Onboardings and wizards - should I show the steps of the process?

[Uzi_Cohen]

Hey guys,
So I need to design onboarding screens for a credit card company. I started to look around on different onboardings and collect ideas from different products such as Lemonade, Forward, Grammarly etc.

I noticed that instead of showing the upcoming steps, there’s only a bar indicates the progress.

What’s the logic behind it? I always thought that indicating the exact number of steps is essential information for the user.

What do you think? In which cases showing steps is a must? Do you have any articles or researches on this topic?

Thanks <3

[dougcollins]

Hm, good question!

Users need to know the system status to make intelligent choices. Giving feedback on progress is certainly key to wizards, but I’d guess that upcoming steps don’t particularly matter if users don’t know what to expect.

That said, I’d probably do some testing on this if it were me.