5 Onboarding Tips To Retain App Users

In simple words, onboarding is the first impression for the user who has downloaded your app for the first time. That impression determines whether he/she would go on to use or discard the app. Hence the famous phrase "The first impression is the last impression". To make a powerful first impression an app has to offer great value and some unique features to the end user. The better the user understand the features the more downloads your app will get.

But how do you encapsulate those qualities in your app? This blog is written to help you understand the most effective user onboarding tips in mobile apps.

Create An Interactive Tour

Make the user walk through the screens to take a series of actions on an app and improve retention. Adding a minimum of 5 screenshots or more is enough, otherwise, the user can end up getting bored.

Duolingo has an app guide tour where the users are explained how to use the product. In addition, the tour aims to ensure that the users don’t exit the app that’s why

Duelingo invites them to start the experience with a quick product test. Thus, it encourages the user to take action, retains them and brings them back to the app.

Branding

Don’t forget your brand! Show your brand image on the onboard screens: enter your logo, colors, typography, icons. Doing this will make a strong impact on users and they’ll very likely to remember your brand for a long time.

Give the user an option to skip onboarding

Yes, you heard it right! Give the user an option to skip onboarding. I’ll tell you why because there is a majority of users who don't want to see onboarding. They simply want to skip and learn it on their own or maybe they know how to use your app. Not offering a skip onboarding option would annoy such users.

Describe the actions

This is the critical part of the onboarding, as you need to explain the most common actions that a user can take in the app or the benefits that he/she can get from using it. This might become the only reason to use your app.

In the image below, Google and YouTube are providing important gestures’ information with focused tips within the context of the action that the user wants to perform and do it in a static way or with animation. Animated walkthroughs are much more engaging than the static ones as animations are great at grabbing user-attention.

Provide some sample data

If the app is preloaded with sample data, the user will feel comfortable experimenting and learning how the app works, and they’ll be better prepared to input real data. This is particularly helpful in such apps that handle sensitive data.

Wrap up

I think by the time you get here, you’ll have a good understanding of the importance of onboarding to a mobile app. If a well-animated onboarding is applied effectively in your app then there are fewer chances that the user will leave your app. So basically it is the primary duty of a developer or a mobile app development company to make an app with a helpful onboarding guide in it.