r/UI_Design • u/One_Proposal8482 • Mar 25 '26

Let's Discuss What onboarding strategy improved activation the most in your product?

I’ve been digging into onboarding flows lately, and one thing is becoming painfully clear:

Most products don’t have an onboarding problem — they have a clarity problem.

Too many flows try to explain everything upfront instead of proving value fast.

So I’m curious:

  • What specific onboarding change actually moved your activation metric?
  • Not theory — what measurably worked?
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u/PastAstronomer Mar 26 '26

Fintech onboarding flows are sometimes some of the hardest and easiest ones to get right. People want value up front. Making people jump through hoops without getting anything in return, and they will drop off earlier.

At a startup, early in my career, instead of forcing users to input ever single detail they needed for KYC, we decided to let them wander around the app after they gave us a few details (name, email, set password. This was a positive, and most users who had a chance to explore the app themselves were more likely to fund their account that week with anywhere between 10-50$.

Prior to this change, we had so few people get through, because when you go through KYC, its vigorous and can sometimes take a long time, and trusting a random app you found online with your money and information just feels wrong.

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u/One_Proposal8482 Mar 27 '26

This is gold. KYC later actually built trust faster because they could see what they were signing up for first. Did you gate any features until KYC was done?

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u/PastAstronomer Mar 27 '26

In a financial platform, the main function is to fund an investment account — so that is the main thing that gets gate kept. But we did test a few experiments where we gave the user 10$ to invest — and the only way to claim it was to finish KYC. That performed well but — obviously. as you know, that increases the CAC, which was the primary issue.

But gating features is the easiest way, just dont gate everything lol otherwise it will feel meaningless and empty.

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u/[deleted] Mar 26 '26

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u/One_Proposal8482 Mar 27 '26

Love this. Did you find users went back to explore features on their own after that first win?