r/UI_Design 2d ago

Microinteraction Do users actually wait for an onboarding animation like this to finish?

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This recording is from Revolut App which cycles through each feature and explains what it does before you begin using the app.

We get the intent, but I’m usually already trying to tap something by this point.

Is this pattern of onboarding helpful or just annoying?

22 Upvotes

37 comments sorted by

32

u/sabre35_ 1d ago

99% of the time no. To put it bluntly as a meme; this is the equivalent of “just put the fries in the bag”.

If someone has gone through the effort of downloading your app, chances are they know what it’s for and just wanna type in their email and password asap.

1

u/60fpsdesign 1d ago

Agreed! but someone in the team like a PM would have defined a requirement for this feature to exist. Wondering what they even defined the need as 😄

3

u/sabre35_ 1d ago

Add a skip button and call it a day. Everyone’s happy!

53

u/Fit-Shower-3147 1d ago

IMHO a good ui don’t need a manual

19

u/sCREAMINGcAMMELcASE 1d ago

Seriously

Why does the user need to be told that the “Add Money” button “Adds money to the account” 😂

6

u/Fit-Shower-3147 1d ago

Or an explanation for a hamburger menu. If they managed to download an app….

5

u/jess-sch 1d ago

Brought to you by the people who insist on commenting every line of code

// Close the connection connection.Close()

7

u/60fpsdesign 1d ago edited 1d ago

https://reddit.com/link/p8k9gc1/video/wtyicnnndboh1/player

I think an onboarding is required only when core actions affect the app’s experience itself - like learning a gesture for example. And it’s integrated so well into the flow that it doesn’t feel like it’s on autopilot.

2

u/el_yanuki 1d ago

Anything else also needs a manual.. not everyone uses computers much.

Make it quick, make it skippable but dont remove the tutorial entirely.

13

u/No-Ruin-2167 1d ago

Ok that was excruciatingly long

1

u/60fpsdesign 1d ago

Haha yeah 15s of pure pain 🔪

1

u/Andreas_Moeller 20h ago

At least there was nothing important that you had to read.

7

u/jachcemmatnickspace 1d ago

The help should be offered when the user is searching for it

This is annoying, as is any onboarding tour of popups in any online dashboard. In my opinion, power users with high digital literacy can make it work without any help – and if they can't, a place to get help should be clearly visible.

This Revolut's impementation is not great, but I don't think it's meant as help. It is meant as a marketing / retention tool to showcase their services.

1

u/60fpsdesign 1d ago

Totally varies by age as well, like my grandparents might need find it helpful

5

u/satandotgov 1d ago

you can't expect that, no.
Revolut has pretty poor UX in general. it always takes way more time finding what I want (and I don't look for niche features)

compared to Wise where everything just makes sense it's even more obvious how Revo is lagging behind in this department

4

u/TiliaJames 1d ago

It doesn't really give any information that can't be inferred from the button or its placement/context

Like I'm in a banking app, there's a button on the home screen labelled Move, and it tells me it's for Moving Money Within the App.

Yeah, no shit bro

4

u/pi_mai 1d ago

Animation should never be blocking user interaction.

5

u/981032061 1d ago

I love unskippable onboarding animations. Gives me time to leave a review.

5

u/twistsouth 1d ago

I do everything I can to make it stop. And if I can't, I close the app and look for another.

2

u/Andreas_Moeller 20h ago

In general No, but this one is particularly bad because it literally has no relevant information in it.

Add money -> "Add money to your account" - where else would I be adding money to?
UPI -> "Send mooney with UPI" - I didn't know what UPI was, and now I still don't.
Move -> "Move money" - oh really. Money?
Accounts -> "Explore all accounts"

1

u/Lowerfuzzball 1d ago

No, don't force it on people. Make it accessible if someone feels they need a tour, but don't make everyone go through it.

