Getting On Board?

So how bad is the retention on mobile apps these days? Pretty bad, you probably guessed; but this bad?

How to Make Your Users Open Your App Again

According to studies, one in four mobile apps is abandoned after a single use. So apart from focusing on first impressions and engaging users during the first launch you should think about how to keep bringing them back over time… Ask this question before you start building anything: How can I ensure that users will keep coming back?

1. Start a drip email campaign during onboarding.
2. Update users with their results by email.
3. Use personalized notifications: push, SMS, chat bots.
4. Leverage of social mechanics.

Read the whole thing — the infographics are great. For more perspective on long-term retention, check out

Your User Onboarding Flow Is Too Shortsighted

Yes, the initial goal of user onboarding is to teach someone how to use your app. But if all a user has done is learned the ropes of one feature, the job isn’t done. Good user retention means going far beyond basic user onboarding. Retention has many stages, and if you want to keep your retention numbers high, you need to think about user onboarding past the first day…

For some specific tips, check out:

User Onboarding Best Practices

It’s easy to make onboarding exclusively about the product—logistics, how-tos, and the nitty-gritty details about your product. But your onboarding still needs to be all about the customer. That starts by creating a seamless user experience centered around buyer personas and jobs-to-be-done to align the promise of your product with the onboarding experience…

A common theme you’ll notice here is exposing only appropriate functionality. Why, a “design pattern”, we could call that idea:

Design Patterns: Progressive Disclosure for Mobile Apps

Progressive disclosure is a strategy for managing information complexity. When you use progressive disclosure, you show only the information necessary at that point in the interaction. And you display more advanced functionalities of the app interface as the user interacts with it…

A most important aspect of that progressive disclosure is to never ask the user for a permission when there’s any chance they might refuse it, as they probably will if the benefit is not obvious and immediate. Good advice here:

Mobile UX Design: The Right Ways to Ask Users for Permissions

When it comes to requesting permission, the worst thing an app can do is to bombard users with permission requests without any notice or explanation. Both asking your users for permission too early or for too many things at once are common mistakes. And yet, many apps still do that…

So there’s plenty of food for thought. Some more links with gritty details you may find useful:

• How Zendesk Onboards New Users is a neat teardown — check the rest at UserOnboard too.

• UI Interactions “The best UI Interactions for your inspiration, every day.” — onboarding specifically

• iOS Onboarding without Signup Screens

• Cross-Platform Onboarding Without Signup Screens

• Onboard is a particularly clean and simple framework for quickly adding onboard screens.