Articles by
Hilal Yıldırım
Hilal is a creative content writer highly focused on growth, occasionally product, and always onboarding.
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Article · 5 min read
User Onboarding Examples and Best Practices To Get Inspired By
The best user onboarding examples are useful only if you can tell which practice each one shows and check your own flow against it. Below, ten common practices each come with an example from a real product and a quick test, such as counting your signup fields or the steps before the first useful action.
By Hilal Yıldırım
Article · 6 min read
In-App Onboarding - Definition, Best Practices, and Examples
In-app onboarding is the guidance inside your product that teaches new users to use it: welcome screens, tours, tooltips, checklists and empty states. The skill is matching the pattern to the moment, such as a question when the answer changes the next screen, or a tooltip the first time someone uses a feature.
By Hilal Yıldırım
Article · 6 min read
How to Create User Stories for Onboarding - 5 steps
User stories for onboarding describe each step of a new user's first days from their side: "As a [type of new user], I want [goal] so that [reason]." Write separate stories for the person who creates the account and for the teammates they invite, and give each story acceptance criteria your team can test before release.
By Hilal Yıldırım
Article · 7 min read
Top 9 Free User Onboarding Software: A Complete Guide
Free user onboarding software comes in three forms: a free plan with limits, an open-source library your developers build with, or a paid tool's free trial. As of October 2026, only Pendo, iorad and Stonly list a free plan among the 18 onboarding tools whose pricing we read, and each caps something different: users, privacy or guide views.
By Hilal Yıldırım
Article · 5 min read
Onboarding vs. Training vs. Orientation - What are the Main Differences?
Orientation, onboarding and training differ in scope and length. Orientation is a one-time welcome, usually on day one; onboarding is the weeks-to-months process of integrating a new hire, and orientation is its first step; training builds specific job skills and continues for the whole of an employee's time at the company.
By Hilal Yıldırım
User Onboarding · 7 min read
Ways to Improve a User Onboarding - 14 best practices
The user onboarding best practices that hold up are the ones you can check: one activation goal per flow, a signup of about three steps, a checklist of five or six tasks, and short tours users can skip. Most real flows in our inspirations library, from Netflix to Calendly, sit inside those numbers.
By Hilal Yıldırım
User Onboarding · 8 min read
What Is the Product Adoption Curve and How Is It Important?
The product adoption curve is a bell curve of when five groups take up a new product: innovators (2.5%), early adopters (13.5%), early majority (34%), late majority (34%) and laggards (16%). Everett Rogers drew it in 1962 by slicing adoption times at standard deviations from the average; Geoffrey Moore added the chasm in 1991.
By Hilal Yıldırım
Tooltips · 4 min read
Who Owns User Onboarding (hint: there is no user onboarding specialist)
No single team owns user onboarding; product, growth, marketing, sales and customer success each own a part of it. What works is one accountable champion for the activation metric, usually product or growth in a product-led company and customer success or sales in a sales-led one, with the other teams owning the pieces they already run.
By Hilal Yıldırım
Tooltips · 6 min read
What Is (New) Feature Onboarding and How to Build One for Success
New feature onboarding introduces a new or changed feature to people already using your product, inside the product. Size it to the change: a one-step tooltip or hotspot for a small improvement, a two- to five-step tour for a new feature, and a short tour plus a way back to the old version for a redesign.
By Hilal Yıldırım
Product Tour · 7 min read
10 Steps to Create the Best Onboarding Videos with Examples
An onboarding video is a short clip that shows new users one task in a product, placed where they need it: a welcome modal, a tooltip, the help centre or a welcome email. The clips in our examples run from 17 seconds to just over a minute; for "where do I click?", an interactive walkthrough usually works better.
By Hilal Yıldırım
User Onboarding · 10 min read
5 Great (and Awful) User Onboarding Experiences to Set an Example
Good and bad user onboarding differ less in how many patterns they use than in whether the first guidance follows the user's first task. In five flows recorded in 2021 (Spotify, Frase, UiPath, Calendly and Genially), the weakest offered no guidance or toured the screen layout; the best started users on a real, prefilled task.
By Hilal Yıldırım
Tooltips · 7 min read
Getting Started with Customer Onboarding
Customer onboarding is the process that takes a paying customer from signup or contract to regular, independent use of your product. It overlaps with user onboarding but adds what paying customers need: a named owner, a plan tied to their goals and a hand-over to support. Done well, it's the first lever you have on retention.
By Hilal Yıldırım
