12 ms·

Don't Waste Time on User Onboarding

208 points by DanHulton 7y ago

wishrider 7y ago
But how do I get visitors in the first place, this is the first challenge. Twitter is pretty good at hiding my promotion tweets from other users...
- onion2k 7y ago
  No idea if this is common practise, but I block any account that promotes a tweet in to my timeline so I don't see it again. If it is, and you're serving a niche market with few people who'll buy from you, promoting tweets could be a really bad idea.
  - dhimes 7y ago
    So how do people reach you to sell to you? Or, to turn it around, how do you find out about new products/solutions?
    - userbinator 7y ago
      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."
      - dhimes 7y ago
        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?
        dotancohen 7y ago
        I'm not the OP, but I'll answer the question anyway. When I'm not specifically looking for something, then I don't find out about them. My attention is limited, I don't have enough to give to every little outfit interested in taking my money. I don't need a new shirt, or car, or coffee or trip. And when I do, then I'll google it and I'll happily see all the ads that Google will show me. The ads are blocked until then.
        dhimes 7y ago
        OK- so ads, then. At your convenience, to be sure, but ads nonetheless.
        jawilson2 7y ago
        I am experiencing an almost 100% disconnect with almost everything you wrote. I don't find out about them then, and my savings and 401K continue to grow unabated. Maybe I'm missing out on cool stuff, but assuming I never found out I was missing out, then my life isn't impacted negatively regardless. I don't really know what an "influencer" is; is it the internet equivalent to the ShamWow or OxiClean guys? I have 0 tolerance for people or companies actively telling me what I should buy or like, and distrust anyone who does so.
        Frondo 7y ago
        I'm going to present an alternate take on "how to live" from you and several other people who replied, not to say your way is wrong, but to say that others live other ways. I like hearing about cool stuff, I like sharing it with friends. I like style, looking fashionable, and being apprised of trends. I don't plan to die with savings. You wouldn't trust me, because I often tell my friends about things they should know about; not because I have anything to gain, but because we all do this in all of my social circles. If I hear about a nootropic they might like, I tell them. If they know of a bar I should try, they tell me. I like a lot of ads because I like knowing what's going on in the world. Even in a post-capitalist Star Trek world, I'd want people who made stuff to tell me. Neither way of living is wrong.
        7y ago
      - miguelmota 7y ago
        That’s why paid ads on google search exist; so people can reach them easier
    - RobertKerans 7y ago
      That's what Twitter is really good at already, it's literally just people chatting and shouting about stuff that other people are chatting and shouting about.
      - dhimes 7y ago
        I can't imagine Twitter being good at reaching a market unless you've gone viral. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like it's like pouring a taste of wine into a fire hose. I don't think I've ever learned about a product on Twitter (but I block ads and don't do much on there). I hear about news and stuff from Twitter.
        arkitaip 7y ago
        You have to have a following and be careful with how your market your stuff but yes, I've discovered many products via Twitter BUT they are almost always aligned with my interests and hobbies. Those that aren't, typically promoted tweet, get blocked.
        RobertKerans 7y ago
        Yep, same. And it's word of mouth from people/entities I trust. And that trust has been built up over time. I have zero attachment to Acmecorp or Joe Random, and generally zero trust in them.
  - michaelbuckbee 7y ago
    I've heard others do this as well and I don't quite understand it. If you don't want to see ads, sure maybe use AdBlock or PiHole, but why block the company? Not trying to put words in your mouth, but are you offended that the company spent money on a promoted tweet? That it was an overreach on their part?
    - onion2k 7y ago
      If you don't want to see ads, sure maybe use AdBlock or PiHole, but why block the company? Blocking the company stops the tweet appearing everywhere I see tweets. That's on my home computer, laptop, Chromebook, office computer, my phone, etc. It continues to block the ads from that company if/when Twitter work out ways around ad-blockers. And it makes me feel like I'm proactively looking after my account. I use ad blockers as well. are you offended that the company spent money on a promoted tweet? I just find that Twitter promotes the same tweets over and over again, so if you don't block them it gets very repetitive. If I was actually offended I'd reply first so they had to pay for an engagement as well as the promotion.
      - jordanpg 7y ago
        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 unsolicited nudge to spend money on something. Ever. I can't be any more clear than this. I hope there are more like me every day.
        Intermernet 7y ago
        We're out here. You're not alone.
        enlyth 7y ago
        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 things. I simply do not want to see ads, ever.
- kowdermeister 7y ago
  A lucky HN or PH campaign might help for a while, but the traffic spike will calm down soon. I'll pay for them on the long run. For me, the CPC cost will make it worth. There are also other ideas, like launching an affiliate program, app marketplaces. Look at where the traffic is in your niche.
nathan_f77 7y ago
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, and I've recently been offering that to new customers.
- capkutay 7y ago
