What If Relationships Had Onboarding?
If a product needs onboarding to go from 0 to 1, why does one of the most important, complex, and costly-to-fail relationships in our lives basically have no onboarding at all?
In my domain, people are extremely careful about how a new user enters a product, but when humans fall in love, it usually goes: attraction, flirting, sex, attachment, then a whole bunch of shared memories. Only once it becomes hard to leave do we slowly remember to ask: Do you want to get married? Do you want kids? What does loyalty mean to you? Blah blah blah.
This seems like a questionable onboarding flow? So I’m curious: What if relationships actually had onboarding?
Ofc ofc, people aren’t products. Product onboarding usually tries to improve activation and retention. But what should a relationship optimize for? Retention? That already sounds a little evil… For some relationships, the best onboarding outcome might be realizing in week three that you’re not compatible, and then happily churning.😉
Compatibility discovery sounds a little more reasonable. But what someone tells you in a questionnaire may not be who they actually are, it might just be their model of themselves. And there’s another question I’m even more curious about: if we define what a “good relationship” should look like too early, could we accidentally create a performed relationship?
Or maybe onboarding itself ruins the most interesting part. Maybe liking someone is supposed to involve a little slow discovery, a little misunderstanding, and a little surprise.