It’s like Uber, but for fish
Most applications I know of are made to be used by humans. Good applications are supposed to provide value. In order to provide value to a human, an application must (A) do something, and (B) get used by a human.
As an app-creator, its very easy to focus on (A); what an app does is its very reason for existing. This comprises the bulk of what we think about when we decide to set out and build something new. (B), however, is still a necessary pre-condition of good applications, and its usually the harder part to get right.
When we think about (B), it’s often within the context of design. We know what we want the app to do, and we know that we’d like our user-interfaces to be aesthetically pleasing. However, it’s difficult to put ourselves in the shoes of a stranger experiencing our product for the first time when we’ve become so familiar with its every detail during development.
This may be the single biggest obstacle in acquiring, and more importantly, retaining early users. It’s why user testing and measurement are considered so essential for growth. It’s why the startup community has embraced Paul Graham’s unofficial motto, “get out there and talk to your users”. Without understanding how people use and react to our product, how could we objectively improve?
Compounding the challenge are the average user’s tightly-budgeted attention span, unforgiving memory, and slender chances of giving actionable feedback.
Given these conditions, and with functionality being equal, what differentiates really good apps?
How efficiently the app communicates itself to the user.
Good user experience is the sum of a hundred tiny moments of joy
The single most important way to improve a user’s experience is to remove the biggest obstacles from their path. The first tough task they must accomplish is understanding what your product does. Their next challenge might be getting through the sign up flow, after which they’ll eventually have to learn how to actually use the product. It follows that a product’s obvious first goal should be to provide clear guidance for users to navigate quickly and pleasantly through these kinds of early and boring stages, yet many creators focus so single-mindedly on what the app does that the human use-case is relegated to the land of distant after-thoughts. Instead of receiving guidance and direction, new users are frequently just dropped into a home screen full of unknown menus, text, and buttons, and left to figure things out for themselves.
This is a huge missed opportunity.
The initial moments after sign up are the ideal time to go above and beyond by guiding newcomers via a user-onboarding flow. It’s a chance to not only give users information highlighting the correct path through the app to their goals; it’s also an extremely effective moment to ask your new users some questions about themselves, granting you insight into each individual’s preferences and disposition. Appealing to the unique qualities of an individual is a powerful and memorable way to engage them while separating yourself from your competitors. Ultimately, how a user feels when they use your app is the biggest thing they will remember about the whole encounter. The best apps take advantage of every possible moment to do something extra special and memorable, making users want to run around and tell their friends. How we ultimately think about and describe a product to our friends and community will depend heavily on our memory of all the tiny moments of joy or frustration that occur during our first encounters with it.
A good visible example of a company successfully employing user-onboarding tactics is Pinterest, record-holder for fastest growth of a standalone website ever. When new users sign up, they are put through a highly engaging series of steps intended to help get them up and running immediately:
- They are told what the product does, and how to most effectively use it
- They are encouraged to select some topics they find interesting from a list with pictures
- They are encouraged to find and connect with their friends
- They are given some inspiration to help them start creating their own content
All of this serves to communicate the core value of the product quickly, and teaches one how to access the features of the product as intended. Each step is brief and focused on accomplishing a specific onboarding goal, with few distractions, and minimal wasted attention-span.
Almost any large, successful social network can be taken as a case-study for the impact of user-onboarding. In such networks, individual users derive value from their social connections within the community. Without connections to other people, there would be no content with which to populate your news feed. Therefore, it has been a publicly stated strategy of nearly all the biggest networks to implement user-onboarding processes which guide you through connecting with specific people on the platform as quickly as possible. Life on Twitter begins with suggestions that you follow some brands or celebrities. Facebook uses cues you provide to make amazingly accurate suggestions of people you know and should ‘friend’. These companies learn about a user’s preferences during onboarding, and leverage them to connect people with things they like early and often. This has been statistically proven to increase retention and sharing.
The process of targeting your audience, learning about them, and helping them accomplish their goals in your app, can make a huge difference at any stage of your conversion funnel. The creative presentation and contents of any given onboarding flow will be very different from app to app, but the fundamentally important thing is that these are powerful opportunities to personalize and focus every user’s early experiences with your product in ways that can influence whether or not they come back.
We have found that building and optimizing your user-onboarding flows can be complex and time consuming — that’s why we built Onboarded, a service for developers and startups, which greatly simplifies and speeds up the process of building, measuring, and modifying user-onboarding flows for your app.
Visit us: www.getonboarded.com
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Contact us: hello@getonboarded.com
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