How do you teach your users how to use your app?
How do you guys help your users better understand your features? Do you do any kind of onboarding for new users? Do you write documentation? I've worked on lots of apps and this often gets overlooked. Usually we just didn't spend the time writing documentation, or we didn't know what to do onboard new users better. I'm working on www.wrkflows.io to try and solve this issue. We provide a knowledge base to host your help docs and a widget so your users can access them right inside your app. What we've found is that users typically want to just play around with things first and if they need help having it right there in app works best. Would love your feedback and ideas!
I'm building pretty substantial onboarding into the thing I'm making. Holding a user's hand through the first experience. That makes sense for my app because there's a very specific sequence of things that should be done... may not make as much sense if a user has tons of different options that are all "correct".
Basically when a user gets inside the site I overlay a full-screen modal that blocks out everything except the one button she should click to get started with her first action, and in the modal I explain how to use that feature. And I do this for a few different features, and then they never see it again after they use the feature once.
For http://gif.com.ai That's exactly how I'm doing it too. Show a help screen one time when the user enters and then don't distract them unless they reset.
Nice that's awesome! Do you guys do anything after a user has gone through your onboarding?
Wrkflows is just my side project, but at my full time job the project I'm working on doesn't have a self sign up anymore. We removed it and changed to a demo only process. It's super high touch, but we needed that with our early users. So the issue we ran into is how do you teach these existing users how to use our app.
Nothing after onboarding for now. Just trying to get the initial launch done at this stage so keeping it pretty simple. Will think about that down the road.
Would you guys use an external service down the road, or do you think you'd custom build something again?
Just me now. No team.
If down the road I/we are making a bunch of money, and if the external service saved me time and did just as good of a job, certainly.
Yea I think that's the way to do it if your app is simple enough at first. Just build something very specific that guides them through getting setup.
I've found while building our app it's helpful for me to document stuff anyways. Some of our features are getting more and more complicated and having a place to document how everything works has helped not only me but my non-developer team members.
Normally, they contact me (via email) and I often reply to it. After that I start mentioning it on the FAQ section (so I don't get that question again).
What do you guys use for your FAQ page?
Just answering general questions like why here and nowhere else.
I like the Drift integration. This makes it many times more useful. I think you need to change this image https://s3.amazonaws.com/wrkshp/static/wrkflows-www/heroimage-v3%402x.png
It was very confusing once the example came up and I was wondering why the widget in the graphic was sticking to the screen and not closing.
Updated the image to simplify it a bit, removed the text. Let me know what you think!
Yes. Much better. Well done. It adds focus back to the example.
Thanks! Yea we're not trying to compete with things like Drift and Intercom which do chat super well. Instead it's supposed to be like a help hub where you can find answers, or chat if you really need to.
Good point about that image! I hadn't even thought of that, going to update it.
My SaaS is a tool to craft and track learning paths https://crammut.com/ so the tutorial is the first learning path that appears automatically in the user's profile. We think it's cool because the user can play around and complete the tutorial at the same time.
Our first MVP had a complete wizard and onboarding, but users hated it. They just wanted to start using it.
Crammut site looks awesome by the way, nice job! I've found the same thing with wizards, people just want to start playing with things right away. Make sense cause I'm that way too, anytime I see popups or tutorials when I'm just starting out I immediately click them away.
We're trying to take that in considerations with Wrkflows. We used to allow you to create tutorials and tooltips walkthroughs, but I didn't think it made sense and was useful enough for people. So we switched to providing a help center widget where users could access help when they needed it. Cause after playing around with a new app for a bit, that's when I want to be able to search for help and I want it to be super easy to find on my own.
"They just wanted to start using it."
and you knew it how? Did you have a feedback widget on the site or did you record clicks?
We did personal interviews with testers. They used the tool in front of us, explained to us how they were feeling using it, and answer our questions.
Now we're using Hotjar to record user's activity. It's trickier because we have to guess things without asking, but it's very useful anyway.
We're also thinking about adding the ability to create a changelog. You could publish app updates, new features, or bug fixes. Your users could access them from your widget.
Would any of you guys use something like that?
Wrkflows is free to use to, so feel free to create an account and try it out.