For several years, user onboarding at Intercom centered on one action: installing a snippet of JavaScript on their website or app. For our technical user base of developers and small startups, it was the clearest and simplest way to get up and running. What was less clear was that while our onboarding process remained consistent, our user base was broadening. Marketers, customer support teams and product managers were signing up for Intercom, and installing JavaScript wasn’t as easy for them. What we discovered was that as integral as UIs and snippets of code are to the onboarding experience, the context informing them – audience, environment, product, packaging and price – is just as crucial, and constantly evolving. In Intercom’s case, our context has changed many times over the past few years. And our onboarding has had to follow.
Onboarding encompasses a lot of things: how you get set up with a product, how you learn about it, and how you purchase it too.
When we think about onboarding, most of us think in terms of software. But all products, in all industries, have an onboarding experience. Take the automobile industry, for example.
Car dealerships provide the onboarding experience for cars. They’re the
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