What is onboarding friction?
Onboarding friction is any point in the new-user journey where progress toward activation becomes slower, confusing, or blocked.
Friction can be UX-related (too many fields, unclear copy), technical (integration failures, permission issues), or organizational (needing approvals or help from others).
Common examples of onboarding friction
Long signup forms that ask for information users do not yet have or are not ready to share.
Mandatory configuration steps that require engineering time or admin access before a user can see any value.
Unclear instructions or dead ends in a multi-step journey that leave users unsure what to do next.
How to measure onboarding friction
Instrument each step in your onboarding journeys and look for sharp drop-offs or long delays between steps.
Track time-to-value and activation rate by segment to identify which personas or channels experience the most friction.
How Skene helps reduce onboarding friction
Skene turns your codebase into explicit journeys and milestones, making it easier to see exactly where users stall.
You can experiment with simplified journeys, reordered steps, or automated guidance and immediately see whether time-to-value and completion rates improve.
Implementation notes
- Start by instrumenting and visualizing your current onboarding journeys before rewriting them; the goal is to understand where friction actually is, not just guess.
- Treat onboarding friction as a continuous optimization problem, not a one-time project—new product work often introduces new friction.