10 Behavioural Principles and Dark Patterns in User Onboarding you need to know

Examples from Dropbox, Figma, Linear, and a deep-dive into Chapter II of "The Holistic Growth Playbook".

How often do you ask yourself: “What do our users need or care about?”. I’ll keep it simple: “What is good for the user is good for business”. I started reminding myself more often about this thesis when thinking about the advice I’m giving to companies, course materials, or practices I share here.

Before we start diving in, I wanted to share a couple of special announcements with all dear readers of Growthmates 👇

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A couple of months ago I shared The Holistic Growth Playbook which aims to provide fresh perspectives and inspiration for anyone interested in Product-Led Growth (PLG) and building high-quality products with that approach. It includes frameworks and best practices drawn from Growthmates guests and leading Growth experts.

We already dove into Chapter I to explore How To Build high-performing Growth Teams, and today I’d like to introduce you to some insights from Chapter II.

What’s inside this post:

• Main Challenges and Priorities (from surveying 100+ companies)

• 6 steps of Holistic User Onboarding

• Uncovering Dark Patterns and Behavioural Principles

• Where to get more inspiration

The main Challenges and Priorities for Growth Teams

Why do we need to talk about Behavioural psychology and how it’s even connected to Product Growth? And why do we need to start applying them on User Onboarding in the first place?

To make this playbook more user-centric and informed by real insights, I ran a survey and collected responses from 100+ respondents coming from early-stage startups, Seed, Series A, and Series B companies. I asked participants to rate several areas based on their level of challenge with Product Growth.

Here are the Top challenges companies are facing with Product Growth (rated as “Very challenging”):

I wasn’t very surprised to uncover that the majority of participants selected these 5 areas as “Very Challenging”. It mostly confirmed my initial assumptions: