Jetpack is building an onboarding plugin to alter the new WordPress user experience

Jetpack is working on a plugin called Jetpack Onboarding that alters the default WordPress “Welcome” screen in the dashboard with a step by step onboarding process.

Right now there are four steps for setting up a basic site:

The repo descriptions states that these steps are customizable to hosts that bundle the plugin out of the box:

It is designed to be extensible, so that hosting companies that choose to bundle it can easily modify, add, or remove any of the steps that we’ve included by default.

Mojo Marketplace (an EIG marketplace) is already working to bundle it. I guess they had the inside track on this.

The process is pretty simple right now, but I do think it’s a great track that WordPress core could emulate. There have been attempts at improving the new user experience for years, but not enough resources to make it happen.

I’m not totally sure why Jetpack has developed this plugin in isolation, versus embracing the NUX group that was put together last year. I’d love to see this worked on in more of a public forum. And while I’m happy to see Jetpack making the experience better, I think community input could be quite helpful.

The walkthrough style of this is extremely interesting to me. Such a setup would give developers a lot of power to create user specific walkthroughs for all sorts of situations, like onboarding a user for an eCommerce plugin, for instance.

I’ve long envisioned what I’ve always called “catered walkthroughs” and this is similar to what I had in mind. It would allow a user to sign up, instantly see a “next step” based on the task at hand, and go from there. I think a WordPress Onboarding API could be put to really good use, and Jetpack could help. I hope they don’t keep this plugin and process in isolation.