Dropbox Product Onboarding
Dropbox uses a sequence of popular onboarding patterns to onboard new users.
Onboarding Forms
First, users go through a short onboarding form that collects data on use case, company size, industry, and more. Dropbox can use this data to personalize the user experience (e.g. enterprise vs. personal feature sets, marketing drip campaigns) and to enrich accounts to help their sales team with prioritization.
The forms are effective because they can be completed quickly, they indicate user progress, they can be optionally skipped, and they are well designed with illustrations and animations.
Welcome Announcment
After completing the onboarding forms, users land on the product dashboard where they are met with an actionable welcome announcement. The announcement is singularly focused on getting the user to make their first file upload – an action that is critical to unlocking all subsequent Dropbox value. The action can be completed directly from the announcement itself removing any unnecessary friction for the user.
Most users probably sign up for Dropbox with a specific file sharing use case in mind. So, Dropbox focuses on helping users complete this job first before going deeper into education. Once that first file is uploaded, a user experiences part of Dropbox's "Aha" moment and unlocks the ability to take deeper (often viral) actions such as sharing their file (AKA inviting other teammates to Dropbox and driving product growth).
Onboarding Checklist and Banner
In this example, the user opts to upload their first file at a later time. The user then sees an onboarding checklist that opens up by default in the bottom left of the dashboard. Opening up the checklist by default serves two purposes: First, Dropbox actively guides the user to a set of key actions they should take to get the most out of Dropbox, including reiterating that first file upload. Second, since the checklist can be closed, it teaches the user where the progress badge lives in the UI to revisit onboarding at any time.
Every step in the checklist is actionable (e.g. upload a file, sign a document, edit a pdf) and deeplinks to the place in the product where the user can complete the said action. Dropbox also includes secondary "Learn more" links to help the user discover help resources to explore the product offering.
Lastly, Dropbox places a dismissible banner at the top of the screen to encourage users to download the Desktop app. Desktop and mobile apps tend to provide better engagement and retention rates, so the sooner that Dropbox can get its users into its first-party apps, the more likely they are to convert into customers.
