Almost every one of my projects have "Re-evaluate empty states" close to the end of building an MVP, to go back, check and do something better than showing empty lists. You rarely see it, but on launch day, it's 90% of what people see.
Think onboarding also falls into this category, I tend to think that it's a lot of work for nothing because you can only see it once but it's probably one of the most important things to get right because it's at the start of the experience.
I think automating onboarding can be pushed to post-MVP, it's not critical to write the code to get someone into a good state. But that is to say, you need a separate onboarding experience - something even hands-on for your initial users.
This very much depends on the type of business you are making though, but you are right to say that something needs to be in place.
Most definitely. I'm super passionate about onboarding. In my life I had one good onboarding experience: joining Google made me feel like a hero on a parade. Every other company was meh, and 3 or 4 actually left me wondering if I made a mistake joining.
With how hard and expensive it is to hire, having new starters wondering if they made a huge mistake and they should revert before it's too late, on Monday evening, it's really bad, and good onboarding is not that expensive.
Heck, if you are good at onboarding you also involve the existing members of the company to reiterate that this is a great place to work for, which generates good will and loyalty.
Since Google I have tried to improve the onboarding of every company I was at, and it was always despite the company, I was always opposed. I don't get it.
Totally agree with this. Before releasing the beta for my startup Beneath, we went through every page and added a call-to-action (CTA) for empty lists, and I think it was probably the single most effective change we made to improve onboarding.
We gave ourselves a little nudge to always add CTAs by adding a callToAction property on the React component we use to also show loading spinners and error messages for lists and the like :D
This doesn't come up the first time, but I can't reproduce it. Might be an issue from Mailchimp (it's an error from their API, when you subscribe an email that is already on the list). Could it be, you were already on the list?
Almost every one of my projects have "Re-evaluate empty states" close to the end of building an MVP, to go back, check and do something better than showing empty lists. You rarely see it, but on launch day, it's 90% of what people see.
Think onboarding also falls into this category, I tend to think that it's a lot of work for nothing because you can only see it once but it's probably one of the most important things to get right because it's at the start of the experience.
I think automating onboarding can be pushed to post-MVP, it's not critical to write the code to get someone into a good state. But that is to say, you need a separate onboarding experience - something even hands-on for your initial users.
This very much depends on the type of business you are making though, but you are right to say that something needs to be in place.
Most definitely. I'm super passionate about onboarding. In my life I had one good onboarding experience: joining Google made me feel like a hero on a parade. Every other company was meh, and 3 or 4 actually left me wondering if I made a mistake joining.
With how hard and expensive it is to hire, having new starters wondering if they made a huge mistake and they should revert before it's too late, on Monday evening, it's really bad, and good onboarding is not that expensive.
Heck, if you are good at onboarding you also involve the existing members of the company to reiterate that this is a great place to work for, which generates good will and loyalty.
Since Google I have tried to improve the onboarding of every company I was at, and it was always despite the company, I was always opposed. I don't get it.
I was more thinking of a software kind of onboarding perspective but good to get your thoughts on that kind of onboarding as well and I agree :p
☝️ This
Totally agree with this. Before releasing the beta for my startup Beneath, we went through every page and added a call-to-action (CTA) for empty lists, and I think it was probably the single most effective change we made to improve onboarding.
We gave ourselves a little nudge to always add CTAs by adding a
callToActionproperty on the React component we use to also show loading spinners and error messages for lists and the like :DMay be you should write about this UX Mistake as well.
UX Mistake 18: Don't show technical error message to users
Example from your own website: https://pasteboard.co/JZ8ML2m.png
This doesn't come up the first time, but I can't reproduce it. Might be an issue from Mailchimp (it's an error from their API, when you subscribe an email that is already on the list). Could it be, you were already on the list?
Yes I am already on the list . When I tried to subscribe again I got this error
Ah, ok, this was expected behavior. And I just released a nicer error text ;) Thanks for noticing and telling me.
Excellent tip! This definitely improves user experience and keeps the user's attention.
Thanks for sharing. This will actually come in handy, I never thought of this.
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Interesting. Do you have a big button to remove all demo data, or how do you transform a users data from demo to «real»?
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I see. Did you user test that behavior? My hypothesis would be that people could be confused when the demo data just disappears.
This comment was deleted a year ago.