  > I think the best advice for me was "Add sample data to avoid an empty nest." I respectfully disagree with that view and I say that as someone who has implemented a product with sample data during the onboarding process. Users don't care about your data. They care about their data. The easier you make it for the user to input their own data and get some value out of it...even if its something trivial...the faster they'll be able to relate their problem to your products ability to solve it.
  - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    I've been thankful of sample data before - eg auditioning online image editors, I didn't want to hunt around and upload something but just wanted to get right in to editing to get a feel for the apps and whether they're so what I needed. In general though: most onboarding I've disliked, too slow, but some with "click here to do this, or elsewhere to end the tutorial" have been good.
  - DanHulton 7y ago
    I don't know that we have much to disagree about. Absolutely users will get more value from seeing their data, but there are situations where it can take a while to get "their data" visible, like if you're waiting for people to answer a form that they created with your software. Instead of having them wait a day, it can help prove the value of your service to show them what data will look like, once it starts coming in.
- jstanley 7y ago
  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]".
httpsterio 7y ago
I was a bit sceptical when I read the title, but the author raises a good point about calcifying users into suboptimal ux decisions. Wofkflow breaking UI changes are always hard and there's always someone whose use case [you're breaking](https://xkcd.com/1172 https://xkcd.com/1172). Then again, you can't please everyone and it might hurt to stick with older decisions. Onboarding itself is extremely valuable. No application is so self explanatory that everyone gets it without a guide. When should you onboard then? I'd say when you're sure that you're not doing any major changes within the next few months. All UIs can and should be iterated upon and it helps if you have a timeline on when you're upgrading which views and components and it'll help you decide when to launch the initial onboarsing process.
- jimktrains2 7y ago
  > Onboarding itself is extremely valuable. As a user, I find them extremely annoying. They stop me from achieving what I want to achieve and I try to get rid of them as quickly as possible. I also find them as the hallmark of a bad UI -- if you have to tell me how to use your product, then it's not well designed.
  - dotancohen 7y ago
    > if you have to tell me how to use your > product, then it's not well designed. VIM users, licensed drivers, and pilots would disagree. Powerful tools require training. If you're pushing an app that I'm already familiar with before I've ever used it, then you are obviously not innovating.
    - jimktrains2 7y ago
      Perhaps we're talking past each other? To me "training" is different from "onboarding". "Onboarding" is something that happens quickly and right at the start -- OP links to blogs about building those screens that block the whole UI and point out some buttons. It's something that isn't meant to be all-encompassing. It's something to point out things you wouldn't expect. (That last bit is why I dislike them so much.) "Training" is something that isn't expected to be fast often continuous from the start. It's meant to be fairly encompassing, as in you should be pretty well versed in something once it's finished -- not an expert, but some experience and understanding of the whole. Training is meant to include things that aren't obvious/you wouldn't expect (e.g. steer into a skid), but is (and I would argue primarily) about building a foundation for the UI and for further training and learning. Training also includes practice. Yes, vim has a learning curve and breaks what has become the current UI paradigm. However, I'd argue that unless you're just using vim occasionally, you need to be "trained" on it, not "onboarded". That "training" starts with getting the user to understand the UI paradigm, which isn't expected to be quick. By the end of vimtutor, for instance, the modal paradigm and the ability to chain commands together should be clear and practiced. Driver's licenses take at least 6 months and both a written and practicle test to get initially. Commercial licenses require training from accredited institutions. There is no expectation that this will happen quickly. Driver's training includes practice study (e.g. driving with a licensed person present). Driver's training also included a study of the UI (e.g. signs of similar styling convey similar information, for example green is an information highway sign, white, tall rectangle is a speed limit, and yellow is important such as exit only lane) which is partially tested in the written exam. Ditto for powerful tools, you're not expected to be told "this unmarked button does this" and be left to your own devices. These aren't things you could ever "onboard" someone to do. They require actual training. > If you're pushing an app that I'm already familiar with before I've ever used it, then you are obviously not innovating. That's very judgemental -- innovation doesn't mean confusing the user. Did Google's original/classic UI mean that it wasn't innovative? There are applications that I would argue require "training", even if of an informal type. This doesn't mean that someone couldn't poke around in the application and get something done, but they probably won't be able to exploit the application to its fullest. Two example: GIS tools (i.e. require knowledge _about_ GIS, _about_ projects, _about_ UI and spatial concepts) and Video/Photo editing software (i.e. channels, color spaces, types of transforms, &c). Again, you can open QGIS and GIMP and do something meaningful on your first time, but that doesn't mean you won't feel lost or that it'll be easy.
ddebernardy 7y ago
