Onboarding & Activation
Marketing delivers the signups it promised. Two thirds of those people never come back after the first session.
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The first thing they meet is a five-step tour of the interface, which describes where things are to somebody who does not yet know what the product does for them.
Joshua Porter's reframe is the one that fixes this: onboarding should not be a separate function or an afterthought, it should be an initial and primary focus of design. Most teams build it last, as a layer of tooltips over a product that was designed for somebody who already understands it.
Activation is the stretch between first contact and the moment somebody understands the product well enough to return on their own. It starts before signup and ends weeks later, and almost none of it happens in the flow labeled onboarding.
Anatomy of a First Session
A first session has a shape whether or not anybody designed it. Naming the parts shows which ones were decided and which ones were inherited.
The Parts
Seven, in the order somebody meets them.
The entry point, meaning what they clicked and what it promised. The first screen after signup. The opening state, which is either empty or seeded with something. The setup asks, meaning every field, permission and connection requested. The guidance layer, which is the tour, the tooltips or the checklist. The activation moment, where the product does its thing for the first time. And the return path, meaning what brings somebody back tomorrow.
Which Ones Get Designed
Teams reliably design the guidance layer and the welcome email, and inherit the rest.
The opening state is whatever the database returns for a new account, which is usually nothing. The setup asks are in whatever order engineering found convenient. The activation moment is not identified, so nothing is arranged around it. And the return path is a marketing sequence written by somebody who never saw the first screen.
The Three Phases Around It
Joe Leech splits the product lifecycle into attraction, activation and retention, and this module sits in the middle one.
Attraction gets somebody to try, and retention keeps somebody who already understands the product. Activation carries the stretch between them, which is the part with no owner in most teams. Where signups are healthy and week-two usage is not, this phase is the leak.
Where the Parts Point
Each remaining article takes one of them.
Naming the activation moment is article 3, since nothing else can be ordered until it is known. The setup asks are articles 4 and 5. The opening state and the guidance layer are article 6. The return path is article 7.
Pro tip: Create a fresh account on your own product and screenshot every screen until you reach something useful. That sequence is your onboarding, whatever the flow in the design file says.