Onboarding

The users of your product don’t want to make choices, especially when they are in the first mile. The default options you provide, like which tab they land on and pre-populating fields with suggested selections, make all the difference in pulling new users through the first mile. I like how Dave Morin describes it, “the devil’s in the default.”

In order to successfully onboard a horizontal product, we need to increase their skill over time to keep up with their changing goals.

New users do not yet have the vocabulary to understand the appNew users do not yet have the vocabulary to understand the appImagine that you are in a foreign country where you don't speak the language. You're hungry... See more

Loom was 2 weeks from running out of money. Now it's worth $1.5 billion and has 14 million users. 5 ways Loom wows new users that you can steal:

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

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

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

We used the "Ikea effect" to increase conversion by 82%. Here's why and how. The Ikea effect is a "cognitive bias in which consumers place a disproportionately high value on products they partially created". We wanted to do 2 things in our... See more