A Good Introduction
Signing up to Graphcool made me wish I actually needed to do graphql.
Today someone reccomended that I sign up to Graphcool. As someone who has absolutely no need to query data in a graph’y way, this was something or a random excursion; however it turned out to be worth the trip: Graphcool has, hands down, the best onboarding experience I’ve ever taken.
There’s so much to learn here; they’ve got an extensive library of quickstarts, a click-through tutorial (complete with celebration) and a sandbox where you can work with demo/open data. What impressed me the most, however, was how well they had engineered the process to capture feedback and provide support.
Building a user friendly application is hard.
To get it right you need feedback from your users, your potential users and your not-users.
That’s a lot of feedback. And while you’re not getting it right, you need a way to help people through the cracks and realise the potential of what you’re trying to achieve.
For the moment, our own application is still at the one-to-one support level of onboarding. It’s a fantastic way of getting feedback and ensuring that the customer walks the key stages required to realising the value of your offering. But it’s not exactly scalable.
Graphcool take three opportunities to directly engage you for feedback during the sign-up. Before you’ve even clicked the ‘try it now’ button, the Intercom integration kicks in and you’re offered the chance to connect with a real person. I expect few people actually do engage at this point, but it’s a reassuring prompt.
Their next insight is to use the standard check-your-email-to-verify-your-account-step page to invite you to submit a few words on how you got to Graphcool. That’s pretty neat, as it’s a low effort for the user to fire and forget (in fact, it feels a lot like the jobs to be done question framework). At this junction they also introduce you to the email, slack and chat contact points.
Finally they reach out to you using the chat window once again, immediately after you’ve completed the onboarding tutorial. I expect it won’t surprise a lot of you to learn that one of the hardest bits of running a data platform is onboarding the data; so doing everything they can to promote this step is important.
The real touch of genius, to my mind, is the auto-enrollment to their slack channel.
Slack’s a good tool for engaging people and building a community. Automatically funneling your new/potential users into this space is fantastic- it introduces them to people who can help them, and centralises a lot of the ad hoc (and perhaps most valuable) feedback you’re ever likely to get about your application.
So congratulations to the crew at Graphcool. With any luck more UX designers will take onboard their insights and the world (wide web) will become a better place.
