On-board users well
Most products need good documentation - FAQs, “how to”s, explanatory documents. But if your product is heavily reliant on documentation you could stand to improve the usability of your product. New users should especially be saved from reading lots of documentation. Editing Wikipedia is a fairly complex process, it requires learning certain mechanics and a new culture. Bringing new users on board (on-boarding) means thinking through what information to present when, how to be understood, and how to engage the user.
me presenting at a monthly metrics meeting
What information when
It’s important to prioritize the information given to a user. You want to give them just the information that they need at the stage that they are in. For example before a user makes an edit we first wanted them to know that Wikipedia is edited by people. This gets them to think that they could be one of those users. At this point we don’t need to give them all of the intricacies of how editing is done, just that it is possible. When someone has already made 5 or so edits, what we want to start doing is letting them discover things they might be interested. Looking at the different stages you can think through what the user needs and also what you know about that user in that stage.
How to be understood
Now that you know what information you want to present you need to think about how to be understood. One example here is when someone was about to make an edit we wanted to encourage them and give them context about the interface they are about to see. The best way we thought to be able to give this information was through a short coaching mark. Oftentimes less is more. Here we didn’t feel we needed to communicate what “markup” was. On the next page they would soon understand what we meant by “markup”. What was important for them to remember is that we didn’t want them to get intimidated by it.
When this edit guider was introduced we A/B tested it. It increased activation rates from 38.6% to 42.1% over no edit guider.
Engaging the user
Of course giving a user information is half the battle. The other half is to keep them going. Give a user information that they aren’t motivated to use is pointless. One thing that is true of most products, and was true of Wikipedia, was that if we could get an editor to engage more in their first time we were much more successful in keeping them as an editor. One thing we tried was a feature we called “Getting Started / Keep going”.
After they made their first edit we sent them to another article that we told them needed help. This was meant to give them the feeling that they were needed. We also took them to an article that we knew needed a certain specific type of help. Because the need was specific we could then give them a little bit of training and let them apply what they had learned to a real life article that needed their help.
Conclusion
Keeping these aspects in mind will help you on-board your new users well. The most compelling products work even without good on-boarding. But poor on-boarding will still mean fewer potential users.