Designing a Mobile App for Maximum Growth

There seems to be something being missed in this thread with the back and forth of effective tutorial screens:

What if we created UX that didn't require explicit hand-holding?

I'm sounding snarky I'm sure, and maybe that's because this is kind of a snarky comment, but as someone who makes mobile apps for a living it's a position that is surprisingly infrequently considered.

Yes, I know it will look really cool, but do you really need to break platform conventions (that users have already spent a lot of time learning) just for your one thing?

Maybe instead of pointing an arrow at a hamburger button and telling the user what's under that button, we should consider something less insanely vague and useless as the hamburger button?

Having built a pretty large number of apps so far, my position right now is: if you find yourself building a tutorial screen/mechanism, you have already failed, and the only good you're doing for your UX now is controlling the degree of failure between "mild" and "utter".

My experience with tutorial screens - not just on the implementation and UX side, but also where they seem to come up during the product development process - suggests that they are at least a bit cargo-cult-y. People suggest them because other apps have them and it's at least a superficially sensible thing to do.

A lot of projects start with the fundamental premise that tutorial screens will be necessary, and when these projects inevitably run into conversion/completion barriers because of the tutorial screens, attempts to mitigate rarely involve completely removing the screens. It's as if the presence of tutorial screens is fundamentally non-negotiable.

As much as planning for failure is dumber than regular planning, sometimes failure really is inevitable and you have no choice but to accept and mitigate it.

Sure, but at the risk of more snark - are you building a new paradigm for computing interaction, or are you building an app to add kitten ears to selfies?

One of the more pernicious things I've seen from mobile developers and mobile designers (including myself from time to time) is that we all want to work on some Cool Ass Shit(tm), but not every app we get to work on is some groundbreaking advancement, and so we see a lot of very non-standard UIs that violate a whole lot of established conventions on apps that are supposed to be very straight-forward.

This is also very commonly justified under the guise of "branding", as if featuring a UX that's wildly inconsistent with the entire rest of the platform is an exercise in marketing (see: AirBnb's old app navigation, where screens shrunk and with 3D perspective flew off to one edge... that's just switching between sections)

Yes, there are scenarios in which you really must break the rules, or that breaking the rules will result in a substantially better experience in the long run. These scenarios are few and far between, and I suppose my main complaint is that app developers seem to have an inflated judgment of whether or not their scenarios (which are usually fairly straightforward) fit the description.

A good example of this I think is Tinder: the card-swiping UI was definitely new at the time (and cloned inappropriately to a disturbing amount, but I digress), and IMO was well justified. More importantly, the rest of the app is very by the numbers - they knew they were breaking a huge convention and so they built around it. Many, many apps are guilty of not only breaking conventions, but breaking many unrelated conventions all at once, resulting in a mess of shit that nobody can figure out how to use without resorting to heavy-handed tutorials.

Hi all, I'm the person cited the article. (Kamo from Primer)

Happy to answer any questions or elaborate on anything in there.

Completely agree here. I think the main theme of that section being "Don't over-educate users" if you can reach for high engagement and conversion rate without overlays, arrows, etc. then that's the way to go.

It's great to design the experience at the outset to not need the tutorial screens. And then test into the possibility of including them anyways.

One "in-between" possibility would be to have something similar to Slack's old onboarding experience where you'd see some elements that gently pulsed prompting the more curious users to click on them and learn more. And everyone else to safely ignore them and move on.

Interestingly Slack has moved on to more explicit explanations during their most recent onboarding iteration. But I am sure that they'll also try something without any tool-tips at all.

The larger point is that many apps have sliding screens that force users to read in order to learn about their app. And that users did not install and open the app to read about it. They're there to use it.

We've seen massive increases in conversion rate and engagement by replacing these screens with "learning by doing" interactions.

If that "learning by doing" step can be accomplished without tutorials then even better!