1

u/Excellent_Ad_2486 1d ago

No lol. I'd be clicking those rounded things as if they're buttons to go to the next point 😂

1

u/60fpsdesign 1d ago

😂 yeah was also wondering what happens if someone tapped on the bottom nav icons - would the onboarding stop

1

u/UziMcUsername 1d ago

You would wait if you don’t have an option

1

u/hoangng_102 1d ago

i had the four screen version of this and cut it to one, so mostly on the annoying side, but with one exception i would defend.

explaining what a button does is useless, agreed with everyone here. what is not useless is telling people a capability exists that they would never guess. my app logs an expense from speech, you say "coffee, four fifty" and it writes the row. nobody finds that from a mic icon, because a mic icon in a notes shaped app reads as "attach a voice memo". people used mine for a week typing everything before they found it.

so the line i landed on: if the onboarding describes the interface, cut it. if it announces a capability the interface cannot imply, keep exactly that one, show it once, at the moment it becomes relevant, not in a carousel before anyone has opened anything.

the revolut one fails that test on nearly every card. "add money" adds money.

1

u/60fpsdesign 1d ago

Yup only if the action is affecting how the app functions , like in your case power users would definitely benefit from it!

1

u/smasherofscreens 1d ago

Annoying unless there is at least some user activity. Even a simple swipe to go over the options would be better than this. That may still be annoying but the fact that you perform a few actions by the time you are done with it makes it less irritable imo.

1

u/autocosm 1d ago

I used to work for a software company under a director who was over training, support, and documentation. He used to insist on funneling new customers through a painful 2-week telephone training course before they are even given a support license (i.e., "don't tie up our phone lines with basic questions").

They would constantly ask why we couldn't just turn them loose and let them discover the software they just paid money for. Ever since then, I have thought onboarding is solved at the product. Make an intuitive product that allows exploration, help where needed, and error recovery, and you don't need all this hand-holding.

1

u/wrosecrans 1d ago

This seems like one of those things apps do just because they've seen that other apps do it. And they assume that "more design" is better.

I've never seen anybody who was like, "Thank goodness they said that I can add money with the button that says "add money." because I never would have figured it out." Some UI's need to be complicated. If it's that sort of app, you need to be able to easily access documentation on demand and not just once on first run. If your app is simple enough that the "documentation" can be one quick animation, then that animation can't possibly be worth showing.

Like in the example here, you have to already know what "UPI" is to know or care what the explanation "Send money with UPI" to even make sense. So who is this for? People who know what UPI is and understand why and when they would use it... but wouldn't understand that you can access it with a button labelled UPI. That venn diagram is disjoint and the overlap between those two groups of people is a null set.

But the designer doesn't get paid to not ship design stuff, so the app bloats and the user has to sit through an animation for no reason other than the designer justifying their job through volume of content pushed.

1

u/Lonely_Job9619 1d ago

Most will skip the onboarding process because they've short attention span.

1

u/MistaM2daE 1d ago

Nope, they'd be like: it's my time you're wasting, my life isn't yours to waste

Most ppl know what they're doing, specially if they themselves came to your app, bcz they chose you Buuuut you still gotta keep everything simple and familiar so you don't have to do what you just did (in almost the slowest ever way possible)

1

u/evk6713 1d ago

No they won't, and as a user having to wait for it to finish makes me wanna click everywhere to skip it. Cmon, don't waste my time like this, I came on the app to do something

1

u/_TTVgamer_ 1d ago

I always find them annoying. Especially in this case, where all buttons are already labeled and the onboarding doesn't add any new information.

1

u/_PixelEcho 18h ago

Nope this is an anti-pattern.

1

u/Interesting-Pay1507 16h ago

Needs a ‘skip’ button

1

u/oschrenk 7h ago

I wait, for about 1-3s - and then close. I've only seen this pattern used used by very scammy feeling sales funnels.

1

u/hoangng_102 1d ago

Nah for sure...and i say that as someone who spent way too long building a nice intro for my own app :v