User Disengagement

Our app takes a bit of setup time, and I put a lot of work into making a really user-friendly “onboarding guide”, basically a checklist of things to do to set up the account, accompanied by visual call-outs for each step in the UI.

Before we had this, we forced companies to complete the full setup before they could use the app… As you might expect, many just gave up.

But since adding our onboarding checklist (and changing our platform to assume lots more defaults, reducing the number of actions required to get started, and allowing it to be used “out of the box”), we now have a new problem: more companies are using us actively, but many of them never complete the full setup, so it isn’t fully tailored to suit them.

The checklist UI dismisses itself automatically after all the steps are complete (there’s only 5, and honestly it takes 2 minutes, but there we go). I often look at active user accounts over 6 months old, and so many of them are using us daily but with a big “Getting Started” checklist still following them round the site!

I guess that’s users for you… Not sure how to improve this, practically speaking — we’ve already reduced the checklist down to the bare essentials — but open to any ideas…

But a bunch of the advice is just not practical because of, well, human psychology. For example, there's a lot of research showing that in competitive markets, people lazily choose the product with the most visible brand (or that is most accessible, ie in your face at the shelf on the supermarket—you can draw analogies to virtual products).

Or, for products with infrequent use-cases, users won't remember to come back and use your product when the time comes. Zillow is a good example of this. The real value is when you are buying, selling, (or renting) a house, but that happens so infrequently. So they've built other ways to keep their app on your phone and their brand in your mind, like the Zestimate score (where homeowners or potential home buyers will check that score on a more frequent basis).

Also, engagement tracking _is_ kind of critical to developing/understanding your product.

So it's not so much about what you do and don't do, it's more about _how_ you do it. Do you track engagement AND solely optimize it?

In any case, loved the article and agree with most of the discussion... just would encourage people to take a more pragmatic method to avoiding the engagement trap.

*https://somehowmanage.com/2020/09/13/disrespectful-design-us...

No idea what you'd do beyond that though... Maybe I introduce some competitive aspect, like "you're already more involved than 60% of our users. You can get to 90% with this"? Or translate it in terms of real value gained from finishing the onboarding? Idk

So no longer do you have docs that say "suppose you want to create a new entry for a sedan, which can be either red or blue", but instead has content from your actual existing table.

It sounds like a small thing, but it greatly reduces that bit of cognitive dissonance/overhead ("why are we talking about cars, I want to update the contact options for this customer") when trying to learn a new system (especially critical for less tech-savvy users), so might be applicable to other products.