Most onboarding teams ask:
"Where are users dropping off?"
It's a reasonable question – and traditionally the correct question to ask for any funnel. But I increasingly think there's a better one as users don't drop off for a single reason.
One user leaves because they don't understand the next step, another because they don't trust what's being asked, a third because they don't have the information required to continue, and a fourth because they only had five minutes available and the task required twenty.
The behavior looks identical. In a funnel. The causes are completely different, yet most onboarding systems respond the same way: they keep presenting the next step in the flow.
This is one of the themes I've been exploring while working on a book about the psychology of onboarding.
Historically, products had no choice. They could only observe behavior after the fact. Someone abandoned a page. Someone never returned. Someone clicked cancel.
The system knew what happened but not why.
GenAI changes that.
Not because every product suddenly needs a chatbot, but more because products can begin interpreting context while the user is still inside the experience.
Signals like a long pause, repeated backtracking, editing the same field several times, and opening help repeatedly: writing an explanation of why they're stuck.
These become signals. And with these signals codified, the interesting question is no longer: "Where did they drop off?", but more more "What is preventing action right now?"
That is a very different design problem that leads to a very different kind of onboarding. Instead of forcing every user through the same sequence, the system can begin adapting to the situation it detects.
Not more prompts. Not more tooltips. Not more reminders.
A better fit between the user's situation and the action you're asking them to take.
I just published a longer article exploring this idea and how GenAI may shift onboarding from static flows to adaptive systems:
https://learningloop.io/blog/the-end-of-static-user-onboarding
This article is part of a larger body of work I'm developing around the psychology of onboarding and customer adoption. I suspect this shift, from designing flows to designing for context, will become one of the defining changes in product design over the next few years.
And I suspect it won't stop at onboarding.
Any flow that assumes every user should follow the same path may eventually face the same challenge.
More on that later.