My only point of contention after skimming through the article is with the trial period. The other side of that coin is that, if it's too short then users bookmark your site thinking they'll sign up later and forget, and if it doesn't exist then users may end up not signing up at all and going with the free option instead. In practice it really depends on the product's criticality.
- arkitaip 7y ago
  Came to write this. Companies forget that their product isn't evaluated in a vacuum, that for any serious business need, a person or an group is going to evaluate multiple products for a extended period of time. Having no trial period or a very short one means losing out of business simply because of short term greed. Also, it doesn't help that psych pop is used to arbitrarily justify any conversion tactic.
  - DanHulton 7y ago
    It's an optimization problem - you lose X% of people if your trial is long enough that they don't prioritize evaluating it before it expires. You lose Y% of people if your trial is too short for them to evaluate it against competitors. If X > Y, shorten your trial. If Y > X, lengthen it. The problem comes in the fact that it's really hard to identify what X and Y are - there's some voodoo involved in properly attributing actual reasons for not converting a trial. This is why I like the idea of going immediately paid with a very-long money-back guarantee, though that comes with its own optimization problems.
    - ddebernardy 7y ago
      In my mind, there's more to it than a metrics-driven optimization in isolation from the rest of the company. In your example, the Y% of people you might lose if your trial is too short may very well turn out to be higher paying and/or lower churn customers. What you suggest in your post is the marketing equivalent of sales and support ignoring the colloquial small fry, without realizing that the latter might be sitting on company boards and referring large clients. Also, if they bookmark the service until they can set aside a time to sign up and evaluate (which as an occasional buyer of SaaS products, I can anecdotally report that some do), you'd have no way to reach out to them and build a relationship unless they contacted you. By contrast, if you have a free tier, and/or make it clear from the outset that when your trial expires you'll be able to do new ones when the product hits major milestones, then you have the end-user's email, you're building a relationship, you can interview the end-user to understand why they didn't convert, you can try to rescue trials that didn't move forward with a sale for a reason or another, etc.
networkimprov 7y ago
On the other hand, if you're offering something that breaks with an established paradigm -- i.e. first-time viewers don't know what to expect, a short storyboard to clarify your model might be invaluable, and worth fussing over.
- onion2k 7y ago
  This is the "don't waste time" part - on-boarding users with things they already know is wasting time, so don't do that. Teach users the new and exciting bits they don't know yet.
- jimktrains2 7y ago
  I'd venture to say that breaking UI paradigms shouldn't be taken lightly. Your application is not special to me, the user. I don't want to have to learn how to use the interface of dozens of different applications because they all thought they were special snowflakes and could break established paradigms.
  - networkimprov 7y ago
    I was referring to application paradigms, not common UI patterns.
    - jimktrains2 7y ago
      What's the distinction? If a user is surprised by what happens when they interact with the UI, the UI has failed. If we're talking about an application that requires a lot of outside knowledge (e.g. GIS (Geographic Information Systems (mapping)), accounting, video editing), you're not going to be able to "teach" the user what they need to know in the UI or some short videos. In one case on-boarding is a symptom of a bad UI, in the other it's more-or-less useless.
sxaddas 7y ago
fuckkkkkkk
sxaddas 7y ago
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abitoffthetop 7y ago
Don't waste time on writing an article about introducing new members either. just go immediately into another customer manifesto. I appreciate that the customer has to be the focus, but this article was a bit bait and switch, and didn't give any time to the legitimate issues of growing a startup team.
calewis 7y ago
If you need to create on-boarding your product is to complicated. Add features over time, measure there impact and remove them if they don’t work.
- atoav 7y ago
  I disagree. there are products that are complicated, because the underlying problem your product helps to solve is complicated. And if there are existing solutions that tackle this problems differently to you, you might have to give users a pointer. If you e.g. design a software for electronic circuit design, good user on-boarding will allow you to highlight specifically why your product shines in comparison to other products. Another objection: some “products” are specifically meant to work for power users and a increased software complexity can increase the working speed and power you give to the user at the cost of making it harder for new users (e.g. vim for text editing). Of course if your product is the equivalent of a egg timer, it should be 100% self explainatory. And even if you do a electronic circuit design software it is always good to keep things self explainatory where you can. But sometimes you have to explain things in order to equip your users with a new, innovative and powerful concept they might never heard about before. Removing that concept to avoid complexity could them be akin to changing your target group. You can fl this, but it needs to fit the concept. Oh and sometimes you can just do both. Give your app an expert mode.
  - overcast 7y ago
    Do you honestly believe you can onboard someone to electronic circuit design software, by having a bunch of annoying modal boxes popping up showing you where some key features are? I agree there is complicated software, but that isn't made less complicated by silly onboarding. And if your software is not complicated, you're just pissing people off having to click away from all that junk. If it's not complicated, but confusing, that's a UI design issue that will not be solved by a 3 minute intro.
