Last May I was given the great privilege to write a sidebar in Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone‘s fabulous new book, Designing Social Interfaces. The topic I was asked to write about is “onboarding” — designing welcoming experiences for new users by easing them in. You might have seen a couple blog posts that I’ve previously written about how Plurk and Yahoo! Shine handled the onboarding process.

The authors have given me the permission to republish the sidebar here in full. I hope you enjoy it and find it valuable. I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.