Onboarding flow
The guided first run that takes someone from fresh signup to their first real win, instead of an empty app.
See it
What it is
Everything between 'account created' and the first moment the product actually pays off for this person (the activation moment, or in growth slang the aha moment). It usually takes one of four shapes: a setup wizard that collects what the product needs to work, seeded sample data so the app is not empty, a persistent checklist ('2 of 5 done'), or an overlay product tour.
Reach for it when your product needs configuration or content before it does anything: a project, a connected account, an imported list. The onboarding flows people remember do the work for the user rather than narrating the UI. Slack drops you into a channel with messages in it; Duolingo has you translating a sentence before you have picked a password.
Gotcha: most teams build a feature tour when the real problem is a bad empty state. Tooltips pointing at toolbar icons teach almost nothing, and completion rate is a vanity number. Measure whether people reach the value moment, not whether they clicked 'Next' five times. Always leave a visible skip, and let people finish setup later from the checklist instead of gating the app behind it.
Ask AI for it
Design a 4-step onboarding flow for this app that ends with the user seeing real value, not a tour. Step 1: one question that personalizes the workspace. Step 2: create or import the first object (with a 'Use sample data' shortcut). Step 3: one setting that visibly changes the result. Step 4: land the user on that finished object, not on a dashboard. Show a progress indicator, prefill every field with a smart default, put a plain 'Skip for now' on each step, and leave the remaining steps in a dismissible 'Getting started' checklist in the sidebar.