A practical checklist for onboarding flows

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. Run through this the next time onboarding flows comes up.

Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

The checklist

• Every extra step before value loses people
• Ask for information when you need it, not up front
• Show progress so the end feels reachable
• Someone is named as the owner
• There is a date to review it again

The reason this keeps coming up

Every extra step before value loses people. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

In practice

The measurable part of design is whether people can find what they came for and act on it without hesitating. Three things worth confirming about onboarding flows before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Ask for information when you need it, not up front — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.