According to research from the Business of Apps, one in four users abandon mobile apps after just one day of use. By day 3, the average app had shed 77% of its users, and by day 30, retention is just over 5%. If you didn’t understand how important first impressions are for the success or survival of mobile apps, you do now.
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So, how can you tilt these first impressions to improve retention and engagement? The answer lies in getting your mobile app onboarding right so that your product can compete in an increasingly competitive market.
In this article, we’ll share the five best app onboarding practices that will help you demonstrate the value of your app, hold onto users, and drive MRR.
What Is Mobile App Onboarding?
Mobile app user onboarding describes the initial experiences that help users understand how your app works and why it can solve their pain points. Its purpose is to reduce friction, demonstrate value quickly, and guide users towards the meaningful actions that are required to activate long-term engagement.
There are three main ways that mobile apps onboard users. Let’s quickly run down each one and which scenarios or products where they work best.
Progressive onboarding
This onboarding approach gradually introduces key features to your user. It typically uses contextual pop-ups, smart tips, overlays, or short product tours to ensure users aren’t overwhelmed with new information.
Progressive onboarding is especially effective for apps with complex features, unique touchscreen gestures, or tools that users need to learn over time.
Benefits-oriented onboarding
This type of onboarding focuses on communicating your app’s value proposition and benefits rather than explaining how to use specific features. The goal is to highlight how the app solves user pain points or makes life a bit easier, rather than providing a laundry list of the features within your product.
This approach works for apps that have unique, tangible, and easily communicated benefits, which could be things like saving the user time, money, or effort, or allowing them to achieve things that would otherwise be impossible for them.
Function-Oriented Onboarding
Function-oriented onboarding is instructional. It generally walks users through the core features step-by-step with the aim of showing them how to perform essential tasks within the app.
This onboarding approach often uses interactive product tours, videos, or slides to teach complex workflows or specific functions that are strongly linked to getting value from the app.
While the three styles mentioned above are distinct ways of onboarding mobile users, it’s important to note that you can use a blend of each depending on your product, audience, USP, and so on.
Top 5 Best Practices for Mobile App Onboarding
Here are our top five mobile UX best practices to keep users engaged.
1. Focus on First-Session Value
Research shows that 25% of users abandon an app after just one use. This statistic clearly underlines one thing: the user’s first few minutes with your app are critical.
Mobile onboarding software helps mitigate this kind of user churn because it allows you toprioritize the core benefit of your app right away.
Some questions that help with onboarding mobile users include:
What problem does my product solve for the user?
What tangible benefits can they get from the app?
Where might the user get stuck or frustrated?
Here are three core ways to ensure a value-packed first session.
Aim for quick wins: Guide users to complete one meaningful action during their first session. For example, the ultra-viral app TikTok lets users browse content immediately without signing up. This allows them to experience value before any friction occurs, reducing drop-offs and building curiosity and interest.
Minimize friction: Lengthy sign-up forms or mandatory account creation upfront are major barriers for users. To speed up entry, offer social logins (Google, Apple, Facebook) or one-tap signups. Figma’s clean signup page with SSO options is the gold standard for this frictionless approach.
Communicate value clearly: Use concise, benefit-focused messaging rather than feature dumps. Users don’t care about features; they care about what those features can do for them!
Example 1: Waze onboarding screen highlighting its benefits and value
2. Keep onboarding simple and interactive
Mobile users expect fast, intuitive experiences. Overwhelming them with long tutorials or dense, flabby text is a pathway towards disengagement.
Use bite-sized guidance: Break onboarding into small, digestible steps. Interactive walkthroughs that trigger smart tips or pointers as users explore features are compelling to new users. For example, Kommunicate’s onboarding triggers contextual smart tips only when users interact with specific features. This approach helps reduce cognitive overload.
Visual cues and short copy: Use arrows, highlights, and minimal text to direct attention. Instagram’s onboarding uses visual cues and minimal text to quickly orient users in a visually driven app.
Avoid generic product tours: Contextual, behavior-driven onboarding is more engaging and relevant. Instead of showing all features at once, guide users through what they need right now to get value from your app.
3. Personalize the user experience
Google and Ipsos research shows that almost 6 out of 10 users feel more favorable toward companies with apps that remember who they are. This statistic shows the power of even the most basic form of personalization. As such, if you can tailor your onboarding via user data and preferences, it creates relevance and an emotional connection that can significantly boost retention.
Collect data early: Use onboarding to gather zero- and first-party data like name, location, preferences, or goals. Blinkist’s onboarding asks users about their interests so it can personalize content recommendations.
Segment and branch: Use th data addressed above to create different onboarding paths. For example, Pinterest asks about interests to customize the feed, ensuring content is relevant.
Personalized messaging: Address users by name and highlight features or content relevant to their profile or region. Apps like ClickUp use this tactic to engage users more deeply.
4. Guide users contextually
Contextual onboarding means delivering help and feature highlights when and where users need them, rather than front-loading information. You can unlock this kind of progressive onboarding in the following ways:
Trigger guidance based on behavior: Exercise app Strava nudges users to record their first activity immediately, before following up with personalized notifications to build habits. This timely guidance helps users reach activation milestones faster.
Example 2: Evernote personalised onboarding
Highlight new or unlocked features: Introduce advanced features only after users master the basics. This process avoids overwhelming new users.
Use in-app banners for important information: In-app messages or push notifications can frustrate users. Banners offer a subtle yet effective way of communicating with users at their own pace.
5. Track, measure, and iterate
The best onboarding experiences for mobile apps are no accident. They’re the result of carefully tracking user engagement and conversion data and turning it into data-driven optimization.
Here are some tips that you can leverage for better mobile onboarding UX.
Key metrics to track: Install-to-registration rate, onboarding completion rate, Day 1/7/30 retention, churn rate, engagement depth (i.e, time spent, feature usage).
Identify drop-off points: Analytics reveal where users abandon onboarding. Pay attention, and you can resolve friction or confusion.
A/B test flows: Experiment with different onboarding sequences, copy, and visuals to find what resonates best for your users.
Iterate continuously: User expectations and behaviors evolve, so treat onboarding as a living process.
Bonus tip
While these five tips will help you deliver the best onboarding experience for mobile apps, there are a few other ideas that can help you overcome early-stage user churn.
Offer skip or “remind me later” options: Some users want your app to hold their hands; others don’t want that kind of experience at all. Allow experienced users to bypass tutorials or surveys to avoid frustration. Wise and ClickUp are examples of good mobile onboarding that offer the flexibility to skip onboarding content and dive right in.
Design for mobile usability: Use big buttons, short text, and intuitive gestures to accommodate smaller screens and on-the-go usage. What has been proven to work in apps should help guide your onboarding content.
Support multiple languages: If you have a global audience, multilingual onboarding increases accessibility and inclusivity.
Final thoughts
Get your mobile app onboarding right, and you can turn first-time users into loyal, engaged customers. By focusing on delivering immediate value, keeping onboarding simple and interactive, personalizing the experience, guiding users contextually, and continuously measuring and iterating your approach, you can slash user churn and boost retention.
Remember, onboarding isn’t a one-size-fits-all process. It’s a winding journey that should evolve with your users’ needs and behaviors. With the right strategy and tools, your app can make every first impression count and build lasting user relationships that translate into monthly revenues.
Mobile onboarding is crucial if you want to maximize engagement and retention rates. Usetiful is an onboarding tool for iOS and Android known for its user-friendly, no-code interface, flexible features, and superb value for money. So if you want to see how you can improve conversion rates and drive down user churn, try Usetiful or book a demo today.