Optimizing Online Onboarding for Better Retention

We all know that moment when we’re getting familiar with a new digital tool and our excitement shifts to frustration. Perhaps it’s a promising health management app that’s requesting more personal information than we’re ready to share, a unique SaaS tool that’s too complicated to set up, or a CRM platform that’s asking us to make a lot of decisions before we even know what it does. We take the first steps—download the app, sign up for the free trial, create the account—only to walk away before we see any real value. Time and time again, our journey with a new digital product ends before it really begins.

This common experience spells disaster for product leads and UX designers focused on boosting retention. While onboarding has the potential to reduce early churn and create loyal, long-term users, poor onboarding experiences have the opposite effect, driving users away and prompting them to seek alternatives elsewhere.¹ When onboarding triggers cognitive overload, sows seeds of distrust with early commitment requests, or fails to demonstrate immediate value, users often bail. At the critical moment when value, trust, and cognitive ease are most important, many onboarding sequences exhibit points of friction that cause customers to pause and think, “Maybe this isn’t for me.”

While product teams might approach onboarding from a practical perspective—providing technical training, listing key product features, or encouraging users to input their credit card info so they can get started—these strategies don’t always resonate with the user. Consumers tend to make snap judgments based on intuitive and emotional mental shortcuts, and user onboarding goes south when it doesn’t align with these automatic decision-making processes. Understanding what drives human behavior is crucial for creating user journeys that truly resonate. In this article, we dive into some behavioral design strategies that can help turn onboarding from a leaky funnel into a momentum-building process that supports lasting retention.