On Onboarding Agents
đź“Ť San Francisco, CA | July 2, 2024
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?
![](/blog/onboarding-2.gif)
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.