User On-boarding and the New User Experience
Matt Brown
The moment from sign-up (or download) to actual use is the most important ‘moment’ in any product’s design. Everything you do (or don’t do) matters — especially in a product that wants to attract a large consumer audience. It’s the biggest opportunity to frame your product, guide behavior, and establish clear value so your users come back. Often small, un-sexy solutions end up having the biggest impact. Things like email drip campaigns, Intercom embeds, and feature tooltips often create big gains. And yet balancing these ‘growth hacks’ with consistent, holistic, user experience design will create the best overall framework to help your users get the most out of your product. At its core, user on-boarding is really nothing more than answering your essential product ‘why,’ and teaching your users ‘how to win’ at using your product. If you make the experience sensible, smart and clear, everyone wins.
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An incredible resource, filled with tons of step-by-step ‘tear downs’ of popular apps and products (on mobile and web). It’s worth going through a few of these, and taking notes. Even Dropbox’s excellent iOS on-boarding has a subtle design issue is likely causing confusion or abandoned installs. Everything matters!
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4 Experience Phases in Gamification (#2): The Onboarding Phase
Games live and die by how well they get players into a game. Too confusing or hard — you bail. This is a nice overview summary of some common patterns for how games handle the NUX. Pay special attention to ‘Early Win-States’ — getting a few comfortable successes ‘won’ in on-boarding increases the chances a user will continue to use both the product and on-boarding itself.
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Slack Kills at Onboarding—Here’s How They Do It
It’s well-known secret that much of Slack’s rise was due to simple, clever, and very seamless on-boarding. As a new user you interact directly with the product itself (as a bot) to enable some basic settings and get to know the UI. Also notice all the other little things Slack does, progressively, to help you get started as a new user.
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How Microsoft’s Secret User Onboarding Process Fooled Us All
It’s fascinating to know that the original games in Windows 3.1 (Solitaire and Minesweeper) were used to teach drag and drop and right click patterns. It also highlights the importance of joy and fun when asking users to try out your product.
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This book is ~5 years old, but the approach to design (user compassionate) is the exact mentality you need to create a great user on-boarding. Steve Krug had the insight that being respectful of your users’ time and patience was the best position to design from.