    - atoav 7y ago
      So you take the idea of on-boarding in it’s most horrible manifestation and use it as a argument against the fundamental idea of introducing users to new concepts within the software they are using?
waylandsmithers 7y ago
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.
- ben_w 7y ago
  Likewise. However, it’s worth remembering that the average user of a website that’s called “Hacker News” is almost certainly more tech-savvy than the average user of any app we create. My solution is, just as the article suggests: > Okay, so your service is immensely easier to navigate since you ran it past a battery of theoretical users. Now cut half of it out. Perhaps that applies no matter how big the app gets, perhaps a simple UX that hides the power tools until they’re called for is the one true way. On the other hand, virtually every time I’ve faced a user saying “$App should perform $Task”, it already does. Sometimes the app doesn’t have a particular feature, but the virtual assistant of the OS does. What’s the best way of helping those users discover those features?
  - DanHulton 7y ago
    It's more for the "onboarding" session that you'd cut half the app out, I could have made that more clear. The idea is that you're looking to sprint to value, to get the user's eyeballs on the most-important part of your service ASAP. Otherwise, they don't stick around to explore and find all the power tools. In normal usage, you should definitely have an easy way to find and use all features, but that's a broader product design question, not an onboarding one.
- burtonator 7y ago
  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.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
mrharrison 7y ago
Don't waste too much time on user on boarding, but putting some time towards user on boarding is good exercise to see if your product is understandable and are any holes that may off put users.
northerdome 7y ago
It has it's place for the right use case. Superhuman requires you to go through a 30 minute on-boarding one on one with a person. Superhuman isn't the most intuitive if you don't take the time to learn it as it's efficiencies come from keyboard shortcuts and features that differ from established email norms. For this kind of B2B app with a certain level complexity a seamless on-boarding makes all the difference. I never would have use the app long term if not for the process.
thirteen37 7y ago
While the article has done good points about what to do instead of an on-boarding, I'd also suggest on-boarding can be good for the user. Video games tend to do on-boarding, and often it's not skippable and covers very basic idioms (use the left stick/WASD to move). The difference I think it's the novelty of the new environment and a sense of accomplishment that it rarely is a chore. So go ahead and on-board if the user gets to see something very cool.
yeahitslikethat 7y ago
This is terrible advice. And Click bait. I'm fact the article gives a lists several things you should do to onboard customers.
Animats 7y ago
He has one good point about user testing. The way to test a user interface is well understood, but not done enough. You have a setup to take video of the screen and the user at the same time. You get some people roughly comparable to the desired user base to try it. Alone, with no help. You give them a set task to accomplish. Then you have someone review and annotate the videos. Where did people get stuck? Where did they back up? Where did they give up? Put together a highlights reel and have the developers and managers watch it. It's usually obvious by that point what's wrong.
mitko 7y ago
The article talks about “user onboarding” as if it is different from the first run experience. Perhaps it is a SaaSy jargon to separate them. But for us at Sleek, we obsess over the first run as it is how we onboard users - until the user has gone through their use case, we assume they’re new to it. Learn by doing, not by learning.
- DanHulton 7y ago
  It's one of those weird terms that seems to mean different things to different people. For some, it means "first-run experience", and for some it means "the tooltip hoops you make people jump through". I think for too many, it's the latter. But yeah, many people only get a first run. You have to obsess over it, because if that doesn't work for you, it can be like pulling teeth to get people to come back.
natvod 7y ago
Something I've noticed is a lot of companies use user onboarding and educational messages as a crutch for confusing UX and product experiences. Many companies also have a one-size-fits-all approach to onboarding, where they send the same messages to all users, regardless of their in-product actions. Instead, it's better to trigger relevant messages if the user has taken a specific action and hasn't taken the next step to achieve Y result. You can always send onboarding sequence to users who haven't taken any actions at all. It should also be noted that for some established companies, a lot of their onboarding isn't necessarily to educate you but to force you to take certain actions that their testing has shown will make you active. For example, Pinterest forces you to follow certain topics when you sign up.
gav 7y ago
One of my favorite resources for onboarding is Samuel Hulick's https://www.useronboard.com/ https://www.useronboard.com/ His teardowns are particularly valuable to see how others do things and what does and doesn't work. Plus they're entertaining.
- DanHulton 7y ago
  Absolutely an inspiration of mine. If anything, my only quibble is that he doesn't go far enough. I'm working on a similar series, except I'm examining the entire Trial-to-Paid flow, from the moment you sign up to the moment you convert, including lifecycle emails, payment flow, etc. Takes a while to do, though, since you usually have a month or more before the email cycle is exhausted.
ypeterholmes 7y ago
Strange title for an article analyzing onboarding.

