10 Tips to Immediately Improve User Onboarding by Pieter Walraven.
From the post:
User onboarding is an art. It can be deceivingly simple, but anyone that has ever designed a new user journey knows it’s incredibly hard.
For starters, there’s some tough questions to answer. What main value does my product offer? Who am I talking to? What is the one most important thing new users need to see? What does my product do? Why do we even exist?!
Luckily, there’s many great products out there with tested and optimized onboarding flows to get inspiration from (read: steal).
To make your life easier, I’ve analyzed some of the web’s most popular onboarding flows. I’ve also included some gaming-inspired learnings from my time as Product Manager at social games developer Playfish as well as insights from the onboarding design of Pie, the smart team chat app I’m currently working on.
Let’s dive in!
…
See Pieter’s post for the details but the highlights are:
- Don’t have a tutorial
- Let the user do it
- Don’t teach me all at once
- Let me experience the ‘wow!’
- Repeat to create a habit
- Use fewer words
- Don’t break flow
- Be adaptive
- Remove noise
- Use conventions
In terms of training/education, very little of this is new. For #6 “Use fewer words,” remember Strunk & White’s – “#13 Omit needless words.” Or compare #9 “remove noise” with Strunk & White #14 “Avoid a succession of loose sentences.”
Any decent UI/UX guide is going to give these rules in one form or another.
But it is important that they are repeated by different people and in various forms. Why? Open five applications at random on your phone or computer. How many out of those five have an interface that is immediately usable by a new user?
The message of what is required for good UI design is well known. Where that message fails is in the application of those principles.
At least to judge from current UIs. Yes?
Any “intuitive” UIs you would like to suggest as examples?