The Uncomfortable Realisation

At some point during the development of Onboarding by Elorn, we did something we probably should have done much earlier. We stopped looking at the platform as its builders and tried to experience it as its users. Sounds obvious right?

What we found was uncomfortable.

The workflows made sense to us because we built them. The navigation made sense to us because we knew where everything was, The terminology made sense to us because we lived and breathed onboarding every day. But we weren’t building the product for ourselves, we were building it for businesses and their customers. When we finally viewed it through that lens, the gaps became impossible to ignore.

The design lacked consistency and some screens looked like they belonged to entirely different products. The workflows were more complicated than they needed to be. Nothing was fundamentally broken, but nothing felt intuitive, polished or (and this is key) enjoyable to use.

The uncomfortable truth was that we’d been thinking about onboarding as a process for collecting information. The end users however don’t see it that way at all. To them, onboarding isn’t a compliance exercise. It is their first experience of a business.

We could have convinced ourselves it was good enough and plenty of companies do….it’s only an MVP after all! We could have launched and promised ourselves we would fix the experience later.  That would definitely have been the easier option.

Instead, we chose the harder way. We stopped development on the version we had and started again. That decision cost us time and effort. It meant revisiting work we thought was finished and questioning assumptions we’d already baked into the platform. At the time it felt like a setback but looking back, it was one of the most important decisions we made.

The Inside-Out Problem

The reason comes down to something that is simple and quite obvious, but that took us longer than we’d like to admit to fully understand. At its core, onboarding isn’t really about collecting data. It’s about helping people provide information in a way that feels clear, logical and trustworthy. It’s the first real experience someone has of your business, and first impressions are remarkably hard to undo.

Most organisations design onboarding from the inside out, and this is entirely understandable. The questions seem obvious: What information do we need? What documents do we require? How do we assess and manage risk? How do we automate decisions? All of these questions matter, particularly if you are a regulated entity. The problem is the end customer, the person actually completing the onboarding journey, rarely cares about any of them. They care about three things: understanding what they need to do, why they are being asked to do it and how quickly they can get it done.

When organisations lose sight of that, onboarding becomes something people endure, rather than a seamless process they simply move through. Forms get longer than necessary, requests become unclear, friction increases, abandonment rates rise, support teams get busier and operations teams spend more time fixing problems that better, more thoughtful design would have prevented.

Everyone loses, including the organisation that thought it was protecting itself.

With this in mind, the question we kept coming back to was deceptively simple: what does a good onboarding experience actually feel like from the other side? We pulled it apart from every angle - the visual design, the language, the sequence of steps and tried to anticipate the moments users might hesitate or lose confidence. The more we examined it, the more we realised that what we were really talking about wasn’t UX in the conventional sense. We were talking about trust. How do you make someone feel comfortable enough to share sensitive information, upload documents and continue through a process they may never have seen before?

As it turns out, people have been thinking about that problem for a very long time.

What Good Actually Looks Like

One of the team mentioned a framework from 2,300 years ago where Aristotle described three elements of persuasion: Ethos, Pathos and Logos. They turned out to be a surprisingly useful framework for evaluating onboarding experiences.

Ethos is about trust. Users will form an opinion around trust quickly. Often within seconds, users will decide whether an experience feels credible or slightly off. That judgement is made before they’ve answered any questions and it’s based on design, the language you use and whether the experience to that point feels considered or rushed.

Pathos is about emotion. This helped us understand not every user will begin the onboarding process in the same state of mind. Some are cautious, some are in a rush and some may be scarred by a previous lengthy onboarding process. We tried to design for everyone, no matter how they feel.

Logos is about logic. This one was particularly interesting when we honestly reviewed our original platform. Everything appeared logical to us, but that was because we built it. We began to ask ourselves: Does the process make sense? Are the questions asked in a sensible order? Is it obvious what happens next? Many onboarding journeys fail not because they’re technically broken but because they stop making sense from a user’s perspective and a confused user won’t hang around for long.

We realised great onboarding requires all three - Ethos, Pathos and Logos. If you remove any of them, the experience suffers.

We’re not claiming to have figured this all out, in fact we are only just getting started. We’re a small team that has made expensive mistakes and spent more time than we should asking whether what we’ve built is good enough. But the process we have been through has taught us something we won’t forget: none of the technology matters if people drop out before they finish.

Onboarding isn’t about forms, workflows or verification tools.

It’s about people.