208 points by DanHulton 7y ago

But how do I get visitors in the first place, this is the first challenge. Twitter is pretty good at hiding my promotion tweets from other users...

onion2k 7y ago
No idea if this is common practise, but I block any account that promotes a tweet in to my timeline so I don't see it again. If it is, and you're serving a niche market with few people who'll buy from you, promoting tweets could be a really bad idea.
- dhimes 7y ago
  So how do people reach you to sell to you? Or, to turn it around, how do you find out about new products/solutions?
  - userbinator 7y ago
    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."
    - dhimes 7y ago
      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?
      - dotancohen 7y ago
        I'm not the OP, but I'll answer the question anyway. When I'm not specifically looking for something, then I don't find out about them. My attention is limited, I don't have enough to give to every little outfit interested in taking my money. I don't need a new shirt, or car, or coffee or trip. And when I do, then I'll google it and I'll happily see all the ads that Google will show me. The ads are blocked until then.
        dhimes 7y ago
        OK- so ads, then. At your convenience, to be sure, but ads nonetheless.
      - jawilson2 7y ago
        I am experiencing an almost 100% disconnect with almost everything you wrote. I don't find out about them then, and my savings and 401K continue to grow unabated. Maybe I'm missing out on cool stuff, but assuming I never found out I was missing out, then my life isn't impacted negatively regardless. I don't really know what an "influencer" is; is it the internet equivalent to the ShamWow or OxiClean guys? I have 0 tolerance for people or companies actively telling me what I should buy or like, and distrust anyone who does so.
        Frondo 7y ago
        I'm going to present an alternate take on "how to live" from you and several other people who replied, not to say your way is wrong, but to say that others live other ways. I like hearing about cool stuff, I like sharing it with friends. I like style, looking fashionable, and being apprised of trends. I don't plan to die with savings. You wouldn't trust me, because I often tell my friends about things they should know about; not because I have anything to gain, but because we all do this in all of my social circles. If I hear about a nootropic they might like, I tell them. If they know of a bar I should try, they tell me. I like a lot of ads because I like knowing what's going on in the world. Even in a post-capitalist Star Trek world, I'd want people who made stuff to tell me. Neither way of living is wrong.
        7y ago
    - miguelmota 7y ago
      That’s why paid ads on google search exist; so people can reach them easier
  - RobertKerans 7y ago
    That's what Twitter is really good at already, it's literally just people chatting and shouting about stuff that other people are chatting and shouting about.
    - dhimes 7y ago
      I can't imagine Twitter being good at reaching a market unless you've gone viral. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like it's like pouring a taste of wine into a fire hose. I don't think I've ever learned about a product on Twitter (but I block ads and don't do much on there). I hear about news and stuff from Twitter.
      - arkitaip 7y ago
        You have to have a following and be careful with how your market your stuff but yes, I've discovered many products via Twitter BUT they are almost always aligned with my interests and hobbies. Those that aren't, typically promoted tweet, get blocked.
        RobertKerans 7y ago
        Yep, same. And it's word of mouth from people/entities I trust. And that trust has been built up over time. I have zero attachment to Acmecorp or Joe Random, and generally zero trust in them.
- michaelbuckbee 7y ago
  I've heard others do this as well and I don't quite understand it. If you don't want to see ads, sure maybe use AdBlock or PiHole, but why block the company? Not trying to put words in your mouth, but are you offended that the company spent money on a promoted tweet? That it was an overreach on their part?
  - onion2k 7y ago
    If you don't want to see ads, sure maybe use AdBlock or PiHole, but why block the company? Blocking the company stops the tweet appearing everywhere I see tweets. That's on my home computer, laptop, Chromebook, office computer, my phone, etc. It continues to block the ads from that company if/when Twitter work out ways around ad-blockers. And it makes me feel like I'm proactively looking after my account. I use ad blockers as well. are you offended that the company spent money on a promoted tweet? I just find that Twitter promotes the same tweets over and over again, so if you don't block them it gets very repetitive. If I was actually offended I'd reply first so they had to pay for an engagement as well as the promotion.
    - jordanpg 7y ago
      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 unsolicited nudge to spend money on something. Ever. I can't be any more clear than this. I hope there are more like me every day.
      - Intermernet 7y ago
        We're out here. You're not alone.
      - enlyth 7y ago
        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 things. I simply do not want to see ads, ever.
kowdermeister 7y ago
A lucky HN or PH campaign might help for a while, but the traffic spike will calm down soon. I'll pay for them on the long run. For me, the CPC cost will make it worth. There are also other ideas, like launching an affiliate program, app marketplaces. Look at where the traffic is in your niche.

