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Creating Onboarding Checklists

Level up your in-app checklists by auto-completing tasks based on key product or interaction events.

Lauren Cumming avatar
Written by Lauren Cumming
Updated over a week ago

Checklists are powerful UI components that can help drive user activation and adoption of key product features.

Candu allows you to create a checklist that lists tasks and next steps for your users to complete within your product. These tasks can be automatically checked off based on user events. This helps users visualize their progress and motivates them to work through any remaining steps that still need to be completed.

For example, if the first step you want a user to do in your product is to invite collaborators to their account, you could add an Invite Teammates step to a Candu checklist and set it up to be ticked off once Candu receives a product event that a user has been invited.

🤩 Pro-Tip: Auto-complete your first checklist item to give users a sense of accomplishment when logging in. Everyone loves to see tasks already ticked off and feel like part of the work is already done!

ℹ️ Please note that if you want to autocomplete checklist items based on critical events taken outside of Candu, you will need to pass user events into Candu. Please see more information on how to connect Candu to product events here.


Making an existing Candu checklist event-driven

In the Candu Editor, you can drag a checklist component onto the document and add the steps you want users to complete.

The tab shows how to create a checklist in Candu's editor for a specific user group.

ℹ️ Before adding events per checklist item, please ensure your checklist settings are set to 'Per User.'

The screenshot shows how to add per user progress to a checklist.

You can then click on each step and choose whether it should be event-driven or auto-checked. This option is on the right-hand toolbar under 'Checklist Item Settings.'

You can select 'Click' or 'Event.'

  • Click: A user must manually check the item themselves to be marked as completed.

  • Event: Users will autocomplete tasks by selecting an associated user event you pass through into Candu or any interaction from a Candu component, such as 'Button was clicked.' Please note that users will not be able to check off items manually.

For example, for 'Create your Candu account,' we have set it to be auto-ticked off when a new user logs in, as they have already registered their account. We pass the event 'User Registered' into Candu so the checklist can update when new events are captured or triggered.

If you do not currently pass any product events into Candu, you can still use Candu's interaction data to trigger step completion. Please include a call-to-action button in each checklist step, e.g., 'Add new user' that directs a user to the page to do this, and use the 'Click' event, which Candu tracks, to trigger an auto-completion of this checklist task. If a user still needs to complete the action, it will not appear within the dropdown.

This gif shows how to add a completion event for a specific checklist step.

Changing the experience after the checklist is completed

Once a user has completed all steps within the checklist, you can either:

  1. Leave the completed checklist to display as is

  2. Remove the checklist component completely

  3. Best Practice: Swap out the checklist for a new checklist or other component type and surface new information

Ideally, you can use the third option to make sure your users have the best user experience possible by surfacing new relevant content related to their journey with your product so far.

To remove the checklist or show new content, you must create a Segment of users who have completed it.


To do this, navigate to 'Segments' > select 'User Event,' find 'NAME OF CHECKLIST completed,' and mark that it has occurred. Candu will automatically create this event based on the checklist title.

Back in the Candu editor, you can now create new content and either:

  • Leave the content blank if you no longer want to display any content once a checklist has been completed

This screenshot shows how to transition from a completed checklist to an activated user experience.
  • Add new content that helps a user to adopt even more of your product and ensure they have access to key resources

This tab shows how to switch between an onboarding and everboarding user experience.
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