You spent two years building your product. Users download it, open it once, and never come back. The problem isn’t your product—it’s the first three minutes.
Onboarding is where products go to die. Study after study shows that 70-80% of users abandon apps after a single session, and the culprit is almost always the same: onboarding that treats new users like they’re already experts, already committed, and already understand why they should care.
Let’s talk about why most onboarding fails spectacularly, and what the rare success stories do differently.
The Fatal First Impression
Here’s what terrible onboarding looks like: You download an app, open it, and immediately face a barrage of permission requests. Location access? Notifications? Contacts? Camera? You haven’t even seen what the app does yet, and it’s already asking you to trust it with your personal data.
Next comes the feature tour. Eight screens of “Swipe to continue” showing you features you don’t understand because you have no context yet. There’s a cartoon character explaining things enthusiastically, but you’re not reading—you’re just tapping through to make it stop.
Finally, you reach a blank slate. “Get started by creating your first project!” But you don’t know what a project is in this context, why you’d want one, or what happens when you make one. So you close the app and forget it exists.
This happens millions of times per day, across thousands of apps, because companies fundamentally misunderstand what onboarding is supposed to accomplish.
The Value Gap Problem
The issue is the gap between promised value and experienced value. Your marketing promised users something compelling—that’s why they downloaded the app. But onboarding often makes them work before they get any taste of that value.
Imagine if Spotify made you categorize your music preferences across 47 genres, manually input your favorite artists, and set up playlists before letting you play a single song. Absurd, right? Yet productivity apps do this all the time: “Set up your workspace! Create your first board! Invite your team! Configure your settings!”
The best onboarding inverts this. It gives users a quick win—a moment of value—before asking them to invest effort.
Duolingo doesn’t start with “Tell us about your learning goals and create your personalized study schedule.” It starts with “You’re learning Spanish! Here’s your first lesson—it’ll take 2 minutes.” Before you’ve made any decisions, you’re already learning words, getting answers right, and feeling accomplished.
That’s not an accident. It’s the result of relentless testing to find the fastest path to the feeling that made someone download the app in the first place.
The Paradox of Choice Paralysis
Many apps mistake “powerful” for “good.” They want to show off every feature, every option, every customization possibility. So onboarding becomes a feature showcase that overwhelms instead of welcomes.
Slack figured this out. When you first join a Slack workspace, you don’t get a tour of threads, channels, apps, workflows, huddles, canvases, and all the other features. You get a simple interface with a few channels and a message that says basically: “This is where your team talks. Try saying hello.”
The advanced features reveal themselves gradually, as context makes them relevant. You learn about threads when someone uses one. You discover integrations when you need them. The onboarding doesn’t teach you everything—it teaches you enough to start getting value, then gets out of the way.
This is progressive disclosure at its finest: reveal complexity only when users are ready for it, not all at once because you’re proud of it.
The Commitment Escalation Ladder
Smart onboarding understands commitment escalation. You can’t ask someone to marry you on a first date. You need to build trust incrementally.
Yet apps constantly ask for marriage-level commitment immediately. “Sign up with your email! Connect your calendar! Invite five colleagues! Enable notifications! Subscribe to our premium plan!”
Compare that to TikTok’s genius onboarding. You open the app and immediately start watching videos. No signup required. No profile creation. Just instant entertainment. After a few minutes of scrolling, you might notice you can double-tap to like videos—oh look, you’re already engaging. Maybe you want to save a video to watch later? That requires an account. Now you have a reason to sign up that’s based on actual value you’ve already experienced.
The commitment ladder works like this:
- Step 1: Consume value (no commitment)
- Step 2: Engage lightly (minimal commitment)
- Step 3: Create something (moderate commitment)
- Step 4: Share or invite others (high commitment)
Most apps try to jump straight to step 4. The best ones guide users up the ladder naturally.
The Permission Request Disaster
Nothing kills trust faster than premature permission requests. Apps that ask for notifications, location, contacts, or camera access before demonstrating any value are essentially saying: “Trust me before I’ve given you any reason to.”
The solution is contextual permission requests. Ask for permissions at the exact moment when users understand why you need them.
Uber doesn’t ask for location access when you open the app. It asks when you try to request a ride and the app says “We need your location to find you a driver.” The value is obvious, the timing is logical, and users grant permission willingly.
Instagram doesn’t ask for camera access on first launch. It asks when you tap the camera button to create a story. By that point, you’ve already decided you want to share something—the permission request makes sense.
This seems obvious, but check your phone: how many apps asked you for permissions before you’d even used them once? Probably most of them.
The Blank Slate Isn’t Blank—It’s Terrifying
“You have no tasks yet! Create your first task to get started!” is a sentence that has caused countless app deletions.
