User Onboarding Teardowns By Samuel Hulick
In the world of design, there are multitudes of articles and resources created specifically about UX and UI design. Samuel Hulick bridges both worlds with his ongoing project at User Onboard, where he does design teardowns of user onboarding flows for many popular apps like Snapchat, Pinterest, and Waze. If this all sounds very dry and technical so far, you shouldn’t worry – he takes content that could easily be considered boring in lesser hands and makes it hilarious, and therefore more memorable, like so:
Make no mistake though, Samuel is also an excellent teacher, and goes out of his way to explain why something is good or bad onboarding:
This kind of insight is invaluable! It is the kind of thing that may not be obvious, or even cross your mind when you are designing something that seems like it should be simple, like deciding if a button should say “Submit” or if it should say “Next” or “Congratulations” or “Get Started” – but Samuel is a true expert at explaining why every single thing matters and might help or hinder a user during the onboarding, their critical first impression of a product. Even if you aren’t a UI or UX designer and aren’t designing apps or websites that have an onboarding process, there is a lot to be learned here because design is inherently a service industry and you are always designing for somebody else, and Samuel’s teardowns are amazing at demonstrating how to be in the mindset of how to best serve your user or client.
And did I mention he is really funny?
He also writes non-teardown posts on Medium that are also really thoughtful and funny, like this one about breaking up with Slack. Subscribe to the User Onboard mail list + follow Samuel on Medium, enjoy, and learn!
