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I've studied over a thousand onboarding flows to find out what makes good onboarding and do we even need one. A lot of what I've read says keep it short, but based on what I found, the average app has 25 onboarding screens.
Analysis of 1,460 onboarding flows reveals patterns behind effective onboarding, personalization, and paywalls in apps.
Key Takeaways
- Effective onboarding focuses on delivering the product's value quickly rather than just feature listing.
- Personalization and interactive elements during onboarding increase user engagement and conversion.
- Paywalls integrated thoughtfully with social proof and personalization can boost plan upgrades.
- Long onboarding flows can succeed if they engage users with meaningful content and interactions.
- Small UX details like progress indicators, microcopy, and custom notification prompts improve the onboarding experience.
Summary
- The average app onboarding flow has 25 screens, with finance, health, fitness, and education apps having the longest flows.
- Successful apps focus on the 'aha moment' where users experience the product's value early on.
- Best onboarding screens sell outcomes rather than listing features, often using animation or letting users try core experiences before signup.
- Personalization during onboarding is present in 23% of apps but only 7% of AI apps, which tend to learn from user behavior instead.
- Short and sweet onboarding flows with multi-intent queries or conversational copy can significantly increase conversion rates.
- Some apps show personalized plans or progress before users even start using the product, enhancing perceived value.
- 22% of apps introduce paywalls during onboarding, sometimes paired with personalization and social proof to increase upgrades.
- Long onboarding flows like Duolingo's can feel short by engaging users with lessons and interactive content before signup.
- Microcopy, progress indicators, and checklists improve onboarding by making it feel effortless and guiding users clearly.
- Custom pre-notification screens improve permission acceptance rates, and mobile onboarding tends to be longer due to permissions and paywalls.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and average onboarding length
- 00:49The aha moment and product value
- 01:24Outcome-focused onboarding examples
- 01:57Personal touches and founder notes
- 02:36Personalization trends and AI apps
- 03:17Multi-intent queries and quiz improvements
- 03:59Personalized plans and paywalls
- 05:18Long onboarding flows that feel short
- 06:46Microcopy, progress, and checklists
- 08:05Notification permissions and mobile vs web
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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The longest categories are finance, health, and fitness, and education. Seven out of 10 of these longest apps are actually finance apps as well. Some of the apps with the longest onboarding flows are also some of the most successful ones. When we look at apps
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with the shortest onboarding flows, three of them are AI products. So maybe keeping our onboarding flows short was never the point. The best onboarding seems to follow this pattern. You sign up, you set up your account, you hit the
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aha moment. That's where you actually feel the product's value. For Airbnb, it's making your first booking. For Netflix, it's finding and watching a show. For Mobin, it's finding a screen or an animation that you love and saving it to your collection. So, what are
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these apps actually doing? The best onboarding screens I've kept seeing had one thing in common. They're not listing features. They're selling the outcome.
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Timo does this really simply. Their welcome screen is just showing the product in action on both their mobile app and desktop.
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Front Butts does this with animation. The moment you open the app, you get a feel for what it does without reading a single word. And Alma goes one step further. It lets you try the core experience before you sign up. I rarely
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see apps with AI features who let you try it out before signing up for an account.
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And sometimes it could just be a copy tweak like Superhum. They turn a boring signup screen into a pitch with logos on the side as social proof. Some apps skip the pitch entirely and just feel human.
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This is an app called One Year. So in their onboarding flow, they included a founder's note which had a handwritten signature and a hand-drawn flower in it.
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It's pretty cute. And Tinder acknowledges when your birthday is around the corner. Airbnb. Well, this one's not even in the onboarding flow, but when you successfully list your first space, they show you a video from their CEO. It's a
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founder's touch at the aha moment. As for Basecamp, they put a personal note from the CEO after you've created an account. It feels like the product was made with intention. And one of the best onboarding flows adds personalization
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into the flow and they make it worth your time. 23% of apps personalize during onboarding. With AI apps at only 7%. It seems like AI tools don't ask questions about your users up front.
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They let the product learn from us instead. Looking at tight onboarding, it's short and sweet. You just download the app, answer two questions, watch it, customize your recommendations, and it'll prompt you to sign up. That's it. Very simple. Headspace found out
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that their users come to their app with more than one pain point to solve. So, instead of asking users to pick just one goal that they want to achieve with Headspace, they let them pick more than one. It sounded like a very simple
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tweak, but it led to a 10% increase in free trial conversion. There are also other apps that allow multi-intent queries.
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Focus Flight lets you choose your map style during onboarding. It makes the app feel like yours before you even started using it. Sometimes it can be even simpler than that. Dollar Shave Club tweaked the quiz copy to be more
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conversational. This alone led to a 5% increase in subscriptions. Some apps don't just collect answers during the quiz. They actually show you what those answers unlocked. So in Endos onboarding, you answer six questions and then they show you this. You haven't
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even used the product yet, but it already feels like it's going to work. Bite Pal does the same thing. After the quiz, they build your personal plan and then tell you exactly when you'll hit your goal.
