We spent a long time figuring out what the first useful moment in Clipflow should feel like. Until we understood that, improving onboarding was a fairly broad task.
The platform had evolved. It started around YouTube production and grew into a much wider content workflow. That meant the thing we first built the setup around wasn't necessarily the thing a new business owner needed to see first.
By August, the moment we wanted to demonstrate was clearer. Take a video, turn it into other useful pieces of content, then move those towards scheduling and publishing. Show someone how one recording could become more than one finished item.
That's a much more concrete experience to design around than asking whether the setup screens look good. It gives us a destination. What does someone need to do before they can see that result? Where are we making them learn something that can wait?
We'd also started looking at the actions associated with people subscribing. I described those patterns at the time because they were helping us choose where to focus. They gave us something better to work with than our own feelings about the interface.
It still took time to connect the product we'd built with the experience someone should have when they first arrived. The features existed, but we had to decide which sequence would make their value clear.
If you're improving onboarding, identify the result you want a new customer to experience. Then look at every step before it. You'll have a much better reason for keeping, changing or removing those steps.
