Onboarding is usually considered to be the first 5 minutes of the user’s experience in the App. But successful Apps always have FEATURE #2. This needs onboarding too!
Scott Middleton challenged this perspective in our recent Onboarding Best Practices webinar. Scott has his own “Aha” moment about why onboarding is really “Continuous Onboarding”.
- “DO NOW” (the journey to the “Aha” moment which is the user’s primary JTBD discussed here).
- “DO LATER” for secondary important features that will deepen engagement and increase retention.
Here is a couple of examples from Google mobile Apps:
In the first, a new button is announced with a simple tip: “A new way to customize Discover”. Its a secondary feature but powerful to announce as it allows the user to simply tune their news to their preferred topics.
The second coachmark, is a more agressive modal element that blocks your attention until you deal with it. Google clearly wants to get stickier with your searches.
The animation below shows a couple of familiar launchers you can use to announce new features or target specific users/segments to:
a) help them out
b) trigger action towards a goal
They are:
- Little Red Gift. This is Slack’s way of letting you know about new things.
- Glowing Hotspot. This the pulsing effect is handy for attracting attention that you want action on.
- Tooltips are the silent unobtrusive helpers.
The latter 2 were once upon a time hard-coded into the application. Now its easy to deploy these:
i) without writing code
ii) target specific users or segments
iii) measure the analytic engagement or improvement on a goal that you want the user’s to complete.
