THE OPTIMAL USER ONBOARDING ZONE

Summary from the TLDR Design newsletter

A user’s ability to realize the most value out of a new product (“performance”) might be correlated to the amount of friction (“stress”) involved in onboarding to it. The optimal onboarding experience can be represented as the peak of a bell curve graphed along those two measures. If the onboarding experience is too passive, or the new user is hand-held even through the most basic tasks, you risk the user not realizing the personal value they could gain from the experience - they will quickly lose interest.