Contextual

Category: Onboarding

  • Does anyone own your App’s onboarding?

    Mel from Canva posted this week about their journey to a $1B valuation. It’s a long but faniscating read that overrides any myth about being an overnight success.

    One mind-bending takeaway from the post is this quote:

    “In order for Canva to take off — we had to get every person who came into our product to have a great experience in a couple of minutes.”

    OK, nothing mind-blowing about that on the surface, but

    “…So we spent months perfecting the onboarding experience paying particular attention to users’ emotional journey.”

    The whole post is on Medium, check it out here.

  • Open Source Onboarding Carousel

    Using Open Source components is a great way to get beautiful code elements into your App. We extended the Contextual platform to allow the popular “Paper Onboarding” carousel – it’s attractive and had a decent amount of flexibility.

    The cool thing about Paper Onboarding is that it’s material design slider. Here is how Ramotion (its authors) describe it:

    Paper Onboarding is a simple and easy to use onboarding slider for your app. bottom.

    By allowing this to be added in our point-and-click dashboard where you can preview on the web and on your devices.

    We made one initial thing even easier:

    You just need to provide content for each slider page – a main icon, text, and small round icon for the bottom

    We made this so you didn’t need any extra developer code.

    Ramotion's Paper Onboarding Example

    We had some additional goals that we thought would be super awesome for our customers

    1. Be able to use images that are hosted remotely
    2. Allow changes to the carousel without needing to do an Appstore release.
    3. Target different carousels at different users
    4. Have carousels in different parts of an App (not just the home screen).

    Here is how it looks in the Contextual Dashboard.

     

    On Android, its automatically built in – nice.

    On iOS, to add the open source Paper Onboarding to Contextual and get all the above benefits you just need to add:

    platform :ios, '8.0'
    use_frameworks!
    pod "pointzi"
    pod "paper-onboarding-pointzi"
    end

    So its, super-easy to get started and then have all the dynamic benefits.

    To learn more about the open-source checkout the awesome work from the folks at Ramotion on Github.

    https://github.com/Ramotion/paper-onboarding

    and

    https://github.com/Ramotion/paper-onboarding-android

  • Contextual Native Carousels now available

    The animation below show  how easy it is to now deliver beautiful carousels in Contextual without:

    1. needing to write code, just add our SDK
    2. needing to do an Appstore Release!

    You can also A/B Test different carousels to targeted groups to test which gives the best results.

    In this video you can see it takes seconds to :

    1. craft a 2-screen carousel
    2. select an image from our library or pick your own
    3. change the text
    4. preview it on a real device

    Some other great controls are:

    • Full control over font type, color, background color
    • Beautiful swipe colour transition between screens
    • Buttons can customized for each slide (see down the bottom it changes from “Skip” to “Done”
    • No particular limit on carousel screens. But we recommend no more than 3, otherwise you’ll drive your users crazy!
    • Multiple images per screen.

  • onboarding: the precursor to viral growth

    “Progressive On-boarding” is introducing new and unused features to users and one important part of a journey is to incentivize them to become a “sharer” or evangelist of your App/product – most Apps only get this when the user is:

    • acquired
    • activated/onboarded
    • retained

    Some readers will recognize this as the first 3 steps of Dave McClures’ AARRR – Pirate Metrics for Startups (I hope we can still appreciate DMC’s contribution in late-2017)

    Retention is the most important pre-cursor to “virality” (or Referral, DMC’s last “R”),  an App developer’s natural end goal is to create a product that is so addictive that people use it regularly, find it indispensable, and keep coming back even after drop-offs in initial usage activity. This is the type of app that becomes integrated into a person’s daily routine – like using Instagram, Dropbox, or Spotify.

    How does onboarding build retention?

    Onboarding is instrumental in getting users to build self-reinforcing behaviors, specifically they:

    • introduce and help understand the feature
    • get the user to experience the “a-ha” moment for that feature
    • track with analytics to have completed a goal or they may get tips/walkthroughs to guide them again.

    Some examples of self-reinforcing behaviors are:

    • The more data a user invests in a product, the harder it can be to leave it. Who wants to import 100s of documents over from Evernote to a competitor, for example? Users want to feel happy that they made the right decision from the jump.
    • The more time that’s invested in using a product, the more reflexive the daily habit to use it becomes
    • The two things above create an emotional connection between the user and the product. You’ll see this when users start posting and blogging on social media about how they can’t live without the app – this is how you get free brand ambassadors!

     

    viral loop

    So Retention leads to Referral

    If your goal is to build a viral loop around the core of your product, then the first step is to think about how you can make it easy for users to find, onboard, activate themselves with your App, and then share it with their friends.

