Mobile vs. Web App Onboarding: Differences, Best Practices, and Examples

Mobile and web app onboarding differ in terms of attention span, screen size, design constraints, and muscle memory UI. However, both share common elements such as personalization, friction elimination, and progress monitoring to enhance user experience. Best practices for mobile app onboarding include keeping screens concise, choosing the ideal onboarding approach, and using gamification to engage users. For web app onboarding, best practices involve giving users quick wins with a tailored experience, using in-app messages to guide new users, reducing cognitive effort through psychological tactics, and offering the option to complete or skip the onboarding process. Top tools for creating impactful mobile app onboarding flows include Braze, Airship, and Pendo, while top tools for building effective web app onboarding flows for SaaS products are Chameleon, Appcues, and WalkMe.