3 Reasons Why It Is Time to Onboard Users with GIFs
Our entertainment website, MashTime, recently introduced a GIF-based onboarding with great success.
Since introducing GIFs in our onboarding we have received great feedback from new users.
This experience coupled with current trends convince us that GIFs can play an important role in modern user onboarding.
In this piece we’d like to share three important reasons for this as well as our experience onboarding users with GIFs.
Reason 1. GIFs are wildly popular
Virtually all social networks are making it easier to share GIFs.
Last year Facebook Messenger pushed GIFs further into the mainstream with its sleek GIF keyboard tab. Twitter is testing a dedicated GIF button. And just last month KiK started monetizing branded GIFs.
This also means it is much easier to find and create GIFs these days. This makes them cheap and quick to use.
Reason 2. GIFs are hilarious
The reason GIFs are spreading like wildfire through social networks every day is obvious.
They are hilarious and can always surprise.
GIFs can easily spice up a stale user onboarding. And this is more valuable than you might think.
We designed the onboarding imagining that every user have a personal patience timer. As the timer expires users become bored and leave the onboarding. And never return.
GIFs can give users the instant gratification they need to reset the timer and complete the onboarding.
Since we introduced GIFs to our onboarding users have started sending us messages about how much they loved it.
Reason 3. GIFs are great for demonstrating the user experience!
At MashTime we were itching to find a clever way to explain what our entertainment website could do.
After discarding our third onboarding prototype we realised that feature lists are mediocre in onboardings.
Be honest, would you use our website if we told you it contained curated clips, clip categories and autoplay functionality?
Perhaps, but we have strong reasons to believe this is not very effective.
Let’s do a quick thought-experiment. Why do you use Facebook? Because you can share photos or chat to friends? Sure, but there are also more fundamental reasons.
A survey the Atlantic picked up found that common reasons for using Facebook are relieving boredom, and procrastinating. These are not linked to any one feature.
In our onboarding we wanted to convey how good you would feel when MashTime would make you laugh uncontrollably.
We wanted to convey the feeling you’d get from leaning back and enjoying the moment.
GIFs are simply great for this. It is just so difficult for text and pictures to compete. And you don’t always have the time and budget for making a video clip.
This is why we expect to see more GIFs in future onboardings.
However, we believe to have stumbled upon an opportunity greater than onboarding design. GIFs have a huge potential in general marketing.
- They demonstrate the user experience with humor.
- They provide a supreme way of building a brand that appeals to millennials.
- And they can spread fast.
Check out MashTime’s GIF onboarding on www.mashtime.com and let us know what you think! Please like us on Facebook and spread the word!
