A novel approach to onboarding • Hacker News Board

Re: A novel approach to onboarding

#21

Post by kevkav » Mon, Jan 28, 2019, 3:26 PM UTC

Belphemur wrote: post #10

I'm so happy that the idea of not shoving all your feature to the user is paying off. I've been trying to make people at my workplace understand that. You don't want a complicate product, you want a modular one. I really like your take on the "skill" page. I could see a little toast with a text like "let us help you with your inbox" as a way to nuge the user to check your skill page.

Thanks @Belphemur. Modular is a good way of putting it. Being modular allows users to add complexity at their own pace and never be overwhelmed by it.

Re: A novel approach to onboarding

#22

Post by kevkav » Mon, Jan 28, 2019, 3:34 PM UTC

objcts wrote: post #19

Great article about mental models! I commend the OP on sharing their experience to really understand what people are thinking, feeling, and expecting. This is exactly how you make tools that people love to use. > The line in the background depicts how a user is feeling at a particular gate. Might cover this in a future post. I understand the sentiment here, but trying to map real human feelings and emotions is tricky…

I completely agree on the feelings map. It isn't something that you could rely on and take meaningful actions from the data.

However, it is useful to consider the fact that people's experience and comfort isn't linearly increasing with time. Understanding that there are peaks and troughs can be useful for user experience design.

Re: A novel approach to onboarding

#23

Post by j45 » Mon, Jan 28, 2019, 3:50 PM UTC

wccrawford wrote: post #14

rekshaw wrote: post #7

The article is interesting, but what intrigued me the most was the carefully coordinated marketing: - Medium article to capture inbound and not make it look like an ad, but a "We want to share this discovery with you" - Hacker News submission to get audience - (probably) team upvote boost to trigger front page - 50% off promotion ending in ~4 hours with the tagline "you'll never see this offer again". Cost of adverti…

I've come to associate those things with snake oil. They're right up there with "Free trial, but you need to put in a credit card." Sure, some legit services use those techniques, but they're a red flag that they might be a pain to deal with if you choose to back out.

A lot of legit services take a cc with trial sign up to separate the people who might pay from the people who would pay if it was the right solution. The right thing to do when taking a cc for a trial is to send reminder emails that they will be charged.. Which not enough do.

I see more and more startups using stripe, between that and the ability to do chargeback with that cc company, I worry less about it. The chargeback dispute is quite powerful.

Re: A novel approach to onboarding

#24

Post by j45 » Mon, Jan 28, 2019, 3:52 PM UTC

objcts wrote: post #19

Great article about mental models! I commend the OP on sharing their experience to really understand what people are thinking, feeling, and expecting. This is exactly how you make tools that people love to use. > The line in the background depicts how a user is feeling at a particular gate. Might cover this in a future post. I understand the sentiment here, but trying to map real human feelings and emotions is tricky…

For users, perception and interpretations can definitely be reality.

+1 for the use of mental models.

Re: A novel approach to onboarding

#25

Post by cowb0yl0gic » Mon, Jan 28, 2019, 3:53 PM UTC

I've always felt that complex software should have a "simple" and an "advanced" UI. Hiri's approach is like having a "complexity scalable" UI, but with the added benefit that the user only has to deal with those things they are really interested/ready for. The key is making it very easy for users to discover what features/functionality are available (ex., keyword search and categories, maybe even some pop-up suggestions) that matches their current task need. If you think about it like game power unlocks, it would allow a user to build on current knowledge to do more advanced things. Throw in some metrics, and you could get a good picture of which features are important to a user, suggest/highlight others that might be related, remind a user of features they haven't used in a while (or have never gotten around to looking at), etc.

Re: A novel approach to onboarding

#26

Post by j45 » Mon, Jan 28, 2019, 3:54 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #18

So this seems to be getting slated as a submarine, but the underlying insight is good: users don't like change. They want an app "exactly like X, but ..." So you start with a familiar interface and let people choose when they're ready to make it less familiar. Rather like how game tutorials work with locked-down interfaces and gradual introduction of more mechanics.

