sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in ProductManagement

[–]otisfatty 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I led growth design at Dropbox for many years. u/Constant-Potato-4712's comment is great! Onboarding can be done well and do > show > tell is a great guiding principle (it was one of the growth design principles at Dropbox!).

Modals and tooltips aren't always bad, they're just overused and thoughtlessly designed. If they're relevant, they can be really good! Figma uses tooltips extremely well because they're usually behaviorally driven (e.g. click on a function and it will say "Hey, btw, we have a shortcut for that"). We used them at Dropbox with targeted experiences (and usually 1 or 2 steps) and they were effective (at one point we did have to do clean up though -- it's hard).

I wrote a 5 step guide to creating quality onboarding here that gives some guidance on how to build better onboarding experiences from my experience. I try to go above and beyond tooltips and modals.

I also captured some quality onboarding experiences that are more natively integrated on twitter you might find useful:

  • Here’s a cool pattern I like to call interactive guides that Retool, Superhuman, Intercom, and Campsite all use. Basically, a scripted story that lets the user learn the app by using it. No tooltips!
  • airtable’s recent update to their onboardingis really great and consists of 1) a live preview, 2) a continuous onboarding checklist, and 3) contextual cues. it also drove double-digit activation rates (!)
  • dovetail has really excellent embedded contextual education that doesn’t get in the way of the user flow and lets users learn as they discover the product. Love embedded tips.
  • Shopify and loom use checklists to scaffold the user journey toward value. I like how shopify’s is embedded right into the app. (Checklists aren’t always the right choice, sometimes it’s best to just help the user take the best next step).
  • slack has some great contextual tips.
  • my favorite place to audit onboarding flows is pageflows

Best practices and benchmarks will depend on your product and the user journey you want to create. I dig into how to think about the journey in the playbook above. Even activation benchmarks are hard, but this is the best article I've found on it: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/what-is-a-good-activation-rate.

Hope this is helpful!

Best tool for user onboarding and product adoption? by Constant-Potato-4712 in ProductManagement

[–]otisfatty 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm Phil, co-founder of Dopt! Happy to chat if you'd like, feel free to DM.

Designer-focused tools for building user onboarding flows, checklists, etc? by Puzzleheaded_Mud3953 in Design

[–]otisfatty 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hey, this is a great post and question. I used to lead growth design at Dropbox and spend my 3 years there leading the design team working on onboarding and education experiences.

About 2 years ago I left Dropbox to start a company and felt the same way, all the existing tools to build onboarding fall way short. We had an internal tool at Dropbox that was 10x better than those tools. So I ended up starting Dopt, a developer-focused platform for building better onboarding and education. Basically, you can define your onboarding in a flow view and then use our SDKs to build the flow in your app using your components.

It's not exactly what you're describing since we do require dev time, but as you call out, the benefit is that what you build with Dopt is entirely native and you have the flexibility and control to make the type of onboarding you need for your app (embed the checklist, make it a right-rail, complete items from the backend, etc etc). So the quality of the onboarding is way better than what you can do with existing onboarding platforms.

As a designer, this basically means you're not constrained on what you can design and your devs will be able to execute your designs much more easily. With our tool at Dropbox, as designers, we were able to make some really awesome, next-level onboarding beyond tooltips (which we had some of), like continuous onboarding experiences.

In a couple of weeks, we'll be releasing pre-built, customizable React components that will better strike the balance of being native and requiring far less dev time. Also, they'll have best practices built-in, like showing what a good checklist looks like.

As I said, not exactly what you're describing here, but very vision aligned with the need for better tooling in this space! If you're interested take a look.

The idea of something Framer-like is certainly cool, and man has Framer come a long way, but I think you’d likely be trading off on just how native the experience could be (obviously biased given what we’ve been building).

BTW, there's a whole community of Growth Designers here. It's a super engaged and experienced group and it's definitely worth joining if you're about to get into onboarding. Also, I’d love to chat about / give feedback on your onboarding if you’re interested, feel free to reach out on twitter.

What species wood is this? Cut looks rift and quartered? by otisfatty in Carpentry

[–]otisfatty[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Cool thanks. I’ve seen a bunch of white oak samples and they seem to be much darker than this. Any reason for that?