Guided Onboarding Wizard
Replace tooltips with an immersive wizard that builds the user's first workflow with them
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 94%
For products with high cognitive load, tooltips fail because they announce features rather than reduce effort. Isford's activation team replaced much of Airtable's tooltip-based onboarding with an immersive, step-by-step wizard: the user answers low-effort questions on the left of the screen while their actual workflow visually assembles on the right. This is paired with deferred 'ongoing education' so advanced features are taught later, not on day one.
Origin
Built by Airtable's activation team over roughly 12-18 months under Lauryn Isford as Head of Growth; the companion ongoing-education surface was internally nicknamed 'the mole' because the UI pops up from the bottom of the screen.
Core principles
- 01Onboarding exists to reduce the effort required to build basic scaffolding, not to tour the product.
- 02Show progress visually as the user makes choices — the workflow should come to life in front of them.
- 03Build for what the user needs to be onboarded, which is not the same as what the business wants them onboarded to.
- 04Necessary education happens now; everything else becomes ongoing education.
- 05The pattern fits complicated products with high cognitive load — it is not universal.
How to run it
- 1
Diagnose the real onboarding blocker
Spend hours with customers and watch them get started. Identify whether the blocker is effort/cognitive load (wizard territory) or simple unfamiliarity with UI affordances (tooltip territory).
Pro tip Airtable's blocker was that the effort required to build basic scaffolding was too high — users needed guard rails and bumpers, not labels.
- 2
Design a one-size-fits-most generic flow
Build a single immersive wizard that serves the scaffolding need of the large majority of users before attempting any personalization.
Pro tip Airtable found one generic onboarding could serve more than 90% of user needs; escape hatches cover the rest.
Watch out Personalizing before you have a working generic flow multiplies surface area with no proven baseline.
- 3
Make the input low-effort and the output visible
Ask the user to pick their project type and what they want to track using large, easy-to-click buttons on the left half of the screen, while the resulting workflow renders live on the right half.
Pro tip Do the work for the user — smart defaults and one-touch setup beat asking them to configure.
- 4
Split necessary education from ongoing education
Ruthlessly cut day-one teaching down to what the user must know. Move advanced capabilities into a persistent, contextual education surface that levels users from beginner to intermediate to advanced over time.
Pro tip Airtable's 'mole' pops up from the bottom of the screen with tips as the user explores their own workflow.
Watch out Advanced features taught on day one to someone who has never seen a workflow are wasted teaching.
- 5
Retire the tooltips a portfolio at a time
Alongside the big bets, run incremental optimizations and retire the tooltips the wizard has made redundant, treating the whole effort as a portfolio rather than a single launch.
Watch out The tooltip is not dead — it still has narrow uses; do not delete every one on principle.
In the wild
Over roughly six to eight months, Airtable's activation team shipped the guided onboarding wizard, the 'mole' ongoing-education surface, and a layer of personalization, while retiring a large share of the legacy tooltips and running incremental optimizations alongside.
→ The combined investment drove a 20% lift in Airtable's activation rate — a statistically significant improvement at meaningful scale.
Common mistakes
Onboarding to the business's goals instead of the user's
What a user needs in order to be onboarded well is not the same as what your business wants them onboarded to. Conflating the two produces onboarding that shows off features and fails to create competence.
Assuming the wizard pattern is universal
The immersive wizard works because Airtable is complicated and getting started has a high cognitive load. On a simple product, the wizard is friction the user never needed.
Teaching advanced features on day one
Users who have not yet built a workflow have no context for automations or similar advanced capabilities. Teaching them early buys nothing and adds load.
Is it for you?
Best for
Growth/activation PMs on a complex, self-serve product where new users struggle to know where to start
Not ideal for
Simple, single-purpose products where the first action is obvious, or sales-led products where a human does the setup
From the transcript
“we built an immersive wizard that we called guided onboarding that helped guide you through setting up your first workflow on airtable and in doing…”
“as you select from beautiful easy to click buttons that require very little work on your part something is visualized for you on the right…”
“I think it's one that works well for a complicated product where figuring out where to go next and how to get started is actually…”
“the Investments we made in onboarding over about a six to eight month period that included the wizard the mole with ongoing education and also…”
From the episode
Mastering onboarding
Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable)