Onboarding

Optimize For The First 15 Seconds Of Laziness, Vanity, & Selfishness

very few customers get on-boarded and primed to the point where they know three things: (1) why they’re there, (2) what they can accomplish, (3) and what to do next (note: users don’t need to know how to use your product at the beginning, they just need to know what to do next!). Once a new user knows these three things, they have reached “The... See more

Putting yourself in the mind of someone who is coming to Slack for the first time — especially a real someone, who is being made to try this thing by their boss, who is already a bit hangry because they didn’t have time for breakfast, and who is anxious about finishing off a project before they take off for the long weekend — putting yourself in... See more

Your objective should always be to eliminate instructions entirely by making everything self-explanatory, or as close to it as possible. When instructions are absolutely necessary, cut them back to a bare minimum.

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... See more