Onboarding review
Signups aren't the finish line. Review the screens that come after.
Most products don't lose users at the signup form — they lose them in the five screens after it, where enthusiasm meets a wall of setup steps, permission prompts, and empty dashboards. Every screen between a new user and their first success is somewhere they can quietly leave.
UX Critic reviews onboarding screens one at a time, scores each, and pins every source of hesitation to the pixels that cause it — so you know exactly which step of the flow is bleeding activation.
The checklist
What an honest onboarding review actually inspects
- Time-to-value
- How much does this screen delay the user's first success? Setup that could happen later is churn happening now.
- One decision per step
- Screens that ask a new user to make three choices at once get none of them made.
- Progress signaling
- Does the user know where they are and how much is left? Unbounded flows feel infinite.
- Deferrable fields
- Company size, role, phone number — anything collected for your CRM rather than the user's benefit is friction at the worst possible moment.
- Empty states that teach
- A blank dashboard is a dead end; a good empty state is the next step in disguise.
- Permission timing
- Notification and access prompts asked before the user understands why get denied — usually permanently.
- Skippability
- Can an impatient expert get to the product? Forced tours punish your best users.
- Motivation copy
- Each step should restate what the user gets, not just what you need from them.
“Step two asks for a team name, an avatar, and a workspace URL before the user has seen the product once. You're charging an entry fee for a store they haven't walked into.”
Which critic to put on it
- The Operator treats every onboarding step as a funnel stage and finds where intent leaks.
- The Advocate catches the form and readability barriers that quietly exclude users before they ever activate.
How it works
Drop in a screenshot — PNG or JPG, live product or Figma export. Pick a critic. In about a minute you get a scored report: a verdict out of 10, per-dimension scores, and every finding pinned to the exact region of the screenshot it lives on. Your first 3 reports each month are free; Pro ($10/month) adds all three critics and AI before/after mockups of the top recommendations.
FAQ
Questions, answered
How do I review a multi-step flow?
One screenshot per report keeps findings specific. Run each step of your flow as its own report — scores are consistent, so the weakest step shows up immediately. Most flows have one screen dragging the rest down.
What's the most common onboarding finding?
Asking too much, too early. Fields that could be deferred, permissions requested before context, and setup steps that stand between the user and their first success. The second most common: empty states that are actually dead ends.
Can it review mobile onboarding?
Yes — upload the app screens. Pair it with The Advocate for touch-target and readability checks; mobile onboarding fails for accessibility reasons more often than teams expect.
Keep reading
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