Your users are stupid
Users are stupid
-
They aren't patient enough to go through your onboarding tour
-
They won't read the instructions, they'll just skim.
-
They'll skip the video instructions.
-
They won't attend a demo call.
Remember that game you installed and in the beginning it asked if you knew how to play already and you lied saying "yes" because you were impatient and ten minutes into the game you don't know what the hell you're doing? Your user is exactly that.
Earlier I just thought some users were dumb, and some really are. But I recently discovered something,
-
They don't have the patience to go through your onboarding.
-
They don't want to put in the effort to read.
-
They feel anxious to go through the video.
-
They feel scared that you'll force-sell to me on the demo call.
The problem is these people are smart but impatient, which makes them behave like fools.
Make your app extremely stupid for stupid people. That's good UX.
The SaaS Manifesto for building good products:
- One action per page
- No context switching
- Force them into actions (never give the option to skip or move to a different page)
- Images and text instructions seem better than videos because they're faster.
You're talking the truth but with the wrong title.
I know people skip many instructions, tours, tutorials, and helpful contexts the product provides but that doesn't mean it's the users' fault, it's the product's lack of great experience.
People aren't impatient, they just value their most important resources which is time and they don't want to spend it on anything that doesn't worth it.
If you are trying to solve users' problems, you should play in their game and not expect them to play the way you like.
That's why we do user research, that's why we learn psychology and human behavior - to know the users better deeply and emphatically. So we can design a delightful experience for them that they enjoy having.
I'm the user. :)
Man, most of my users do the step by step tour. 8 out of 10. I always skip tutorials, but most of the world isn't me.
Or maybe I did a good product tour 🤔
I don't think not giving your user an option to skip is a good idea. If you force the user to act the way you want, you will likely lose them. If someone does not want to use your product, they will never go through the onboarding process, even after watching the introductory videos.
Most "Terms of service" agreements are un-skippable, yet everyone just instantly scrolls through them. Not having a "Skip" button doesn't change anything, just makes the product worse.
Exactly, it's a terrible advice.
I loved the hook on this post - pulled me deep into reading it - right from the first article.
We all feel this at some point - wouldn’t it be easier if the user did just one step of the onboarding. Instead of just signing up and giving up.
Well - means we need to do a better job at getting them to do it.
Or sticking to the onboarding - till they do it.
I've thought about this a bit with Squeaky. We actually don't have an onboarding process, we just dump them straight into the only important page in the application that they'll need to engage with to get started with the product. It's actually worked quite well, with 75% of our new sign ups ' self-activating'.
I do feel this pressure though, like 'we need to optimise our onboarding and make it feel like a handheld journey' cause that's what everyone tells you to do.
Interesting.
I have the exact opposite issue with Hirevire - where most of the users don't engage with the application. It's only month 2 after launch - so need to either tweak the message or improve onboarding.
On a separate note - Squeaky looks interesting.
What's the very first thing you ask people to do when they enter the app? I imagine it's something like
?
Yeah - that's exactly it.
Seems fairly low friction, what percentage of people complete step 1, and what percentage complete step 2?
Right now - zero percent of users have completed step 2.
Out of 18 users who got to step 1 in two months......
So the problem is most likely that there's not enough people at the top of the funnel.
Yeah that definitely seems to be the case. Don't be too critical of the onboarding steps until you've had enough volume go through them - more likely at this stage that your real issue would be not getting the right audience/people to try the product. Do you have many recruiters or hiring managers in your network, are they trying it out?
The few recruiters in my network have not been trying it out - as much as I expected.
You're right about the real issue.
I think just reach out to more and more of them. At first I thought to suggest reaching out to hiring managers and Head of People/Talent type roles, but maybe it's the sort of tool you could get in front of almost anyone in the HR/Talent teams as all it takes is a few curious people to try it out so you get feedback. Likewise it may actually appeal to small-sized startup founders as they are often trying to scale up but don't necessarily have time and budget for extensive and time-consuming hiring processes.
Anyway, I do see a lot of potential in what you're building, don't give up!
Depends on the audience and also how critical the tool is for the business, in which case, they will even manage to learn to fly a spaceship.
haha nice @goforbg you have mention the right thing but the scenario is mostly people already have seen the video on YT how they can use the tools that's why the leave the instruction and skip the tour and start working on the website/tool.
Right, but in my case, a lot of the users skip onboarding and then give churn survey feedback as "I didn't know how to use it".
Agree with some points in your article -however I feel like there's something more to this comment. I would suspect there are perhaps UX considerations in your onboarding.
Recently read this article when redesigning my onboarding experience. I matched it with looking at data and talking to my users. Was able to find a lot of things I misunderstood.
At least you have users who churned out - there must be folks who never even get to the "becoming a user" part because they got distracted before signup.
That's not cool.
What a clickbait
I'd rather skip the tutorial by the creator of the software and google the problems I run into. A product that solves for this use case really well? Webflow. Googling "how do I XYZ" almost always results in a Webflow course, video, help article, or forum post.
Not stupid, but busy and distracted.
Stupid means you have to explain everything.
Busy means you have to motivate them to focus or provide solutions that are obvious & don't need explaining.
It's not the same.
Come on :) I's just a metaphoric/colorful language. He does not mean it literally. I have actually used this expression for decades, internally mostly.
