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.
First use
An overview of common tasks when using a wallet application for the first time.
Funding a wallet
An overview of how users are likely to fund their wallets
Backing up a wallet
An overview of the tradeoffs between using manual backup vs automatic cloud backup.
Protecting a wallet
An overview of how to add extra layers of securtiy to protect sensitive user data.
Restoring a wallet
What options to consider if a user has lost their device, had it stolen or deleted and redownloaded a particular wallet application.