Creating an effective and elegant onboarding UX is notorious for being quite the journey, made more arduous when you’re a small startup strapped for resources. What does it look like to galvanize early users on the vision while setting expectations for what the product is today? How do we make it short and sweet while still painting a picture of what the user is signing onto? How do we get the info we need for a strong product experience on landing?

And now, as we see more agentic products breakout from phases of prototypes and early betas, there are new behaviors to illustrate to the user. Gone are the days of dumb chat bots kicking users to high level answers as they desperately type “connect to representative”. We are ushering in agents: adaptive learning systems that will come to know us better than we know ourselves through the meaning-making of continuous feedback loops. How should users interact with these systems to derive value?

Staring at a blinking chat box can be so…open-world. What do I ask for? What can I ask for? What should I ask for?

And so, onboarding must educate and guide the user on what is newly possible. If the promise of agents are a new level of personalization and user-defined value, then agents should be incorporated into onboarding to achieve the ideal of landing on a product that already knows you.

Like the choose your own adventure books 90s kids know well, the next-level of product onboarding will resemble interactive stories. Except, it will be like if the author was there with you, writing the ending just for you.