In an earlier post, I wrote about setup wizards with tips on when to use them and how to design them. The guidance I shared in that article is extensible across every type of setup experience, but I’d like to take a moment to show how that guidance relates to a very specific type of setup experience called companion setup. In this post, I’ll introduce companion setup, when it’s useful, and provide tips on how to choreograph the flow within it.
Discussion about user onboarding often focuses on teaching new users how to use a product’s interface. There are dozens of third-party plugins that offer various ways to point out product navigation, features, and affordances. However, this only scratches the surface of what onboarding can be about. The biggest opportunities for onboarding happen at higher levels.
Similar to how The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) says that employee onboarding can happen at multiple levels, user onboarding can also be tiered. Here’s the 4 levels of user onboarding that I currently think about, from lowest highest level: interface orientation, process onboarding, new meanings onboarding, and systems understanding.
I often talk about onboarding as having a few jobs: Building trust; familiarizing users with a product’s offerings; setting up logistics; and guiding users toward next steps, until they achieve a steady state.
That third item in the list, setting up logistics, sometimes becomes the responsibility of setup wizards. I’ve worked on and encountered a fair number of setup wizards in my time working on apps, devices, and operating systems. In this post, I’ll give you an overview of what goes into designing one.
…it’s this classic: rely on recognition rather than recall.
Continue readingIt’s Clippy’s birthday!
On November 19, 1996, Microsoft announced the release of Office 97, and the famously overzealous paperclip assistant was born. Here’s just a little bit about Clippy (full name: Clippit) and it’s relationship to onboarding.
Continue readingThere’s a term used in the product development world that has started to make me cringe, even though I know I’ve used it before. It’s unavoidable if you work on any experience that even remotely touches user onboarding. But it can have a negative impact on human-centered product design. The offending term? “User education.”
Continue readingIn conjunction with the launch of my book by the same name, I’ve created a talk and workshop that help teams understand how to build better onboarding experiences for new users of their products. The talk and workshops have been featured at events like IxDA Sydney, UX Fest (prev. UX London), UX Australia, CPHUX Passion Talks, and Button: The Content Design Conference.
A good onboarding experience welcomes new users and guides them from their current situations to lasting success. But it often gets reduced to a one-size-fits-all, front-loaded piece of instruction. This talk covers why teams need to move past front-loaded instruction and instead embrace guided interaction.
Key takeaways from the “Better Onboarding” talk:
The “Better Onboarding” talk is available in a 30 min, 45 min, or 1 hour format (not including Q&A). Contact me if you’re interested in having me give this talk.
The workshop gives teams a process for designing user onboarding that guides new users from their different starting situations to the same destination of success. It pulls in a mix of activities from my book as well as some updated content from previous workshops. This workshop suits designers, product managers, content designers, and more, no matter what stage their product’s onboarding experience is in.
Through a mix of presentation and hands-on activities, participants learn how to:
The “Better Onboarding Journeys” workshop has been run virtually and in person, and runs approximately 4 hours (can be extended to 6 in special circumstances). Contact me if you’re interested in having me run this workshop.
I’m a User Experience (UX) designer, and I happen to have a penchant for the user onboarding side of it. All UX professionals are onboarding designers, in a way. That’s because UX design involves closing the gap between systems, services, and the humans that use them through thoughtful design of virtual and physical interfaces. Good UX designers work hard to minimize how much time people have to spend on learning and using interfaces, trying to make them as intuitive as possible. This is no small feat given how every new user brings a unique set of mental models with them, and how limited current technologies are in providing perfectly individualized personalisation.
Now let’s shift to the neurotechnology industry; specifically, brain computer interfaces (BCIs). BCIs use sensors, which can range from non-invasive to invasive, to “measure brain activity, extract features from that activity, and convert those features into outputs that replace, restore, enhance, supplement, or improve human functions” (ScienceDirect). That definition can bring up ideas from sci-fi stories like The Matrix, Upload, or Altered Carbon, where characters can download expertise, control machines with their minds, and do other superhuman things.
But alongside these ideas, I worry that a question may also be forming in people’s minds: “Do we need the discipline of UX design to close the gap between humans and systems if we have direct-to-brain interfacing?”
Continue readingI frequently get asked if onboarding needs to be done differently for products in the enterprise or B2B spaces, so thankfully the folks over at GrowthDesigners.co gave me a space to answer that question. Spoiler: the principles that underpin good onboarding apply to all kinds of products, just like the principles of good product design don’t change just because the audience changes, but there are some specific considerations for the B2B space.
