Member-only story
Good Onboarding Isn’t Just a tutorial. It’s Hospitality.
Yep, that was FocusPasta’s onboarding flow — a 6-page fullscreen brochure explaining everything the app does, all loaded upfront. Pull up any guide on how to create a good onboarding screen, and you’ll find that we checked every box on the don’t-do list, in order, as if we’re trying.
- Overload users with information? Check.
- Give instructional material instead of letting users try it? Check.
- March people through six screens before they’ve even seen the app? Check.
Hey, at least we had a skip button.
How we got here
It’s not that I designed this and genuinely thought “yes, this is the best onboarding experience ever” — it was the best I could do at the time.
I would have loved to do the whole cinematic tour with animated arrows, a little guide walking you to your charts after your first session, the bing and the bang. But I had no idea how to do that.
FocusPasta was my first app, the thing I built to learn iOS development. Building the onboarding flow I wanted sounded so complex at the time that my brain couldn’t even start to comprehend how to orchestrate it.
It wasn’t just one feature, but every single important screen in the app, each…
