UX Designer Interview Question:

Tell us what is onboarding and why is it so important for mobile design?

Submitted by: Muhammad

User onboarding is the process of increasing the likelihood that new users will successfully adopt your product.

When launching a product, you need to spend a lot of time and resources to attract a sufficient number of users. There are a variety of means to attract users to your app, including advertising, referral programs, public relations, and content marketing. But when people finally download the app, they sometimes feel abandoned or let down. Therefore, you must do a good job at showing users why they need your app and how they should use it.

Onboarding can sometimes be an integral part of the app, where we show the user how to behave within the app. This dive in effect is especially useful if we incorporated some new features that might be unfamiliar to our users. Tooltips can also be used to show them how things work.

The same approach can be used when we have complex systems. With tooltips we can explain why some things are there or why others are not. It's something like a guided tour of your app, where hints are only triggered when the user reaches an appropriate point in their experience. Thus, hints may appear in different orders for different users and actions.
Submitted by: Muhammad