    Some steps and considerations to keep in mind:

    Timing of sharing

    • Keep out of the user’s way until they’ve had a happy experience. With Contextual you can target an audience at the right time of the user’s journey, then show them a tip or popup suggestion.
      • Your UI should hide the share until it’s relevant.
      • Example: Spotify makes it super-easy to share your current song,  because songs make us happy (evokes a positive response).
      • Spotify also passively shares your playlist to your FB timeline. This doesn’t make me happy as a user, but it’s free advertisement for them!
    • Make it a simple one-click action to share while the user is experiencing that endorphin rush or “activated” experience.
      • Experiment with highlighting the share button or do some push campaigns to incentivize sharing.
      • Use your analytics to understand where best to test how and when to share. Contextual has some powerful analytics that allow you to look backwards for click events in the last 30 days even if you didn’t realize it was important. (we also support others like Segment).


    Make it really easy to share widely

    In the example above the awesome HelloFresh have a very subtle sharing button. It obey’s the rules of:

    • “keep out of the way”
    • “Make it a simple one-click”

    But is it motivating users to share enough? What could be more viral than food? Just by sending a picture of the recipe will drive installs and views. That’s building the self-reinforcing behavior, here are just a few use-cases:

    “Here’s what we are having tonight!”

    “Will I do this for Saturday night with the Smiths?”

    “This looks incredible!!! 🙂  “

    hello fresh share tip

    What would the viral uplift be if HelloFresh simply targeted engaged non-sharers with a simple tip like this. Simple tips can increase the uplift of a “goal” or “success metric” by 20-80% – its certainly worth a try to do targeted, contextual tips!

    This is a classic case where targeting users who’ve not shared before can be targeted.
    In Contextual, this would look something like this:
    dashboard

     

    Some other considerations

    • Is your App running on a phone or on a tablet? Is the user “on-the-go” or is it a “lean-back” experience? Minimize the steps to get to sharing for each situation.
    • Does each use of your app build upon the previous experience? (Do you have markers or “tags” that track a user’s journey).
    • Pre-tick the share list with all contacts or relevant/recommended contacts.
    • Enable search on the contacts list so the user can easily share to specific people.
    • Provide the option to manually enter additional email addresses.
    • Make it possible to share on multiple networks at once.
    • Consider the fundamental value proposition you are presenting to your users
      • Are you enabling them to more easily connect with their friends and social networks? Are you saving them time or money? Are you making their day/lives more efficient somehow?
      • Is your value prop unique enough to cut through all the other competing noise?
      • Reward often and variably – this keeps the urge to share going and encourages daily connections since inviting friends becomes a core process in your app. Check out why variable rewards matter from here or just get Nir Eyal’s book – it’s good ????
      • Clearly define and promote your value proposition early on in your marketing messaging, and connect these back to the core idea of what your product delivers
    • Consider where new users can discover your viral loop and set the process off
      • Do it for free – App Store Optimization, online marketing, website integration, newsfeeds, your website homepage, and blogs are all great “on-ramps”
      • Spend a little – paid advertising, traditional marketing campaigns, SEO
      • Try incentive campaigns to encourage existing users to invite friends. Use push notifications or in-App feeds to get the message out.

  • Has Material Design nailed Mobile Tooltips?

    I received a question from a recent uxdesign.cc post on Cognitive Overload in mobile app design. (It was a variant of my last post here).

    Has Material Design already answered the need for reducing cognitive overload?

    Material Design is a unified system that combines theory, resources, and tools for crafting digital experiences.

    This initiative from Google (and gift to the world) is widely embraced but Apple is sticking with their own Human Interface Guidelines (and the battery efficient Flat Design). I won’t go down the rabbit hole of comparison but predictability, elegance and delight in design are all great cognitive tools for reducing negative human-computer interactions. (Also it didn’t hurt that Google clobbered Apple by having wide-spread tools and libraries for both web and mobile).

    Material Design’s strength was sticking with a cognitive design balanced with device performance, processing power and battery efficiency — an acknowledgement that human perception uses light to interpret the physical world.

    BUT — where Material Design stops short is that it solves “the current moment”. Its really a design tool, NOT a user experience tool.

    It does not consider the user journey and the contextual nature of a design for the current user’s needs.

    Material Design’s Approach to Mobile Tooltips

    They take a well-meaning of hiding tips (similar to desktop where its hover that delivers the tip). The advocate the long-press (press-and-hold).

    The problem for long-press is that:

    a) mortals don’t know that gesture, only UX nerds.

    b) confused use. Historically long press) gesture on a mobile devices mimics the secondary button press on a computer mouse. Traditionally it gave you the same alternative options as the secondary mouse click on a computer. So long-press for tips is competing with another function. Frankly, allowing the user to access “less, commonly used functions” is a far better pattern. “Help” could be one of the options provided.

    c) gesture dissonance: the user has to drop their uncertainty of clicking the button in order to learn what the button does — wtf?!!!

    d) Perhaps the greatest challenge is that nobody knows how to communicate it (contrast with the “Like” button that was self-marketing). Swiping could be illustrated in a sketch and also mimicked existing human behavior of swiping or dismissing something no longer needed.

    e) not many apps use it. I long-pressed a bunch of Google Apps and can’t get a tooltip to show. Naturally if Apps don’t use it, then user’s won’t use it.

    IOW — Long-press for mobile tips are dead. Sorry material.io 🙁