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What I learn making a hard to learn product?

Earlier this month I launch the MVP of my product, Diagram (a no-code way to build your backend). The initial results were positive. The landing page was performing fairly well (~15% conversion rate) but it soon became clear that the platform was hard to use. A lot of people were having issues finishing up their first endpoint on the platform.

Working on it for the last 3 weeks led to the following 3 lessons:

1. Less user friction > cleaner code
It is often better to sacrifice a simple solution for better user experience. Auto generating a project when a user creates an endpoint is a good example. Saves the time while also reduces onboarding friction for just a few lines of code.

2. Gifs are useful, hard and peculiar
A simple educational Gif can make a lot of difference but are harder to make than it seems. iMovie (for OSX users) and “Kens Burn” cropping animations can do the trick and save 120$ buying ScreenFlow. Also, Gifs take a lot of space. Mine was 3.2mb for 14.2 seconds. Using HTML5 video with autoplay instead worked flawlessly at 1/7th of the size (445kb).

3. Users should see value early
Getting used to my product I started to miss out on the hurdles that faced by new users who are unfamiliar with the platform. A clear “First User Win” goal helped a lot to eliminate all the unnecessary steps.

  1. 1

    Great tips! Using gifs or short videos to explain a feature/process is a great idea. Can you share any resources that helped you create you gifs? I'm getting comfortable with Sketch, but I'm totally new to any kind of motion editing

    1. 3

      I recorded my MacBook screen with Zappy. It's easy to use and free. You can also use OSX built-in screen recorder tool. Just hit Shift-Command-5 to open it up.

      Then I edited the recorded video with iMovie to make it more playful and fun. The “Kens Burn” in the crop settings is a great tool for the job! Exported it to Gif with ezgif.com video-to-gif converter.

      Pro tip: You can use ffmpeg to cut down on the dimensions and the frame rate of the MP4 file before converting it to a gif to reduce its size!

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