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This is an early onboarding experience that sits between signup and first real use. In this moment, people are trying to understand what the product is for, how it fits their work, and whether they’re ready to move forward. For Slack, this experience supports activation by helping users transition from account creation into meaningful collaboration.
We tested Slack’s onboarding tour, including workspace setup, collaboration prompts, and early in-product guidance. Participants were asked to imagine they had just signed up and to move through the flow, reacting to what they saw along the way. The study measured Comprehension, Desirability, Intent, and Effort to understand how clearly users understood the experience, how it made them feel, how easy it felt to get started, and how ready they were to take a next step.
Onboarding is where confidence either forms or quietly erodes. Testing this experience helps teams see whether hesitation comes from confusion, emotional resistance, or timing around commitment. These signals matter because even small pauses at this stage can shape activation, adoption, and long-term engagement in products that depend on collaborative behavior.
User Needs & Business Goals
This experience balances user confidence and momentum with Slack’s need to quickly orient people toward collaborative use. Users want to understand what Slack is for and how to get started, while the business aims to accelerate activation and long-term adoption by anchoring early behavior in team workflows.
Audience
This concept was tested with current Slack users and product, marketing, and engineering professionals, primarily based in the United States. Participants reviewed Slack’s onboarding flow immediately after signup, including workspace setup, collaboration prompts, and early in-product guidance. They were asked to imagine they had just created an account and to indicate where they would go next, how they felt about what they saw, and how easy the experience felt overall.
User Needs
In this moment, users are trying to get oriented quickly and decide whether Slack fits how they work.
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The experience should feel clear and easy to move through, without requiring extra effort to understand what to do next (usable).
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The experience should help users quickly grasp what Slack is for and how it will support their work (useful).
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The experience should make it easy to locate the right next step at each point in the flow (findable).
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The experience should feel intuitive, with steps that follow a logical order and match user expectations (intuitive).
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The experience should build trust by feeling consistent, polished, and dependable from screen to screen (reliable).
Together, these needs ensure users can move forward with confidence while forming an early mental model of how Slack fits into their work.
Business Goals
From a business perspective, this concept supports early activation and long-term engagement.
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Increase Activation Rate — Help new users reach a meaningful first use moment quickly.
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Encourage Team Adoption — Nudge users toward inviting others and using Slack collaboratively.
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Reduce Early Drop-Off — Minimize confusion or hesitation during initial setup.
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Establish Product Value Early — Clearly communicate what Slack enables within the first session.
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Support Scalable Growth — Create an onboarding flow that works across roles, team sizes, and use cases.
Together, these goals help Slack convert initial interest into sustained, team-based usage that benefits both the user and the business.
Choose Metrics to Test Your Onboarding Tour
This concept evaluates an onboarding experience where people are deciding whether to continue and how seriously to engage. We selected a focused design stack by mapping core user needs to observable signals in the flow. The metrics used were Comprehension, Desirability, Intent, and Effort.
Intuitive → Comprehension
At this stage, users are trying to understand what each step is asking of them and why it matters. Comprehension captures whether prompts, choices, and sequencing make sense without explanation. In onboarding, breakdowns here show up as hesitation or second-guessing, not misclicks.
Desirable → Desirability
As users move through the flow, they’re forming an emotional read on the experience. Desirability reflects whether the onboarding feels appealing, modern, and worth continuing, or merely tolerable. This signal helps explain why people may understand the flow but still feel unsure about engaging deeply.
Useful → Intent
Users are deciding what they want to do next and whether it feels worthwhile right now. Intent captures readiness to act, not just clarity. In onboarding, this metric helps distinguish between people who are oriented and people who are prepared to move forward.
Efficient → Effort
Getting started should feel light and manageable. Effort captures how easy or difficult it feels to begin using the product, even when users technically succeed. In early onboarding, perceived effort often determines whether momentum builds or fades.
Together, these metrics focus on understanding, feeling, and readiness. They show not just whether onboarding works, but whether it creates enough clarity and confidence for users to keep going.
Establish Hunches to Direct Your Testing
Starting with hunches helps teams surface uncertainty before data enters the room. These assumptions shape what gets tested and keep the research focused on moments where confidence or momentum might break down.
Example: Slack onboarding tour
<table xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" style="min-width: 75px;"><colgroup><col style="min-width: 25px;"><col style="min-width: 25px;"><col style="min-width: 25px;"></colgroup><tbody><tr><th colspan="1" rowspan="1"><p>Hunch</p></th><th colspan="1" rowspan="1"><p>Question</p></th><th colspan="1" rowspan="1"><p>UX Metric</p></th></tr><tr><td colspan="1" rowspan="1"><p>Clear step-by-step guidance will help users understand what to do, but may feel unnecessary for experienced Slack users.</p></td><td colspan="1" rowspan="1"><p>“How well do you understand what this screen is asking you to do?” </p></td><td colspan="1" rowspan="1"><p>Comprehension</p></td></tr><tr><td colspan="1" rowspan="1"><p>The onboarding flow will feel polished and professional, but plan-related messaging may introduce hesitation.</p></td><td colspan="1" rowspan="1"><p>“What impressions does this experience give you?”</p></td><td colspan="1" rowspan="1"><p>Desirability</p></td></tr><tr><td colspan="1" rowspan="1"><p>Even when users understand the flow, they may not feel ready to commit to a next step yet.</p></td><td colspan="1" rowspan="1"><p>“What would you most likely do next?”</p></td><td colspan="1" rowspan="1"><p>Intent</p></td></tr><tr><td colspan="1" rowspan="1"><p>The overall experience will feel easy to start, even with multiple decisions across screens.</p></td><td colspan="1" rowspan="1"><p>“How easy or difficult did it feel to get started with this experience?”</p></td><td colspan="1" rowspan="1"><p>Effort</p></td></tr></tbody></table>
Together, these hunches aim to evaluate whether Slack’s onboarding builds clarity and confidence at the same pace that it asks users to move forward.
