This is why I have a certain distaste for articles like this. The author has this sort hypothesis / contention, specifically that user onboarding is a waste of time, yet presents no data to either validate or disprove their hypothesis. We're supposed to just accept their hot take as gospel, where as folks like yourself can offer actual data that serves as a compelling counterpoint.

I dunno that it's a counterpoint. The thesis of the article is that setting up a user onboarding flow before you're ready is a waste of time, and/or that it's not as useful an activity as others you could be doing with that same time.

I'd consider Polar a success of "adding onboarding when ready." I just don't want people to consider onboarding as the first and only tool to reach for when trying to fix your Trial-to-Paid Conversion issues. There are a lot of other useful tasks you could - and frequently should - be working on as well.

God I hate user onboarding... seeing stats like that make me so sad, and feel ever further away from the current internet zeitgeist.

Half of their users skip the on-boarding. Why would that make you feel far away from the current internet zeitgeist?

Presumably the user group you've self selected into also has a retention rate that is 20x lower than those that don't skip the on-boarding.

Because everything has onboarding now. Sometimes it's unskippable (think mobile games). It's always annoying, very frequently patronizing, and, frankly most people's app/site designs aren't that special because modern UX seems to have no more than a handful of designs for how tech is to be spoonfed to the masses.

Of course none of that matters because it makes another tiny, self-selected group considerably more money.

This is really interesting, because Polar is the first onboarding experience I've had in a really long time that made sense and wasn't extremely annoying.

What is the retention of people who do vs don't skip the onboarding? Is it a wide disparity?

> About 50% of our users completely skip the onboarding altogether.

How is this different than when you had no onboarding? (serious question) Did you make other changes that made the onboarding process less important to end users?

The glass is half full, not half empty. About 50% of users DON'T skip onboarding - and for those users, it really matters.

You separate people in those willing to explore and figure it out on their own, and those who'd otherwise probably never check further than the home page on their own. In my experience the biggest gain from intros is that when you get people into entering some basic data - creating an example project or something - they feel like they've already invested some time and are much more willing to explore the features further and enter more data and eventually really start using the app.

can anyone else share some A/B stats?