Thread by @LukeW

about on-boarding: a thread based on examples in Theresa Neil’s great Mobile Design Patterns book. While the older design style doesn’t hold over up the years... the takeaways certainly do. (1/8)

If you just drop people into a user interface, chances are you’ll hear a lot of comments that make it clear they don’t know how to get started. (2/8)

So in response, teams turn to guided tutorials or intro screens that attempt to explain what people can eventually do with an app. You’ve likely seen many such tours. (3/8)

With this version, the team consistently observed two things: 1) no one read the screens 2) people would try to skip them right away. So what gives? First people say they are lost & need help. Then you give them help and they ignore it. You just can’t win, right? (4/8)

At this point, the team thought: maybe we’re just not showing the help people need in the right way. Perhaps it will work better if it appears “in context” with the type of overlaid set of instructions you see in other mobile apps. (5/8)

But when testing these designs, people generally responded with “please make this stop.” So now what? Being dropped into an app didn’t provide enough direction. Intro tours were skipped/ignored and the robot needed to go away. (6/8)

Next they simply added a tip that called out a good first step for their users. Since the core action/purpose of the app was paying your workers, that was the tip. With this, people coming to the app knew what they could and should do to get started. No intro tour needed. (7/8)

The initial tip was all about getting people to the core value of the app. Which required adding some employees -how else do you manage an employee payroll?

So successful onboarding comes down to this: "getting to product value as fast as possible — but not faster."
(8/8)