Design
Designing InCore's onboarding, three times over
The first version was correct and nobody used it. The second was fast and nobody trusted it. Here's what the third one got right.
The problem
Every engineering team we onboarded to InCore asked the same question in week one: "where do I actually start?" The product had forty capabilities and one entry point — a dashboard that treated a first-time licensing lead and a five-year power user identically.
Our first attempt fixed this with more structure: a guided checklist, progress bars, the works. It was correct. It was also completely ignored — completion rates sat at 11% after three weeks.
What changed
The checklist assumed people wanted to be taught the product. What they actually wanted was to finish the one task that brought them there — usually licensing a specific core — and see everything else later, on their own terms.
Onboarding isn't a tour of the house. It's directions to the one room they're trying to get to.
- Collapsed forty capabilities into three entry intents, chosen up front
- Replaced the checklist with a single contextual next-step, one at a time
- Let the dashboard stay empty until there was something real to show
Takeaways
The lesson wasn't "simplify." It was that a guided tour and a shortcut solve two different problems, and I'd spent two rounds solving the wrong one.