I decided to turn this into an article because I gained what Tom Chi called in his Ted video on rapid prototyping Expansive learning. Before now I've studied on-boarding screens and when i did, I paid attention to the copy, kinds of illustrations or animations used, colors, button style but one thing I had not noticed was the placement of the Skip button.

I Designed two onboarding processes and shared it on Twitter asking the community for help in choosing which process to go with because quite frankly, I loved both. The feedback I received was amazing I'm not sure I was expecting it.

Onboarding screen 1

Onboarding screen 2

People chose both Designs for different reasons and no, I won't keep you waiting let's get right on with it.

The majority choose the first Design because it was “normal”. At least that's what they insinuated and I draw this hypothesis from their reason for not choosing the second decision.

Most prominent would be that the position in which I placed the "skip" button was weird and well they thought it was a position where the "back" button would be instead.

I considered it for a while and thought yup they were right, usually, the "back" button goes there but I also thought that although this was true I believed a users behavior during the onboarding process is different.

I had two scenarios in mind

1. The user has decided to go through with the onboarding process and he's just swiping left or right till he gets to the last screen. He/she's probably patient because there are just 3 screens
2. The user is impatient in which case he's just looking to skip the process entirely. Which means he either scans for the "skip" button or has a vague idea that it could be at the bottom or not far from the "Next" button
3. Or 3 I could validate or invalidate my assumptions.

With that in mind, I did a bit of research to see what the Dos and Don'ts were, I read a few articles from Google's material design, Shopify and apptimize and none of them mentioned what position to place the skip button.

So if there wasn't any "standard" per se why was it weird that I switched things up a bit

So now we come to point this. Fortunately, I am at Watson institute and so had access to 30 + people to help me test my design

I shared the link to the prototype, included instructions on how they were to carry out the test and then I asked a follow-up question of how hard it was for them to locate the skip button and if they subconscious an idea of where it would be

Assumptions

My assumptions when asking these questions was that for the first screen, the users knew where the skip button was so they didn't spend time with that