Personally I hate on-boarding that walks me through every silly element of the app that there is. Am I to remember all that? Dude, I just came in. I don't need to know where is your pantry and boiler room. I just want to know where's a bathroom I could use. Later you can show me where everybody else hangs out.
I agree, I think that's one of the hard things to balance. Force the information down a user's throat, and they'll hate you for it. Don't give them enough information and you end up with users who have poor experience.
Honestly, I think the best on boarding experience is a super-intuitive design. But that's just me.
Yep, the ideal case is when you can blend selling, learning and using. As soon as you type something into Google's giant field, even if it's not what you're looking for, you're able to do all three.
Maybe we should call this type of site the "onboarding try hard." Probably just a sign the product designer hasn't figured out what they want their user to do, so instead decides to show you the entire car lot and hope something sticks.
I like the distinction made between sign-up-friction and onboarding, in that the former is essentially about the sign-up process (i.e. forms). However, it's too bad all of the bad practices listed at the end have to do with ugly, shitty forms.
Going back to how the OP defines onboarding, it's: "*the process of getting a new user to a must have experience and a set of best practices to get them active"
If one of the best practices is to make it easy to upload contacts, then I think it's worth mentioning in the "bad practices" section that uploading contacts unexpectedly, a la Path, can turn users off very quickly, despite your best intentions. Even when users agree to let apps access their phone book, they still don't perceive the kind and quantity of info they're giving out...and so to get an email from some obscure person on their contact list who tells them they don't give a fuck about how said person joined Path...well, that causes a freak out, as we remember well:
Twitter is an interesting example of an onboarding quandary...I agree with the OP that the signup is well-done and slick, however, talking to people who have joined Twitter and then stopped using it...the problem is that new users (especially journalists who are used to thinking everyone is paying attention to them) get turned off by the lack of response when they first start tweeting. This is not the user experience they get on Facebook, when you generally have "friends" right away and are able to "Like" and communicate with them right off the bat.
I'm not sure what the answer to this Twitter problem is, just noting that there's huge room for improvement in that aspect of onboarding.
It can be good to set expectations as much as you can, which isn't easy to do. Importing contacts during onboarding, for a product who's core value improves the more relevant people you can interact with is a solid practice, even if the majority of your users don't do it.
To your point on Twitter, instead of "like" remember they do have "favorite" which is a pretty similar form of feedback. It also appears the way they handle getting those initial interactions is encouraging other to "follow" you. They can do this even better if you actually do import your address book :)
