What are the best practices for creating mobile app onboarding journey maps?

1 What is a journey map?

A journey map is a diagram that shows the user's path from their initial interaction with your app to their desired outcome. It helps you understand the user's perspective, context, and motivation, as well as the touchpoints, channels, and feedback they encounter along the way. A journey map can also highlight the gaps, opportunities, and challenges in your onboarding process, and help you prioritize the features and content that matter most to your users.

2 Why do you need a journey map for mobile app onboarding?

A journey map can help you design a better onboarding experience for your mobile app users by aligning your onboarding goals with your user's goals, empathizing with their emotions and pain points, optimizing the onboarding flow and content, and testing and validating your onboarding assumptions. It can help you define what success looks like for both parties, identify moments of delight, frustration, confusion, or anxiety that your users experience during onboarding, streamline the steps and information needed to complete onboarding, and gather feedback from users to compare with initial hypotheses and expectations.

3 How to create a journey map for mobile app onboarding?

Creating a journey map for your mobile app onboarding involves several steps. Firstly, define a user persona and scenario which reflects the most important or common user segment and goal. Secondly, map out the user's actions and touchpoints from opening the app for the first time to achieving their desired outcome. Additionally, consider the user's emotions and pain points at each action and touchpoint. Finally, identify opportunities and solutions to enhance the user's onboarding experience, such as adding a tutorial or providing feedback. By following these steps, you can create a journey map that will help improve the user's onboarding experience.

4 How to use a journey map for mobile app onboarding?

Once you have created a journey map for your mobile app onboarding, you can use it to communicate and collaborate with your team, prototype and test your onboarding design, and iterate and improve your onboarding experience. A journey map can help you share insights and onboarding vision with stakeholders, create a low-fidelity prototype of the flow and content, and analyze user feedback and data to identify strengths and weaknesses. Furthermore, it can be used to test with real users or potential customers, collect their feedback and data, and make changes and improvements accordingly.

5 What are some examples of mobile app onboarding journey maps?

To inspire you, here are some examples of mobile app onboarding journey maps that you can check out. Spotify, a music streaming app, has a simple and engaging onboarding flow that asks users to select their favorite genres and artists and then creates a personalized playlist for them. Duolingo, a language learning app, has a gamified and interactive onboarding flow that tests the user's language level, sets their learning goal, and introduces them to the app's features and rewards. Airbnb, a travel booking app, has a personalized and contextual onboarding flow that welcomes the user with a relevant destination, asks them to sign up or log in, and shows them how to search, book, and host on the app.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?