Onboarding

Onboarding, the first use, can make or break someone’s experience of a product. Therefore it is important to identify your target audience and design specifically with its context, expectations, and needs in mind.

Some new users bring years of traditional financial experience to Bitcoin. They have bank accounts, debit cards, and ingrained ideas about what money is. This makes onboarding tricky, as the user might assume that the patterns and habits from prior experience will apply. If you design a user experience that is superior to the traditional system, convincing users to switch to a different financial system will be a lot easier.

On the other hand, close to two billion people have no exposure to traditional financial institutions. This, along with designing for younger people whose ideas about money aren’t fully formed, represents a very different challenge.

Onboarding, for this guide, refers to anything that helps users set up the product or learn its interface (such as dedicated flows and UI elements) and initially focuses on mobile applications. But onboarding isn’t just for first-time users. Experienced users also need to be onboarded, especially when new features are added.

Remember: Onboarding should not be a crutch for bad design. Avoid trying to explain too much and then shooting users into a poorly designed app. Rather, think about onboarding flows as a smooth on-ramp into a great user experience.

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Principles (coming soon)

Onboarding experiences can look very different depending on your target audience, however, some things should be consistent across Bitcoin products.

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Getting to know your users (coming soon)

This section will give you some tips on how best to understand and develop knowledge about your users.

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First-time user experience (coming soon)

An overview of how to design a successful onboarding experience for first-time users. This will help set the basis for a more advanced type of user.