nathan_f77 7y ago

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, and I've recently been offering that to new customers.

capkutay 7y ago
> I think the best advice for me was "Add sample data to avoid an empty nest." I respectfully disagree with that view and I say that as someone who has implemented a product with sample data during the onboarding process. Users don't care about your data. They care about their data. The easier you make it for the user to input their own data and get some value out of it...even if its something trivial...the faster they'll be able to relate their problem to your products ability to solve it.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  I've been thankful of sample data before - eg auditioning online image editors, I didn't want to hunt around and upload something but just wanted to get right in to editing to get a feel for the apps and whether they're so what I needed. In general though: most onboarding I've disliked, too slow, but some with "click here to do this, or elsewhere to end the tutorial" have been good.
- DanHulton 7y ago
  I don't know that we have much to disagree about. Absolutely users will get more value from seeing their data, but there are situations where it can take a while to get "their data" visible, like if you're waiting for people to answer a form that they created with your software. Instead of having them wait a day, it can help prove the value of your service to show them what data will look like, once it starts coming in.
jstanley 7y ago
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]".

httpsterio 7y ago

I was a bit sceptical when I read the title, but the author raises a good point about calcifying users into suboptimal ux decisions. Wofkflow breaking UI changes are always hard and there's always someone whose use case [you're breaking](https://xkcd.com/1172 https://xkcd.com/1172). Then again, you can't please everyone and it might hurt to stick with older decisions. Onboarding itself is extremely valuable. No application is so self explanatory that everyone gets it without a guide. When should you onboard then? I'd say when you're sure that you're not doing any major changes within the next few months. All UIs can and should be iterated upon and it helps if you have a timeline on when you're upgrading which views and components and it'll help you decide when to launch the initial onboarsing process.

jimktrains2 7y ago
> Onboarding itself is extremely valuable. As a user, I find them extremely annoying. They stop me from achieving what I want to achieve and I try to get rid of them as quickly as possible. I also find them as the hallmark of a bad UI -- if you have to tell me how to use your product, then it's not well designed.
- dotancohen 7y ago
  > if you have to tell me how to use your > product, then it's not well designed. VIM users, licensed drivers, and pilots would disagree. Powerful tools require training. If you're pushing an app that I'm already familiar with before I've ever used it, then you are obviously not innovating.
  - jimktrains2 7y ago
    Perhaps we're talking past each other? To me "training" is different from "onboarding". "Onboarding" is something that happens quickly and right at the start -- OP links to blogs about building those screens that block the whole UI and point out some buttons. It's something that isn't meant to be all-encompassing. It's something to point out things you wouldn't expect. (That last bit is why I dislike them so much.) "Training" is something that isn't expected to be fast often continuous from the start. It's meant to be fairly encompassing, as in you should be pretty well versed in something once it's finished -- not an expert, but some experience and understanding of the whole. Training is meant to include things that aren't obvious/you wouldn't expect (e.g. steer into a skid), but is (and I would argue primarily) about building a foundation for the UI and for further training and learning. Training also includes practice. Yes, vim has a learning curve and breaks what has become the current UI paradigm. However, I'd argue that unless you're just using vim occasionally, you need to be "trained" on it, not "onboarded". That "training" starts with getting the user to understand the UI paradigm, which isn't expected to be quick. By the end of vimtutor, for instance, the modal paradigm and the ability to chain commands together should be clear and practiced. Driver's licenses take at least 6 months and both a written and practicle test to get initially. Commercial licenses require training from accredited institutions. There is no expectation that this will happen quickly. Driver's training includes practice study (e.g. driving with a licensed person present). Driver's training also included a study of the UI (e.g. signs of similar styling convey similar information, for example green is an information highway sign, white, tall rectangle is a speed limit, and yellow is important such as exit only lane) which is partially tested in the written exam. Ditto for powerful tools, you're not expected to be told "this unmarked button does this" and be left to your own devices. These aren't things you could ever "onboard" someone to do. They require actual training. > If you're pushing an app that I'm already familiar with before I've ever used it, then you are obviously not innovating. That's very judgemental -- innovation doesn't mean confusing the user. Did Google's original/classic UI mean that it wasn't innovative? There are applications that I would argue require "training", even if of an informal type. This doesn't mean that someone couldn't poke around in the application and get something done, but they probably won't be able to exploit the application to its fullest. Two example: GIS tools (i.e. require knowledge _about_ GIS, _about_ projects, _about_ UI and spatial concepts) and Video/Photo editing software (i.e. channels, color spaces, types of transforms, &c). Again, you can open QGIS and GIMP and do something meaningful on your first time, but that doesn't mean you won't feel lost or that it'll be easy.