Yeah no problem. But worth considering the "too busy" angle as leads to consider how to hook a user quickly. Some can be too busy and stupid of course.
Yes, everyone could behave stupid when busy and distracted..
Missed my highway exit twice, when I was having a deep business conversation while driving.. never forget that , always avoid that
"Remember that game you installed and in the beginning it asked if you knew how to play already and you lied saying "yes" because you were impatient and ten minutes"... haha I feel targeted. Love this!
My feels exactly - as I switch between indie hackers and hackernews 😁
Absolutely.
This is one of the problems with free trials and freemium.
These models on your users being intelligent & the product being perfectly set up for them to use it, love it (but not enough to not want/need the premium version) and stick with it.
Just wrote an article about this on here - https://www.indiehackers.com/post/why-freemium-free-trials-are-a-terrible-growth-strategy-for-startups-937542e2a1
Awesome, I think I'll remove the freemium soon with inboxpirates. Will definitely give this a read
Users are also distracted frequently. They're listening to music, someone else in the room asks them a question, they get talking for a few minutes, and then they come back to your onboarding flow and can't remember what they just did.
From our perspective, we're thinking, "How the heck could someone mess this up?" But we have to be understanding of the wildly different contexts that surround the screens our users are on.
Exactly - I constantly open an app or a website and switch to social media totally forgetting what I was trying to do.
Being sticky with the user is not as easy as I thought when I first started building my app.
right exactly, I have 45 tabs open, at least 2 of them are new apps I was trying out but haven't had a chance to get back to cause there was a bunch of steps I needed to perform 🤦♂️
Exactly! I remember publishing this and thinking I missed the attention span part of it.
It's not that the users are stupid but that users don't want to spend time learning new things. You have to present information in a functionality that already is familiar for the users, so that they can take actions instinctually, without having to think about them, they should just do what feels "natural".
I don't think not giving your user an option to skip is a good idea. If you force the user to act the way you want, you will likely lose them.
https://garagedoorsrepaircarrollton.net/
“ Force them into actions (never give the option to skip or move to a different page)”
— oof… this drives me insane and is a sure way for me to drop off 😅
This is indeed the case. Users are lazy and try not to give skip/ignore options if they can.
Force them into action? You’re asking then to abandon the whole page?
No - perhaps your design is full friction. You need to deeply understand the human condition.
Sounds great for a simple application.
hmm I like the way you presented that they aren't actually stupid but got no time
That's bold.
I get your point but for me user attention must be earned. If a product doesn’t solve my pain points or make me money why should I give it my attention. Artificially force user attention like non skippable ads is a big no.
Your so right, I was gonna do an automated pentest but after I had to do extra steps I was gone.
A smart way is also to build your onboarding tour like a tree, with options to have the short version or an enriched version, with regular options to skip and discover by themselves.
Making them feel like they are actors instead of being pulled somewhere.
You're talking the truth but Depends on the audience and also how critical the tool is for the business, in which case, they will even manage to learn to fly a spaceship.
Hi @goforbg
Good to see you here. I won't call them stupid. The products have to be highly intuitive.
Sadly in our case https://skilledup.life - free talent for tech startups (once subscribed), I'm still running version 1. To overcome this, we have deployed a team of support heroes who help through Tawk Chat (bottom right on our website).
At some stage, I need to improve the product. As we focus on traction instead of product and we have unlimited free talent, we ourselves have become less efficient. I'm fully aware of this - just need to action.
Using your stupid analogy - I would say, I am a stupid founder (been aware but not doing something immediately).
All the best.
[email protected]
Most users even including me want to dwell into interface without knowing much about it and like to figure it out afterwards.
I find onboarding instructions right at the start is too overwhelming.
On a serious note, users must be able to access that information of rules/instructions including videos whenever they want, that I consider will be real benefit for users.
Note: "force them into actions" works only sometimes, if someone implements the same all through the product then I am happy to leave that product.
Super good points - Whenever a user hesitates, he starts to worry, when he worries, he wants to escape.
Make every step/page actionable with confidence, you may have multiple actionable choices on a page, but there should be only ONE LARGE COLOR button for a user to click on.
Stupid apps only address majority of the population. The issue is that it is easy which makes it a commodity. Nothing wrong with that business but just got to think how to deal with commodity.
Many years ago, I had a conversation and the question got me thinking was..."Do you want to make money off the poor people or do you want to do something else?"
The preposition about the users (they are stupid, impatient etc.) is pretty wrong and can lead to more mistakes as it seems to me you do not understand the humans' nature.
This problem is well known and was reviewed in detail in 2000 by Krug ("Don't make me think" book).
The users are not dumb or stupid or impatient, they just don't want to waste their time on your app or a website, especially if it's designed badly. All you need to do is to create a great experience without the possibility for them to make a mistake (so-called "fool-proof" - another concept that was created maybe 50 years ago).
But it's not easy and many developers prefer writing long manuals, and documentation, making explaining videos and creating boring onboardings that lead to the user's mistakes, thinking they are fools and losing them as customers.
Look - the gamers never ever read any manuals. I even doubt if such manuals exist. Nevertheless, they feel pretty good and confident in any new game. Why is that? A great UX, a great design.
Don't spend your time calling users dumb, instead create a great UX, get feedback, and remake it again until it's easy and doesn't require reading a word of documentation.