Onboarding Ux

What Is Onboarding Ux?

Onboarding Ux is a Claude Code skill designed to audit and generate in-app user guidance for web applications. It systematically analyzes your app’s user experience from a new user's perspective and identifies areas where users might become confused, encounter empty states, or struggle to understand the app’s features. More than just identifying these gaps, Onboarding Ux also produces actionable solutions—actual content and code for onboarding flows, tooltips, feature tours, contextual help, sensible defaults, and inline hints. This ensures that users are never left staring at an empty screen, uncertain of what to do next.

Onboarding Ux works closely with the ux-audit skill: while ux-audit locates user experience issues, Onboarding Ux generates the specific guidance and interface elements needed to resolve them. This tight integration provides developers with an end-to-end solution for improving new user experiences, making the app approachable and easy to navigate from first launch.

Why Use Onboarding Ux?

Many web applications suffer from poor onboarding experiences. Developers often focus on implementing features and business logic, but neglect the critical first impression that onboarding provides. This oversight can result in:

• Users confronted with blank tables or dashboards with no instructions.
• Interface elements that are self-explanatory to the developer, but cryptic to new users.
• Hidden or underutilized features due to lack of visibility and guidance.
• Increased support requests and user churn caused by initial confusion.

Onboarding Ux directly addresses these pain points by:

• Automatically detecting screens and flows where users may get lost or stuck.
• Generating clear, contextual guidance—such as tooltips, empty state messages, and feature tours—to help users understand what to do.
• Producing ready-to-use code snippets for integrating onboarding elements directly into your frontend codebase.

By proactively guiding users and surfacing helpful information at the right moments, Onboarding Ux reduces friction, accelerates user activation, and ultimately improves retention.

How to Get Started

To use Onboarding Ux, you’ll need to have Claude Code with compatible browser tools. The skill relies on the same browser detection logic as the ux-audit skill, supporting Chrome MCP, Playwright MCP, or playwright-cli. Ensure that your app is accessible at a deployed, live URL (preferred) or a local development server. Onboarding Ux will attempt to resolve your app’s root URL by checking configuration files like wrangler.jsonc, CLAUDE.md, or by detecting a running dev server.

Once set up, you can trigger Onboarding Ux by using prompts such as:

onboarding
help content
empty states
user guidance
first run experience
feature tour
app is confusing
new user experience
make the app welcoming

For example, a prompt like “Audit onboarding and generate in-app guidance for new users” will initiate the skill. Onboarding Ux will then browse your application, identify onboarding gaps, and generate recommendations with practical implementation snippets.

Key Features

1. Empty State Detection and Content Generation

Onboarding Ux identifies screens where users may encounter empty tables, lists, or dashboards. It then generates descriptive messages and actionable calls to action (CTAs). For example:

// Example React empty state component
function EmptyTableState() {
  return (
    <div className="empty-state">
      <h2>No Projects Yet</h2>
      <p>Start by creating your first project. Projects help you organize your work and collaborate with your team.</p>
      <button onClick={openCreateProjectModal}>Create Project</button>
    </div>
  );
}

2. Tooltips and Inline Hints

The skill spots confusing controls and generates tooltips or inline hints to clarify their purpose:

// Tooltip for an ambiguous button
<Tooltip content="Export your data as a CSV file">
  <Button icon={<DownloadIcon />} />
</Tooltip>

3. Feature Tours and Contextual Help

Onboarding Ux can suggest and scaffold multi-step feature tours to introduce users to key parts of your application:

// Example using Shepherd.js for a feature tour
const tour = new Shepherd.Tour({
  defaultStepOptions: { scrollTo: true }
});

tour.addStep('welcome', {
  text: 'Welcome! Let’s take a quick tour of the dashboard.',
  attachTo: { element: '.dashboard-header', on: 'bottom' },
  buttons: [{ text: 'Next', action: tour.next }]
});

// Add more steps as needed

4. Sensible Defaults and First-Run Experience

The skill can recommend and define default values or settings to ensure users see meaningful content on their first visit, reducing blank or confusing screens.

Best Practices

• Audit Regularly: Rerun Onboarding Ux whenever you introduce significant UI changes or new features to maintain a seamless onboarding experience.
• Combine with ux-audit: Use ux-audit to detect usability issues, then apply Onboarding Ux to generate solutions.
• Test with Real Users: Validate generated content and flows with actual users to ensure clarity and usefulness.
• Iterate on Guidance: Continuously refine your onboarding flows and help content based on user feedback and analytics.

Important Notes

• Onboarding Ux is intended for use with Claude Code’s browser automation capabilities, which must be enabled and correctly configured.
• The skill works best with deployed applications but can function with local development environments if properly resolved.
• While Onboarding Ux generates useful default content and code snippets, always review and adapt these outputs to align with your app’s voice, branding, and interaction patterns.
• For more advanced onboarding needs, consider integrating the generated elements with libraries such as react-joyride, Shepherd.js, or your app’s custom components.

By systematically identifying onboarding gaps and providing immediate, actionable solutions, Onboarding Ux helps you create web applications that are welcoming, intuitive, and easy for new users to adopt.