ddebernardy 7y ago

My only point of contention after skimming through the article is with the trial period. The other side of that coin is that, if it's too short then users bookmark your site thinking they'll sign up later and forget, and if it doesn't exist then users may end up not signing up at all and going with the free option instead. In practice it really depends on the product's criticality.

arkitaip 7y ago
Came to write this. Companies forget that their product isn't evaluated in a vacuum, that for any serious business need, a person or an group is going to evaluate multiple products for a extended period of time. Having no trial period or a very short one means losing out of business simply because of short term greed. Also, it doesn't help that psych pop is used to arbitrarily justify any conversion tactic.
- DanHulton 7y ago
  It's an optimization problem - you lose X% of people if your trial is long enough that they don't prioritize evaluating it before it expires. You lose Y% of people if your trial is too short for them to evaluate it against competitors. If X > Y, shorten your trial. If Y > X, lengthen it. The problem comes in the fact that it's really hard to identify what X and Y are - there's some voodoo involved in properly attributing actual reasons for not converting a trial. This is why I like the idea of going immediately paid with a very-long money-back guarantee, though that comes with its own optimization problems.
  - ddebernardy 7y ago
    In my mind, there's more to it than a metrics-driven optimization in isolation from the rest of the company. In your example, the Y% of people you might lose if your trial is too short may very well turn out to be higher paying and/or lower churn customers. What you suggest in your post is the marketing equivalent of sales and support ignoring the colloquial small fry, without realizing that the latter might be sitting on company boards and referring large clients. Also, if they bookmark the service until they can set aside a time to sign up and evaluate (which as an occasional buyer of SaaS products, I can anecdotally report that some do), you'd have no way to reach out to them and build a relationship unless they contacted you. By contrast, if you have a free tier, and/or make it clear from the outset that when your trial expires you'll be able to do new ones when the product hits major milestones, then you have the end-user's email, you're building a relationship, you can interview the end-user to understand why they didn't convert, you can try to rescue trials that didn't move forward with a sale for a reason or another, etc.

networkimprov 7y ago

On the other hand, if you're offering something that breaks with an established paradigm -- i.e. first-time viewers don't know what to expect, a short storyboard to clarify your model might be invaluable, and worth fussing over.

onion2k 7y ago
This is the "don't waste time" part - on-boarding users with things they already know is wasting time, so don't do that. Teach users the new and exciting bits they don't know yet.
jimktrains2 7y ago
I'd venture to say that breaking UI paradigms shouldn't be taken lightly. Your application is not special to me, the user. I don't want to have to learn how to use the interface of dozens of different applications because they all thought they were special snowflakes and could break established paradigms.
- networkimprov 7y ago
  I was referring to application paradigms, not common UI patterns.
  - jimktrains2 7y ago
    What's the distinction? If a user is surprised by what happens when they interact with the UI, the UI has failed. If we're talking about an application that requires a lot of outside knowledge (e.g. GIS (Geographic Information Systems (mapping)), accounting, video editing), you're not going to be able to "teach" the user what they need to know in the UI or some short videos. In one case on-boarding is a symptom of a bad UI, in the other it's more-or-less useless.

sxaddas 7y ago

fuckkkkkkk

sxaddas 7y ago

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abitoffthetop 7y ago

Don't waste time on writing an article about introducing new members either. just go immediately into another customer manifesto. I appreciate that the customer has to be the focus, but this article was a bit bait and switch, and didn't give any time to the legitimate issues of growing a startup team.

calewis 7y ago

If you need to create on-boarding your product is to complicated. Add features over time, measure there impact and remove them if they don’t work.

atoav 7y ago
I disagree. there are products that are complicated, because the underlying problem your product helps to solve is complicated. And if there are existing solutions that tackle this problems differently to you, you might have to give users a pointer. If you e.g. design a software for electronic circuit design, good user on-boarding will allow you to highlight specifically why your product shines in comparison to other products. Another objection: some “products” are specifically meant to work for power users and a increased software complexity can increase the working speed and power you give to the user at the cost of making it harder for new users (e.g. vim for text editing). Of course if your product is the equivalent of a egg timer, it should be 100% self explainatory. And even if you do a electronic circuit design software it is always good to keep things self explainatory where you can. But sometimes you have to explain things in order to equip your users with a new, innovative and powerful concept they might never heard about before. Removing that concept to avoid complexity could them be akin to changing your target group. You can fl this, but it needs to fit the concept. Oh and sometimes you can just do both. Give your app an expert mode.
- overcast 7y ago
  Do you honestly believe you can onboard someone to electronic circuit design software, by having a bunch of annoying modal boxes popping up showing you where some key features are? I agree there is complicated software, but that isn't made less complicated by silly onboarding. And if your software is not complicated, you're just pissing people off having to click away from all that junk. If it's not complicated, but confusing, that's a UI design issue that will not be solved by a 3 minute intro.
  - atoav 7y ago
    So you take the idea of on-boarding in it’s most horrible manifestation and use it as a argument against the fundamental idea of introducing users to new concepts within the software they are using?

