Instructions
Onboarding is the part of the user experience where most products fail. A user who signs up, gets confused, and gives up in the first five minutes is a lost user — and bad onboarding is the single most common reason that happens. Getting the first minutes right deserves as much attention as any other part of the product.
The goal of onboarding isn't to teach users everything about your product. It's to get them to one valuable moment as quickly as possible — the point where they understand what the product does for them through direct experience, not through being told. Everything in onboarding should be in service of reaching that moment.
Design for the least charitable version of your new user: someone who's mildly impatient, unfamiliar with your interface conventions, and n...
