The Elements of User Onboarding

by Samuel Hulick

www.useronboard.com

This 130-page ebook was designed to be the most enjoyable and thorough guide to user adoption the world has ever seen.

Here's a tiny list of things this book will help you be better at:

Tee things up for success long before the user even signs up
Turn users into stampeding elephants of motivation
Set up a signup flow that pulls all the right ones in
Craft a first-run experience that sets them up for return visits
Set up lifecycle emails that makes sure those visits happen

Genres: Design, Business, Technology, Psychology, Nonfiction, Computer Science

127 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[Erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The Elements of User Onboarding" is a fantastic resource for anyone who writes onboarding UX. Samuel Hulick makes what is potentially a dry subject, a fun and entertaining read. He provides a lot of wonderful, real-world examples, and leads you along his course. I enjoyed every page of this book and have already made plans for how to change onbboarding for my product. I plan to read it again soon, and have recommended it to the rest of my team.

If you write or design how people sign-up for your product, or how users set-up their accounts, this book is a must-read. Still not convinced? Check out the teardowns on his website: https://www.useronboard.com/

[Kalle · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like the effort but this was sadly not what I expected. Some fun and good parts but lacked the depth and insight I was looking for. The really steep price (+40$) gave me false expectations as it basically felt like a bunch of Medium articles compiled into a PDF. If the price was lower I would rate it differently. Also very much focused on web which was another issue for me as I was hoping for a more general look at onboarding.

[David Nash · Rating 5 out of 5]

A comprehensive, yet concise guidebook on all thing User Onboarding. I teach Product Managers and I often reference Sam's materials as best practices. He does great product tear-downs on his site too.
Thanks, Sam.

[Vignesh Nandha Kumar · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good book if you're just starting out as a designer. If you've worked as a designer for 5 years or more, there's probably nothing new here. It still is a nice reminder of things you already know, presented in a quick read format.

[Sashko Valyus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Нічого особливо нового, просто весь процес розкладений по поличкам, від першого контакту, по підтримки спілкування на протязі користування продуктом

[Petri Maatta (dreammakerr) · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was a great read and contained plenty of best practices. I can't wait to start implementing.

[Marcelo Ferranti · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too basic and outdated.

[Giedrius · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a quick read about phases of user onboarding. It mainly focuses on SaaS businesses with a notion that whatever you are selling, you should help users became better at doing something (instead of making them better at using your product). Most of the chapters in the book are based on common sense and analyzing onboarding process of few online companies.

The book is easy to read and understand, however, I must say that in my opinion, it is quite superficial. I was expecting more empirical read based on facts and evidence rather than authors personal opinion after he analyzed several websites.

[Tash · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book doesn't waffle on, which I appreciate. Instead, it gets straight to the point on how to improve onboarding. The recommendations are pretty practical, as in, I feel like we can do 90% of the suggestions without alot of work.

We're revising our onboarding based on this, so it'll be interesting to see how it goes over the next couple of months.

[Joshua Pitzalis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great introduction to some basic on-boarding principles.

Very casual. Some pretty metaphors.

I was expecting a little more.

Good though.