Flatten the learning curve: Importance of the on-boarding experience
Do you remember being excited about a product that you couldn’t wait to get your hands on?
For me, it was my gaming console. I remember unpacking it and connecting it to my television, but then the tediousness of the software setup left a lot to be desired. The entire process took about thirty minutes, with sign-in errors, systems updates getting downloaded, and the whole system rebooting to accommodate that change.
Praying that I don’t face any more issues or delays, I put my game disc, and in about ten minutes, I was wondering why the consoles or any product for that matter can’t take cues on on-boarding from video games.
Try to list out all the words that come to your mind when you hear on-boarding. Webinars, video tutorials, knowledge base, welcome emails, personalization, tool-tips, light-boxes, wizard ( Did I cover everything? ). Some of the products treat their on-boarding like an afterthought or a checkbox they have to complete. This is a big mistake.
The importance of doing on-boarding right
“100% of your users will always hit on-boarding, but 100% will never hit the entire product.”
On-boarding is the first interaction your user have with the product, and the first impression is vital. Make the user understand the feature(s) before opening up the entire product, ease them into the complexity while guiding them at all times and you have a customer.
On-boarding is a significant opportunity to utilize your user’s ultimate high motivation level. Use the on-boarding experience to enhance user experience and drive conversions. For B2B growth, a company can only hire so many salespeople, customer success and support personnel to deal with the backlog; on-boarding can alleviate the task load for all these teams.
Tip: Once you have an on-boarding flow in place, track it and keep iterating; this will allow you to fine tune the user experience and engagement with the product.
On-boarding Methodologies
Let’s now jump back to video games and observe two primary methods through which on-boarding is executed to flatten the learning curve.
- Passive approach
- Active approach
An essential criterion for choosing a particular strategy lies within the complexity of the product and the user’s prior experience of a similar product. Let us explore how each one of these methods helps the user navigate the game and uplift their on-boarding experience.
Passive Approach
This would enable the user to consume a lot of information during the beginning of the game and introduce them to the game play mechanics.
Game of Thrones: Genesis (2011)
It is a commonplace to expect lengthy exposition for complex game genres like Strategy, and if within the first half-hour the user is not hooked, then chances are very slim that they would continue trudging. With the game linked to the Game of Thrones lore, it starts off as a book giving a bunch of storytelling input, but the pertinent concepts are explained without context.
It goes to show that while the developers are eager to show off all their features front loaded(walk-through), the user would not be able to necessarily adapt when the core gameplay loop comes around at a later time.
Sometimes it is necessary to clarify certain things at the start, but the devs must be alert enough to recognize when it becomes unapproachable to a new player.
XCOM Enemy Unknown belongs to a similar genre; although it could also fall into the same pitfalls as the previous game, it avoids it by layering the exposition into a digestible format. I admit it can be tedious at points, but never was I overwhelmed with the barrage of visual cues on the screen. The level design is one of the best ways to ensure the tutorials seem organic to the user.
Active Approach
To intuitively guide the user to maneuver and operate the game/product. Ideally, it would not provide a lot of explanation as the user would have used similar products before.
Spiderman (2018) is a fantastic game in many aspects, not least of which is their on-boarding experience, a perfect example to demonstrate the active approach. Within a minute into the gameplay and even before walking, you are swinging across the skyscrapers of New York with ease, making you feel every bit as awesome as Spider-man.
It is imperative to note that the game developers not only made sure the user gets right into the action but also introduced their best feature at the beginning with little to no fuss. In addition, they put nuggets of information in the transition/loading screens while giving valuable tips and not breaking the gameplay, thus flattening the learning curve.
The devs understand the users and their level of competence to create a genuinely enjoyable experience. A hands-on approach would be more useful for knowledgeable users or if the feature is simple enough to be understood intuitively.
But it can make things hard for the users as well, introducing Contra: Hard Corps. Deemed one of the hardest games to play, it does not help that the on-boarding experience is to put you in the middle of the enemy’s nest and fend for yourself while your grappling with the controls figuring out what to do.
Why can’t we have the best of both worlds? At Deskera we do…
Even though we deal with sophisticated functions like accounting, payroll, and more in the cloud, we at Deskera strive to make things simple for the user to navigate through our products. During our on-boarding process, we don’t have eighteen light-boxes; instead, we guide the user intuitively to learn by actually doing something. By layering out the complicated process and executing micro on-boarding of features, we walk the tightrope between active and passive on-boarding methodologies.
Visit our website to sign up for a free trial to experience our on-boarding first hand.