Over the years, I’ve encountered a variety of posts, books, papers, and talks that have expanded my thinking about what goes into good user onboarding. That’s because user onboarding is a blend of many educational, behavioral, human resources, design, and business practices, rather than a separate instance of design.
Continue reading
Digital painting (Illustrator on iPad)
I sketched this idea of people hanging upside down from floating inner tubes two years ago, without knowing how I wanted to render the piece or what I wanted it to say. Eventually, I realised I wanted to say something about plastic in our oceans…so here we are.
This Adobe Design Circle panel was held in December of 2020. It featured growth design experts such as Molly Norris Walker and Chetana Deorah, and was facilitated by Andy Budd.
This panel covered the burgeoning discipline of Growth Design, how to structure teams around growth, and how it relates to other design activities like user onboarding and product design. You can watch the 1 hour recording here (may require registration).
I recently downloaded a calculator app. This app greeted me with a series of first-run tooltips explaining various parts of the app. It was an example of an “explicit” first-run experience—when guidance is provided on temporary layers or in one-off flows—that was unnecessary. Let’s quickly run through some of the issues with applying an explicit educational approach to this calculator app, in the hope it can help you decide if implementing an “explicit” onboarding experience for your new users is the right way to go.
Continue readingOver the last few months, I asked different people who work on products in services, in a variety of industries, to share their perspectives on user onboarding. While I’ve heard from many people over the years, I wanted to ask a few pointed questions. Via questionnaires and interviews, 48 people* shared with me the challenges they faced in trying to create a good user onboarding experience, the goals they felt user onboarding needed to achieve, and how they defined the scope of it. My goal was to understand the range of perspectives different people have about user onboarding, and find common themes. In the spirit of sharing, this post is a lightweight recap of what stuck out most from these conversations (and I’d love to hear if your perspective is similar or different!).
Continue readingThis piece was written together with Joe Macleod and also published as part of UXLX 2020.
When we design products and services, we focus a lot on the core user experience, or what we envision seasoned users to be doing day to day. But a good product or service will be bookended by a strong beginning, and a strong end.
Continue readingWhen people think of user education in products, they’re often thinking of certain set of UI patterns. In some cases, these patterns can be helpful. But, in most other cases, the patterns are overused and applied inappropriately to many situations. They quickly become anti-patterns.
I’ve illustrated that slippery slope by drawing these “patterns” as if they were Pokemon evolutions. You know, when a seemingly harmless pattern can turn into a formidable beast.
Continue readingI founded the UX and research presence for the first Google Photos team in Sydney, Australia in 2017. Our team was established to explore a “portfolio” of new opportunities for the Google Photos ecosystem.
The team started off small, and my early role on the team was as UX lead and sole UX designer. As a result, I ran strategic activities to define projects, in addition to doing hands-on product design. I identified and led the pursuit of new opportunities by synthesising existing research to find insights; conducting internal and external research directly; and running problem definition and conceptual ideation workshops with the team’s VP, engineering director, and my product manager counterpart, with input from business development, marketing, and other Google teams. We came up with projects that ranged from solid product ideas that could get started straight away, to bigger ideas that involved new types of audiences and so required a more learning-oriented approach.
One of our first launches was the Google Photos Library API and Partner Program, introduced at Google I/O 2018. The API was built to support the increasing need for people to be able to use their photos across the different apps and devices they use. I defined the first round of UX principles that informed the API’s acceptable use policy for the Partner Program. I created the initial version of the UX guidelines as well as the frontend UI for a sample application for the GitHub repository. I also hired an additional designer to take over ownership of API reviews with partners.
For the bigger ideas, I first documented all assumptions, hired a user research vendor to work with to follow up on the assumptions. I then designed everything from pilot programs, to vision storyboards and scenarios to rally the engineering team around, and built prototypes for mobile and web experiences that would be launched in the pilot programs. I also designed the flows/UI/illustrations in the end-user experience.
Over time, I grew a local UX team of designers and researchers to support our expanding portfolio as well as continued iteration of initiatives that had gained investment. Members of this team have publicly launched multiple iterations of Google Photos APIs as well as Gallery Go, a lightweight photo gallery app designed to work on Android Go devices.
This is a time when we’re seeing thousands of products and services trying to give users guidance about a single community issue: Coronavirus, or COVID-19. I’ve included a few brief considerations for designing this kind of in-app messaging, along with examples.