Users want to be able to onboard at their level of familiarity and competency and move forward.

It's kind of like how users grew up with Facebook, it began simple and became complex over time. Except allowing users to onboard at any point in that timeline.

Re: A novel approach to onboarding

#27

Post by ntumlin » Mon, Jan 28, 2019, 4:37 PM UTC

rekshaw wrote: post #7

The article is interesting, but what intrigued me the most was the carefully coordinated marketing: - Medium article to capture inbound and not make it look like an ad, but a "We want to share this discovery with you" - Hacker News submission to get audience - (probably) team upvote boost to trigger front page - 50% off promotion ending in ~4 hours with the tagline "you'll never see this offer again". Cost of adverti…

Not to mention every comment dpower has made is on a post related to Hiri. Maybe HN should just explicitly allow and tag accounts made to promote a company. It makes sense that people who create products want to talk about them, and they can certainly have valuable advice or insights. That might give them a platform to share more without people feeling there's some hidden motive.

Re: A novel approach to onboarding

#28

Post by dpower » Mon, Jan 28, 2019, 4:59 PM UTC

ntumlin wrote: post #27

rekshaw wrote: post #7

The article is interesting, but what intrigued me the most was the carefully coordinated marketing: - Medium article to capture inbound and not make it look like an ad, but a "We want to share this discovery with you" - Hacker News submission to get audience - (probably) team upvote boost to trigger front page - 50% off promotion ending in ~4 hours with the tagline "you'll never see this offer again". Cost of adverti…

Not to mention every comment dpower has made is on a post related to Hiri. Maybe HN should just explicitly allow and tag accounts made to promote a company. It makes sense that people who create products want to talk about them, and they can certainly have valuable advice or insights. That might give them a platform to share more without people feeling there's some hidden motive.

I'm a lurker, not a poster for the most part. And as you can see from our blog, we don't write that often. We don't really do content marketing. Any revenue we make as a result of this post certainly won't cover the time I've spent writing it. Hiri is a bit specialist.

Would be happy to tag the posts - think it's pretty clear this is a company blog though. Your point is well taken/made all the same.

Re: A novel approach to onboarding

#29

Post by pmontra » Mon, Jan 28, 2019, 5:29 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #18

So this seems to be getting slated as a submarine, but the underlying insight is good: users don't like change. They want an app "exactly like X, but ..." So you start with a familiar interface and let people choose when they're ready to make it less familiar. Rather like how game tutorials work with locked-down interfaces and gradual introduction of more mechanics.

> People expect an email client to work a certain way. Our unique features made us too different. They made the interface unfamiliar

Agreed. It applies to many fields, also to programming languages. Elixir and Phoenix were designed ostensibly to look like Ruby and RoR and onboarded many developers from those environments. Still some parts of Elixir are too Erlang -ish. Example: the cryptic handle_* methods of GenServer. They could have had the courage of using a class like notation, make them crystal clear for the vast majority of developers and grow much more.

Re: A novel approach to onboarding

#30

Post by AndrewKemendo » Mon, Jan 28, 2019, 5:31 PM UTC

This is really great and there are some interesting takeaways.

The reality was that most users paid little attention to our onboarding. They weren’t reading our precious copy.

We found exactly the same, and we had somewhat of an advantage in this regard of having a completely new interface to most people (Mobile AR). So we expected people would take more time to learn our UX. Nope.

People want to blaze through onboarding even if they have no clue what to do and have never done it before. They wanted it to just be so simple that there was zero learning curve. That ended up being enlightening for us and forced us to radically simplify and copy.

Your product should work the way I expect it to

How I expect your product to work is largely based on my experience using other products

This is a great way to look at it. Now ask yourself, what if it's a new interface that people haven't dealt with before? Answer: You're conversion is going to be bad until your UX makes it orders of magnitude easier to accomplish a very important task.