Thinking about First Time User Experience (FTUX)
What building Sugar and Envelope is teaching me about onboarding and the small moments that help a product make sense.
Sugar was the first app where I really tried to think intentionally about FTUX—First-Time User Experience. Before that, most of my attention went into building the thing. With Sugar, I started thinking more about what it would feel like to arrive in it for the first time.
What does someone understand in the first few minutes? What feels obvious to me only because I built it? Have I given them a reason to care before asking them to do anything?
I think I initially treated FTUX as something closer to a tutorial. A few screens explaining the app, maybe pointing out some features, then letting the person get on with it. But the more I build, the more I see it as a collection of small moments that help someone understand what this product is, why it matters to them, and what just happened when they touched something.
Onboarding is part of that. And one thing I’m becoming more interested in is using onboarding to understand why someone showed up in the first place.
Even when people download the same app, they might be looking for very different things. Someone might have a specific problem they want to solve. Someone else might be trying to build a habit, reach a goal, or just explore. I’m starting to think the questions we ask early on should help us understand those motivations, so what follows can feel relevant to that person.
That applies well beyond budgeting. Though asking questions only really makes sense if the answers change something. Otherwise, I’m just giving someone extra work before they can use the app.
With Envelope, my budgeting app, I experimented with making an abstract financial idea feel more personal. Income is something you can show as a number, and people can look at it without really thinking much about it. But framing it as “you could earn something like $2 million over your lifetime” gives it a different weight.
The exact number wasn’t the point. It was the possibility of someone pausing and thinking, wait, that much money could pass through my hands?
Something that usually sits in the background suddenly feels tangible. It connects the idea of managing money to their own life. I don’t know how consistently that framing lands, but experimenting with it made me think more about the distance between showing someone information and helping it mean something to them.
And then there’s everything that happens after onboarding.
The first time someone takes an action, they don’t have the same context I do. If something moves, changes, or disappears, do they understand what happened? If the app did something automatically, do they know why? If they’ve finished a step, is it clear what they can do next?
I’m noticing how easy it is to leave those little gaps when building. I already know how the app works, so I can mentally fill them in without even realizing they exist. A new person can’t.
That doesn’t mean every tap needs an explanation. I’m still figuring out where a small bit of feedback helps and where it just gets in the way. But I’m paying more attention to those first-time moments now, even when they happen well beyond the first session.
There’s a bigger lesson in this that I keep coming back to: great products might have less to do with one genius feature than I used to think. So much of how a product feels comes from doing a thousand small things well.
A question that feels worth answering. An empty state that helps you get started. Feedback that makes an action feel clear. A short explanation exactly when you need it.
Individually, these things barely seem worth talking about. But building Sugar and experimenting with Envelope has made me notice how much they add up. They’re part of what makes a product feel thoughtful, intuitive, and human.