Onboarding a complex product: a case study of Grammarly

Conversational copy, progressive disclosure and great use of imagery

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I hear this from clients a lot:

We have so many features, how do we communicate them in onboarding?

There’s so much to set up in our early experience, what do we start with?

Why aren’t users getting to my features?

What ends up happening is an onboarding experience that tries to do too much at once.

Too much copy. Too many carousels. Too many tooltips.

What I typically start with is a correlation analysis: which of these features correlates strongest with early monetization and retention?

This helps prioritise and cut some out.

But then we still have the challenge of the UI and UX: how do you get users to take actions as early as possible? To springboard on their fresh, newbie motivation in the first couple of days?

Well, we’ll look at one such masterclass: Grammarly.

I was writing an important document last week when someone suggested I use Grammarly.