Design Invite and Teammate Flows
Onboarding & Growth · onboarding, collaboration, permissions
Updated 2026-07-28
- Invite at the moment collaboration becomes necessary, not during signup. Asking someone to name colleagues before they have seen the product produces empty invitations.
- Let people invite several at once, by pasting a list, and accept messy input with names, addresses, and separators mixed together.
- Set the role during the invitation. Inviting first and fixing permissions afterwards means everyone starts over-privileged.
- Say what the invitee will see. The sender needs to know whether they are sharing one document or the whole workspace.
- Make the invitation email do the work. It should name the sender, the workspace, and the specific thing being shared, and it should land the recipient on that thing after signing up.
- Handle the awkward cases:
- Someone who already has an account.
- Someone whose address is on a different domain.
- An invitation that has expired.
- A seat limit reached at the moment of acceptance.
- Show pending invitations with a way to resend or cancel, since the most common outcome is that nobody acted on it.
- Give the new arrival somewhere to start. Landing on an empty workspace with no context wastes the introduction the invitation just made.
An invitation is a handover between two people, and it fails when the second one arrives without the context the first one had.
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UX Handbook