Excellent feedback, and very true.. new user onboarding isn't as good as it should be. It's for non-technical users too, and I'll need to find a way to communicate to them as well.
Oof, being a one-man show is taxing. Thanks so much for your feedback, I've added a task in Teamwork to get on this!
Thanks for the feedback. We are working on making the onboarding easier and also improve the UI in general. Please get in touch with us if you have more feedback (you can use the support form on our website).
Thanks for the advice, I agree with your assessment. I'll figure something out and will make onboarding a smoother and more palatable process than it is now. It seems like that's my biggest issue at the moment.
A first time user with no background information on how to use your product can quickly get frustrated. Worst case, they might even believe your product was poorly designed. Sounds pretty bad, right? A great onboarding experience can solve this.
I have been trying to get the user onboarding process right for my recently launched product "ReadBoard" based on following insight.
"Please review your current onboarding (what do users experience during their first time inside your product and in the first week, including emails) and assess how much is about WHY vs. HOW."
I agree onboarding is key, especially at this point. Most users will start from the web site, not from sharing a folder, but some will start from sharing a folder, and I want that process smooth. I've got post-setup satisfaction among the (mostly early-adopter) users who've tried it, but that's because they only have to do it once. The "amazingly sweet solution" quote on http://ourdoings.com/ is from someone who went through the previous, even more complicated setup. But I definitely do need to make it smoother if I want to attract even more early adopters, much less mainstream users.
I think as long as this is made clear, it's a great idea -- onboarding a new dev is a rare opportunity to get dedicated but fresh eyes on your internal processes.
I agree, that's one of the challenges we have to tackle.
The commands being contextual to the page you are on helps in my point of view, but we have to explore ways of onboarding users in a proper way.
I'd be curious to hear about how you onboard new users - from all appearances, the vagueness/single page sort of force people to register if they want to learn about the product. What kind of onboarding or lifecycle setup have you implemented - and any preliminary stats you can share?
This was the onboarding program that we had had and I’m trying to devise a replacement for. Because yeah, it sucked as both an experience and also in terms of effectiveness.
What I’m doing now is a weekly series of recorded hands-on/whiteboard sessions, building up from the 10,000 foot view of the software (the most fundamental user journey) and working piece by piece towards the details. And I’m letting the onboarders steer the agenda - they tell me what they’re ready for next, a few days ahead, and I pull the diagrams/exercises/links/docs ahead and then just kinda wing it.
It’s more effective, and enjoyable, as far as I can tell. It’s probably not paced as ideally as it could be, but as a manager I have likited time to give to something like this. We’re getting to the point where I think some of the veteran engineers could take slices and host the discussion. And the recordings will hopefully act as an accelerator for the next batch of newbies.
I still feel like there’s a lot better a resources and time strapped manager could do.
Oof, being a one-man show is taxing. Thanks so much for your feedback, I've added a task in Teamwork to get on this!
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