The hard problem of onboarding horizontal products

The next area where I think games have a lot to teach product designers is in onboarding . Many games follow the path of slowly revealing the complexity of a system over time, giving the player just enough to do that they're engaged but not overwhelmed. Often this is a continual process that happens across the entire span of the game. Multiple hour... See more

In a world of moving fast and pushing out a “minimum viable product,” the first mile of a product’s user experience is almost always an afterthought. The welcome/tour, the onboarding, the explanatory copy, the empty states, and the defaults of your product make up the first mile. Ironically, these crucial components of initial engagement that make ... See more

So another important element of long-term retention is figuring out how to move your users along a learning curve. This developmental process—called ongoing onboarding—is similar to how you would learn any subject, such as an instrument or language or technical skill: by starting with small, simple objectives and then building on your mastery incre... See more

Lesson #2: Strive for a great UX and a good-enough UISimply put, how things work matters more than how they look. This is especially true in the early stages of a product when you have supportive early adopters.On the other hand, a “good-enough” UI is … good enough, especially since it can be more subjective. For example, color and font schema can ... See more