"My definition of onboarding might be a little bit different than a conventional one. I define it as any time there’s an opportunity to increase the likelihood that users are successful when trying to adopt your product. It’s not just an intro tour or design patterns along those lines, but basically any time that you can close a gap between somebody who’s seeing what they can be capable of with your product and actually being successful with it."

http://blog.intercom.io/user-onboarding-interview-samuel-hulick/