Why most onboarding flows fail before the user even starts
“Why do we design onboarding for the product's logic instead of the user's mental model?”
The real problem
Most onboarding flows are designed by people who already know the product. That's the root of the failure.
When a designer or PM maps out an onboarding sequence, they're walking a new user through _their_ mental model of the product - the one that took them months of context to build. The user arrives with zero context and a very different question in their head.
The user isn't asking
"how does this work?"- they're asking"can this help me do the thing I came here to do?"
What this looks like in practice
Replace this section with your actual thinking. Some prompts to get started:
- What did you observe?
- What surprised you?
- What would you do differently?
The why behind the why
This is why we need to go one level deeper. Why does this pattern persist? What systemic or organizational pressure produces it?
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