The blank slate—that empty state when users first arrive—is a critical moment. For designers, it’s clean and full of potential. For users, it’s paralyzing and vaguely accusatory. “You haven’t done anything yet. Why haven’t you done anything?”
Great onboarding pre-populates the blank slate with examples, templates, or sample data. It shows users what the app looks like when it’s working, so they can envision what their own usage will look like.
Notion handles this brilliantly. When you create a new workspace, you’re not greeted with emptiness. You get a pre-populated workspace with example pages, templates, and sample content. You can explore, click around, and understand what’s possible before creating anything from scratch. When you’re ready, you delete the examples and build your own—but you’ve already learned by doing, not by reading instructions.
Canva does this too. New users don’t face a blank canvas. They see thousands of templates they can customize. The blank slate becomes a jumping-off point instead of a barrier.
The Aha Moment Clock Is Ticking
Product analytics companies have identified something called “time to aha moment”—how long it takes users to experience the core value that makes your product worth using. For most successful products, this needs to happen in under five minutes.
For Facebook, the aha moment is seeing posts from friends you care about. For Dropbox, it’s having a file sync across devices. For Airbnb, it’s finding a place to stay that’s better or cheaper than hotels.
The entire onboarding flow should be reverse-engineered from this aha moment. Every screen, every interaction, every request should either get users closer to that moment or be eliminated.
Twitter struggled with this for years. New users would sign up, see an empty feed, not know who to follow, get bored, and leave. Twitter eventually redesigned onboarding to immediately suggest relevant accounts to follow based on interests, pre-populate feeds, and get users to their aha moment (seeing interesting tweets from interesting people) much faster. Retention improved dramatically.
The Tutorial Nobody Reads
Interactive tutorials with overlay arrows and forced walkthroughs seem helpful in theory. In practice, users mash through them as fast as possible, retain nothing, and then can’t remember how to do basic tasks.
There’s a better way: learning by doing with intelligent defaults and contextual hints.
Figma doesn’t throw a tutorial at new users. It opens a starter file with example designs you can click, drag, and modify immediately. A small panel suggests “Try selecting this shape” or “Double-click to edit text.” You’re learning actual skills by manipulating actual objects, not memorizing abstract instructions.
When users inevitably get stuck, contextual help appears: tooltips, embedded hints, or subtle animations showing what’s clickable. The app becomes its own tutorial, teaching through interaction instead of interruption.
The Personalization Trap
“Tell us about yourself so we can personalize your experience!” sounds user-friendly. In reality, it’s often just the product shifting work onto users before delivering value.
The personalization questionnaire—where apps ask about your goals, preferences, interests, and habits—rarely improves the experience enough to justify the friction it creates. Users don’t know how to answer these questions accurately, and apps often don’t use the data effectively anyway.
Better approach: infer preferences from behavior. Spotify doesn’t make you check boxes for music genres—it learns what you like by observing what you play. Netflix doesn’t need a questionnaire—it watches what you watch.
If you must ask questions, make them feel like conversation, not homework. Headspace asks “What brings you to meditation?” with friendly, relatable options like “I’m stressed” or “I want to sleep better.” It feels like talking to a friend, not filling out a form.
The Success Metrics That Matter
How do you know if your onboarding is working? The metrics tell the story:
Day 1 retention: What percentage of users who download your app come back the next day?
Time to first value: How long does it take users to complete their first meaningful action?
Activation rate: What percentage of new users complete the core action that correlates with long-term retention?
Setup completion rate: If onboarding requires steps, what percentage make it through all of them?
Products with world-class onboarding see Day 1 retention above 40%, time to first value under three minutes, and activation rates above 60%. If your numbers are lower, onboarding is your problem.
The Five-Minute Rule
Here’s a practical framework: If you can’t get a new user to experience your product’s core value within five minutes, your onboarding is too complex.
This doesn’t mean your product is too simple—it means your onboarding prioritizes the essentials and defers the advanced stuff.
Apply the five-minute rule to your product right now:
- Download your app fresh
- Set a timer for five minutes
- Try to accomplish the main thing your product promises
- If you can’t, identify what’s blocking you
Those blockers? That’s your redesign roadmap.
The Uncommon Truth
Most product teams spend 95% of their time building features for existing users and 5% thinking about new users. This is backwards.
Your existing users have already figured out your product. They’ve climbed the learning curve. They’re invested. New users are fragile, skeptical, and one moment of confusion away from deleting your app forever.
Great products obsess over those first three minutes. They test onboarding relentlessly. They optimize for quick wins. They reduce friction ruthlessly.
Because you only get one chance at a first impression, and in the app economy, first impressions happen in seconds, not minutes.
Your product might be amazing. But if users never get past your onboarding to find out, none of that brilliance matters.
Fix the first three minutes. Everything else becomes easier.