waylandsmithers 7y ago

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.

ben_w 7y ago
Likewise. However, it’s worth remembering that the average user of a website that’s called “Hacker News” is almost certainly more tech-savvy than the average user of any app we create. My solution is, just as the article suggests: > Okay, so your service is immensely easier to navigate since you ran it past a battery of theoretical users. Now cut half of it out. Perhaps that applies no matter how big the app gets, perhaps a simple UX that hides the power tools until they’re called for is the one true way. On the other hand, virtually every time I’ve faced a user saying “$App should perform $Task”, it already does. Sometimes the app doesn’t have a particular feature, but the virtual assistant of the OS does. What’s the best way of helping those users discover those features?
- DanHulton 7y ago
  It's more for the "onboarding" session that you'd cut half the app out, I could have made that more clear. The idea is that you're looking to sprint to value, to get the user's eyeballs on the most-important part of your service ASAP. Otherwise, they don't stick around to explore and find all the power tools. In normal usage, you should definitely have an easy way to find and use all features, but that's a broader product design question, not an onboarding one.
burtonator 7y ago
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.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

mrharrison 7y ago

Don't waste too much time on user on boarding, but putting some time towards user on boarding is good exercise to see if your product is understandable and are any holes that may off put users.

northerdome 7y ago

It has it's place for the right use case. Superhuman requires you to go through a 30 minute on-boarding one on one with a person. Superhuman isn't the most intuitive if you don't take the time to learn it as it's efficiencies come from keyboard shortcuts and features that differ from established email norms. For this kind of B2B app with a certain level complexity a seamless on-boarding makes all the difference. I never would have use the app long term if not for the process.

thirteen37 7y ago

While the article has done good points about what to do instead of an on-boarding, I'd also suggest on-boarding can be good for the user. Video games tend to do on-boarding, and often it's not skippable and covers very basic idioms (use the left stick/WASD to move). The difference I think it's the novelty of the new environment and a sense of accomplishment that it rarely is a chore. So go ahead and on-board if the user gets to see something very cool.

yeahitslikethat 7y ago

This is terrible advice. And Click bait. I'm fact the article gives a lists several things you should do to onboard customers.

Animats 7y ago

He has one good point about user testing. The way to test a user interface is well understood, but not done enough. You have a setup to take video of the screen and the user at the same time. You get some people roughly comparable to the desired user base to try it. Alone, with no help. You give them a set task to accomplish. Then you have someone review and annotate the videos. Where did people get stuck? Where did they back up? Where did they give up? Put together a highlights reel and have the developers and managers watch it. It's usually obvious by that point what's wrong.

mitko 7y ago

The article talks about “user onboarding” as if it is different from the first run experience. Perhaps it is a SaaSy jargon to separate them. But for us at Sleek, we obsess over the first run as it is how we onboard users - until the user has gone through their use case, we assume they’re new to it. Learn by doing, not by learning.

DanHulton 7y ago
It's one of those weird terms that seems to mean different things to different people. For some, it means "first-run experience", and for some it means "the tooltip hoops you make people jump through". I think for too many, it's the latter. But yeah, many people only get a first run. You have to obsess over it, because if that doesn't work for you, it can be like pulling teeth to get people to come back.

natvod 7y ago

Something I've noticed is a lot of companies use user onboarding and educational messages as a crutch for confusing UX and product experiences. Many companies also have a one-size-fits-all approach to onboarding, where they send the same messages to all users, regardless of their in-product actions. Instead, it's better to trigger relevant messages if the user has taken a specific action and hasn't taken the next step to achieve Y result. You can always send onboarding sequence to users who haven't taken any actions at all. It should also be noted that for some established companies, a lot of their onboarding isn't necessarily to educate you but to force you to take certain actions that their testing has shown will make you active. For example, Pinterest forces you to follow certain topics when you sign up.

gav 7y ago

One of my favorite resources for onboarding is Samuel Hulick's https://www.useronboard.com/ https://www.useronboard.com/ His teardowns are particularly valuable to see how others do things and what does and doesn't work. Plus they're entertaining.

DanHulton 7y ago
Absolutely an inspiration of mine. If anything, my only quibble is that he doesn't go far enough. I'm working on a similar series, except I'm examining the entire Trial-to-Paid flow, from the moment you sign up to the moment you convert, including lifecycle emails, payment flow, etc. Takes a while to do, though, since you usually have a month or more before the email cycle is exhausted.

ypeterholmes 7y ago

Strange title for an article analyzing onboarding.