Turn Hunches into Test Questions
Turning hunches into concrete questions makes uncertainty measurable. Pairing each UX metric with a clear question type ensures we capture signals about understanding, feeling, effort, and readiness to act, without conflating them with navigation context.
**Comprehension (Likert scale)**
Question type: Likert scale
Example: “How well do you understand what this screen is asking you to do?”
**Desirability (Multiple-choice impressions)** Question type: Multiple-choice impressions Example: “Which of the following words best describe how this experience feels to you?”
Intent (Multiple-choice action selection)
Question type: Multiple-choice
Example: “What would you most likely do next?”
Effort (Likert scale)
Question type: Likert scale
Example: “How easy or difficult did it feel to get started with this experience?”
Calculate UX Metric Scores from User Feedback
This concept evaluates Slack’s onboarding tour at the moment users transition from signup into early product use. Participants were asked to imagine they had just created an account and react to key onboarding screens, focusing on understanding, effort, emotional response, and readiness to move forward. The design stack includes four UX metrics: Comprehension, Desirability, Intent, and Effort, a mix of attitudinal and decision-oriented signals.
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Very Good = 90% and above
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Good = 70%–89%
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Average = 50%–69%
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Poor = 30%–49%
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Very Poor = below 30%
**Comprehension (94% — Very Good):**
Most participants clearly understood what each screen was asking and why. The structure and language supported fast orientation, allowing users to build a mental model of the onboarding flow without confusion. Any uncertainty tended to relate to future decisions rather than misunderstanding the current step.
**Effort (92% — Very Good):**
Getting started felt easy for the majority of users. The experience moved at a comfortable pace and did not feel demanding, even as multiple prompts were introduced. This indicates low perceived friction during early setup.
**Desirability (85% — Good):**
The onboarding experience came across as polished and professional. Users responded positively to the overall tone, though plan-related moments introduced some emotional hesitation. The experience was appealing, but not universally motivating at every step.
**Intent (84% — Good):**
Participants generally knew what they could do next, but some hesitated when actions implied commitment to collaboration or next steps. This hesitation reflects readiness rather than clarity. Users who already had a team in mind showed stronger forward intent.
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Taken together, the scores point to an onboarding tour that is clear, low-effort, and emotionally steady. The dominant tension is not usability or understanding, but timing—when users are ready to commit versus when the experience asks them to decide. Overall, this is a confident onboarding experience that supports momentum while revealing where readiness becomes the limiting factor.
Click here to check out the raw survey data and UX metric scores for Slack’s onboarding tour.
Draw Signals from Your Design Stack
Here’s how signals were surfaced from Slack’s onboarding tour test results by following five steps:
1. Focus on poorly scoring or imbalanced metrics
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The overall test score is 89% (Good). Effort stands out as the strongest signal at 92%, showing that people generally feel it’s easy to get started. Intent is the weakest metric at 84%, not because users are lost, but because some pause when asked to commit to next steps around collaboration. The signal here is a light tension between ease of use and readiness to act.
2. Identify patterns across metrics
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Comprehension and effort reinforce each other. People understand what each screen is asking and can move forward without friction. Intent lags slightly behind, which suggests the friction isn’t about interaction or clarity, but about decision-making. The flow moves smoothly, but some users hesitate when choices imply a level of commitment they haven’t fully formed yet. This reflects a common onboarding tension: momentum versus optionality.
3. Determine if user needs are being met
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Usable: Met — Most participants could move through the flow without confusion or extra effort.
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Useful: Met — Users generally understood how Slack would support collaboration and work.
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Findable: Met — Next steps were easy to locate across screens.
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Intuitive: Partially met — The sequence makes sense, but some steps assume readiness that not all users feel.
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Reliable: Met — The experience feels consistent and polished from start to finish.
4. Compare outcomes to business goals
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Increase Activation Rate: Supported — Low effort and high comprehension help users reach first use quickly.
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Encourage Team Adoption: Partially supported — The flow prompts collaboration, but not all users are ready to act on it.
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Reduce Early Drop-Off: Supported — Clear steps and low friction reduce the risk of abandonment.
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Establish Product Value Early: Supported — Users pick up on Slack’s purpose early in the flow.
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Support Scalable Growth: Supported — The experience works across roles and appears adaptable to different team contexts.
5. Surface signals & establish a direction
Signals derived from the data:
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Users move through onboarding with little effort or confusion.
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Most people understand what Slack is asking them to do at each step.
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Hesitation appears when users are asked to define collaboration too early.
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The flow favors forward momentum over exploration.
**Direction based on business context:**
The evidence points toward an onboarding experience that is strong at guiding action, but slightly less flexible for users who are still forming their use case. The core challenge is not usability, but timing—when to ask for commitment versus when to allow orientation.
This onboarding tour is clear, efficient, and confidence-building. Its main tension is not friction, but readiness, revealing an experience optimized for teams that already know they want to collaborate.
