“Onboarding” is one of those words that sounds helpful but often signals trouble. Teams use it to describe introducing users to a new product or feature, but it subtly casts users as students and the product team as teachers. That framing is backwards.

Most “onboarding” patterns like product tours, pop-up tooltips, how-to guides are built on the assumption that users need to be taught. But in practice, they mostly interrupt, overwhelm, and age poorly. When I was at Facebook we ran an experiment removing all tooltips across sharing products. Almost every metric improved. The tooltips had piled up over the years, each well-intentioned but collectively suffocating the experience.

The lesson was simple: if you’re designing for learning, remove everything that gets in the way of doing.

At Zoox, we’ve taken that to heart. Instead of product tours or pop-ups, we use clear visual hierarchy guiding the user naturally toward the right action. When we need to explain something, we use progressive disclosure: reveal just what’s needed at the moment it matters, then fade it away after the first few sessions.

For lingering questions, we rely on contextual affordances: info icons, help menus, quick references users can reach for when they want them, not when we decide they need them.

Great products aren’t just easy to use once we’ve learned them - they make learning invisible.