Onboarding

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

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 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.”