I Done This Blog

If you’re a product person, you’ve probably spent a lot of time obsessing over the minute details of your app. You’ve spent hours tweaking the wireframes in Sketch, and even more hours working with engineering to make sure that everything’s absolutely perfect.

But even once you’re satisfied, none of that hard work actually matters unless you can get people to use your product.

Your users won’t always care about gutter sizing or great typography, especially when they’ve just signed up for a new product. They just want something that they can use and that can work.

The good news is that you’ve already sold them on your product’s value proposition. They’ve downloaded or installed your app and, in doing so, given you a clear signal that they’re interested in what it has to offer.

All you have to do is roll out the welcome mat and show them how it works. But demonstrating the value of your app and the way it works is the key to engaging users who will actually stick around.

A simple checklist is often one of the best tools for that. As productivity guru Atul Gawande writes in The Checklist Manifesto, “Under conditions of complexity, not only are checklists a help, they are required for success.”

Checklists break a complicated system into small steps that are easy to accomplish. They hook into psychological principles, creating motivation for new users to actually complete onboarding tasks. From scheduling a social media post to creating a channel in a chat app, breaking these desired actions into small, simple steps is the key to actually getting people to do them.

In this article, we’ll look at five different examples of how products use checklists to drive success in user onboarding.

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