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Brilliant shows you courses that are personalized to your responses. As soon as you finish your onboarding flow, your homepage is already populated with only the content that you want to see. Here's another one by Speak, a language learning
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app. It asks you what language you'd like to learn and your goals. Then in one simple screen, it tells you in two months you'll be able to communicate while traveling in France. There's a simple graph showing that speaking helps
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you reach your goals faster than reading. The steps before this screen already had you speaking instead of typing. So out of 900 plus apps and websites, 22% of them throw a paywall during onboarding. Some apps also pair
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personalization with a paywall. Beside pairs a quiz with a one-time offer to drive urgency.
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Timo does the same with a full page of social proof before showing the paywall and Focus Flight makes the paywall itself fun. The one-time offer, it's shaped like a flight ticket and your phone vibrates as it gets printed
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out. It's a paywall that actually feels delightful. As for Grammarly, based on your quiz answers, they recommend tailored pricing plans. This alone led to almost a 20% increase in plan upgrades. Okay, some of these onboarding flows are really long, yet
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they don't feel like it. The onboarding flows that I really love tend to make onboarding flows feel short. Out of 986 apps, Duolingo has one of the longest onboarding flows. And if we zoom in, it goes like this. You get started, choose
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the language that you want to learn. It learns about you. You start your first lesson, get the satisfaction of completing it, and then you create an account. By that point, you've already gone through 60 screens before you even
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sign up. And the crazy part is it doesn't even feel long. Okay, so Bump's onboarding flow is creative. Even the loading states are wild. There's always something going on throughout the onboarding flow. Smooth animations on things like verification that rarely get
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special treatment. It adds fun. It doesn't feel like you're going through a boring onboarding flow. Bipal has 61 screens. The onboarding was a lot of fun. It has really amazing animations.
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The raccoon is quite lovable and you even get to name your virtual pet raccoon. Throughout the onboarding, they emphasize the value like your personal plan is ready and you'll lose weight by an exact date and then bam, a paywall.
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All right, so another pattern I noticed some apps don't frontload all the education to you. Cake Equity is a great example. They're dealing with dry concepts like company equity investing schedules and turns it into something approachable with copy that reassures
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users from time to time and tooltips that explain the impact of each step so that users feel like someone's guiding them along the way. Even something as small as a password field that checks off requirements in real time as you
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type removes a reason to get stuck. Maybe it's a progress indicator. Maybe it's microcopy. None of this is flashy, but it makes the experience feel effortless. T-Do apps does this really well, too. Instead of giving users a blank empty state, they show you
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something like this with no guided tours, no popups, just a little nudge in the right place. And when Mural replaced pop-ups and banners with a clear six-step checklist, it drove a 10% relative increase in one-week retention.
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Checklists stick around even after the user dismisses the initial flow. If you go on Mobin and do an AI search for onboarding checklist, you will find more ideas like this.
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Another pattern that I kept seeing is a lot of apps show a custom screen before the notification pop-up. Apparently, it improves accept rates significantly.
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Here's an example by Brilliant. I'll remind you to learn so it becomes a long-term habit. Cool. Center takes it one step further. It also teases you the notification that you'll receive if you allow it. This might explain why web
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onboarding is 21% shorter than iOS. Mobile just has more permission and paywall screens baked in. Okay, this one surprised me. House split their signup form into multipl
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friction we add in one place removes friction in another. Culture plays a role here as well. Users in eastern markets tend to be more comfortable with informationheavy interfaces. So what feels like clutter to one audience feels efficient to another, which is partly
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why we can't just copy what worked. And I don't think there's one right or wrong way to design an onboarding flow that's bestin-class. The ones that stuck with me didn't feel like onboarding. What I saw in common in these apps is that they
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brought users to value quickly. Sometimes it's adding delight to a very long onboarding flow. Sometimes it's letting users personalize their app experience for themselves and sometimes it's getting out of the way. So, do we even need on boarding? Bobin is a place
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to find design inspiration. The product speaks for itself. Same with AI chat apps. The first prompt is where users find value. For products like these, maybe the best experience is just to let users get in fast and not have an
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onboarding experience that gets in their way. Maybe it all boils down to the product. We had so much fun diving into the data. And did you know that onboarding flows are the second most search on Mobin? For the next video, I
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have a feeling that we're going to dive really deep into dashboards and see what the data tells us. So stick around, subscribe if this vibes with you.
Topics:onboardinguser experienceapp onboardingpersonalizationpaywallaha momentconversion ratemobile appsAI appsuser engagement
