Don't Waste Time on User Onboarding

Post by dlanouette » Thu, May 02, 2019, 3:32 PM UTC

burtonator wrote: post #48

waylandsmithers wrote: post #28

I get that there are probably established best practices that people follow for designing onboarding but I've never experienced one as a user that I didn't want to immediately dismiss or skip through.

Here are our stats for Polar.... Before onboarding our cohort retention was 2%...after 1 week. This means that after a week only 2% of our users came back to use the app. After a basic onboarding we jumped to 10%. We're now at about 14-15% (just via improving the app). About 50% of our users completely skip the onboarding altogether. I think I'm going to experiment with a video instead of a tour to see the difference…

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 02, 2019, 3:38 PM UTC

dhimes wrote: post #33

userbinator wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't use Twitter, but if I'm specifically looking for something, I will actively seek out and do the research. I suspect many others who block ads and such are the same. "They don't reach me, I reach them."

What about when you are not specifically looking for something? How do you find out about new shirts, or cars, or coffees or trips or whatever? Do you stumble across them on web sites, like in articles? On TV? If you usually find out things word-of-mouth, then how do your influencers find out about them?

Post by HeWhoLurksLate » Thu, May 02, 2019, 3:49 PM UTC

enlyth wrote: post #34

jordanpg wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to see ads, ever . I hope a growing number of people feel the same way. I don't care about the business model of the whole internet. It is obviously a house of cards. A business model based on bad UX? I hope it collapses. No, I don't know what will replace it. I don't care, as long as it doesn't involve ads. I really don't care if the ads are innocuous or labeled or relevant. I don't ever want to see an…

I completely agree. I don't care if your ad is clever, relevant, organically sourced, environmentally friendly, necessary for financing your product, something I actually want, need, or didn't know I wanted yet. The internet is plagued with this cancer everywhere you go, no matter what you do. Somehow it's become acceptable that every second of our attention and time is competed for by corporations trying to sell us…

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 02, 2019, 3:52 PM UTC

the_duke wrote: post #23

nathan_f77 wrote: post #3

This article is great, and full of really helpful advice! I think the best advice for me was "Add sample data to avoid an empty nest." I just realized that my product has this problem, so I'm going to be adding some sample data for new users. I think I'll also have a toggle switch so you can easily hide all the samples. (It would be annoying if you had manually delete everything.) Concierge setup is also a great idea…

Sample data can be helpful, but in my experience, usually isn't. What users actually want is a quick way to work with their own data. A specialized "first launch wizard" that makes entering inital data really quick and painless is often a better choice. It can also make sense to allow trying the product out with existing data, but for this I would offer a "demo" mode where you get bootstrap data, can play around with…

Post by arkitaip » Thu, May 02, 2019, 4:03 PM UTC

jstanley wrote: post #8

nathan_f77 wrote: post #3

This article is great, and full of really helpful advice! I think the best advice for me was "Add sample data to avoid an empty nest." I just realized that my product has this problem, so I'm going to be adding some sample data for new users. I think I'll also have a toggle switch so you can easily hide all the samples. (It would be annoying if you had manually delete everything.) Concierge setup is also a great idea…

Instead of adding sample data when the initial view would be empty, I prefer to replace the empty view with a message about what the user should be doing first. So instead of "0 photos" and a blank page, it could say "Get started by [uploading some photos]".