onboarding is if you have uncommon tasks or processes which will be unfamiliar or complicated to access for users.
For example, will you give the user the ability to see real-time feedback, like if you worked collaboratively on Google docs? In that case, you might want to include a tutorial to show that, rather than having your user be surprised the first time they open a collaborative document and surprised that things are changing.
However, one last thing you should consider if you’re moving forward with mobile onboarding.
Is there a way to make it a quick setup?
It’s not helpful for users to be walked through a tutorial highlighting specific features, only to be kicked back to the home page and forced to click on those features again. So one thing you might want to consider is if you can combine mobile onboarding with a common first step like content customization.
For example, the onboarding might walk you through creating a user profile, tagging your interests, or other essential things that are your user’s first steps.
However, this approach only works if users have unified first (small) tasks. Asking the user to set everything up in this “onboarding” often turns it into a wizard.
Mobile onboarding often acts as a junk drawer
Onboarding tutorials, in a vacuum, aren’t bad.
If you had all the resources in the world, you might always want to include them in your mobile apps. It offers marginal improvements in perceived ease-of-use and task success, but that doesn’t mean it’s not without downsides.
Nothing is more painful than seeing onboarding become a crutch for bad or bloated design. In addition to ‘offloading’ the burden of user experience, it can also be where other product teams want to advertise new features they’ve developed.
I’ve sat in meetings before trying to prevent mobile tutorials from becoming a 10-screen process. That’s not a good process for users: that’s hijacking a pattern to advertise new features or excuse lousy design.
So if your team wants mobile onboarding, take a moment to consider these three questions. You might be surprised that you don’t need that mobile tutorial after all.