A transcript of Episode 272 of UX Podcast. James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom are joined by Krystal Higgins to discuss what onboarding is an how we can design it into our products better.
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This transcript has been machine generated and checked by Dave Trendall.
Transcript
Computer voice
UX podcast episode 272.
[Music]
James Royal-Lawson
Hello, everybody. Welcome to UX podcast, coming to you from Stockholm, Sweden. We are your hosts, James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom, balancing Business, Technology, people and society with listeners in 200 countries and territories in the world, from Iceland to Sri Lanka.
Per Axbom
Krystal Higgins is a designer, painter and scuba diver. I love it when people share those extra tidbits in their bios. She’s also the author of ‘Better Onboarding’, a new book from A Book Apart. And in it, she takes us through all the stages that teams go through as they define, design, and maintain user onboarding.
James Royal-Lawson
Krystal joins us today to share some teasers from her book, crush some of the myths about what onboarding is, and is not, and to help us approach this space where a better understanding of the possibilities and opportunities that exist to help products make more sense to the people who use them. So I guess, probably the most sensible, sensible place to start is, what do we actually mean by onboarding?
Krystal Higgins
Yeah, onboarding, a very used term. These days, everyone likes saying, hey, let’s design an onboarding experience. And, you know, we need a product that has an onboarding experience. The way I kind of view onboarding is, it’s a journey of acclamation and taking many actions in a product that eventually gets someone from the state where they don’t really know what’s going on yet, or even what they might want to do in the future and a product to one where they’re very comfortable using it and kind of one of the core users of our service or product. It’s not the first time use, just that one app open, that stuff is definitely part of onboarding, but it’s not definitive of onboarding.
James Royal-Lawson
I guess that would be the, I suppose the thing that you would jump to first, if you were not really on top of all this, and you go, you’d answer the question yourself, what is onboarding? I guess it would be, ‘Oh, it’s the first time I use something’, or it’s kind of, you know, the opening, it’s the unboxing.
Krystal Higgins
Yeah, yeah. And unboxing is a great word, right? I think unboxing and onboarding, have gotten very conflated. And also onboarding is sort of conflated with that first time experience, because a lot of companies use the word onboarding, to describe that one day of orientation meetings that you might have, or induction meetings at a new company. And so we’ve interpreted in the product world, well, it’s that one, you know, tour through the product that you need, and then everything’s golden. But as a lot of companies are finding with employee onboarding products as well, you kind of want to know what you’re building up to. So onboarding has to build up to a clear state. And it’s great to have a great unboxing experience. But what is it that that’s helping people grow into over time? It’s not always something you can get out of just focusing on that one moment in time.
Per Axbom
Yeah, another prejudice, I think I sort of had was that onboarding, is that you teach people how to use the app or service. But it’s, it’s so much more than that. It’s also you teaching why to use, which was your smartwatch example, but also when to use and getting ready to use in different steps of using the service. So all of that was sort of an ‘aha moment’ for me. Realising that that is, of course, is also onboarding.
Krystal Higgins
Absolutely. You know, it’s it’s one thing to teach people, you know, how the structure of something is set up, and how to navigate around, but absolutely, like, are they motivated enough by what the product offers in order to navigate around. You have to justify to them, what is it that they’re spending their time and their effort learning, and why is that important? So it’s almost the top layer of a bigger pyramid where you have to get the core motivations down and help people really understand what the value proposition of a product is before you can then start being like, hey, now it’s important for you to learn how to use this product.
Per Axbom
Exactly. And something I do often, when I talk to clients, is I argue for the onboarding video that helps people get to grips with it, but you actually offered some critique for that.
Krystal Higgins
I do, I do. It’s not necessarily as bad as you may think. My critique of it is the onboarding video is a tough thing to get people to watch and actually internalise the first time they visit a product or open an app, because they don’t really know what they don’t know yet. And so asking them to spend 90 seconds, three minutes, however long a video is, giving them a tour of something they haven’t really seen, is a big ask. But you can still have videos and things like that. But maybe later when once people want to get a deeper dive maybe as part of your help content, or in the context of something where they’ve actually shown some intent to engage a bit deeper.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, that’s a good point, though. So what kind of things would you look for to get the idea that your current onboarding isn’t working as well as maybe you’d expect? You know, you’ve got that video that’s that’s been you’ve been doing for a while and been updating costing you lots of effort resources to do, what do you look for to say, we should go somewhere else?
Krystal Higgins
Yeah, there’s a there’s a number of signals that you can look for. And these are just some examples. So for one, you might find that you’re losing a lot of customers and their first 30 or 90 days, however long, is a good window for your product. And yet, the ones who maybe receive hands on support from customer service are successful. So what then you start to see there’s that perhaps there’s something in the the new user experience, for those that aren’t getting hands-on support that is kind of causing them to drop off. So you might want to do a bit of comparison between people who are getting support and people who are not. Other things are just seeing low engagement, low retention in those first 30 or 90 days, customer support costs as well and looking at the tickets that maybe customer support is getting. If they’re handling a lot of stuff that was covered by a video or you thought it was covered by a video, it’s showing you that perhaps the video is not doing the right job to help inform people about these things. That’s just an example of some ways that you can start to look at seeing if you need a better way.
James Royal-Lawson
Because I guess with the video itself, that just checking whether someone’s made it through the video, isn’t a good enough signal in itself, I guess.
Krystal Higgins
Absolutely. You definitely want to look at your localised metrics as well. I do like to have people look at onboarding and measure in the context of kind of broader metrics like engagement or attention. But absolutely, if you’ve already implemented a, call it a piece of education or guidance, looking at that, and seeing, hey, are people closing this right away? Are people dwelling on it? Are they going all the way through to your point, or just skipping out halfway through. All of that can help you understand if your current strategies aren’t just working.
Per Axbom
There are a couple of phrases that I think are key to understanding how you’re explaining onboarding to us. And they’re, of course, front-loaded instruction and unsupported immersion. I love those. And I love the front-loaded instruction one. And you’re what you’re saying there is that, well, essentially, that people are given instructions at the beginning of using a new service, I think, and it’s often too much, and it’s not in the right moment.
Krystal Higgins
Yeah, yeah, exactly. When we front-load things, that’s exactly how it sounds. We’re trying to cover all of our bases by guessing all the things that someone should know, in one small window of time. And as you might guess, that’s not going to be, you know, possible for just somebody who might only need to know one thing, or somebody who just doesn’t understand the context of your product yet. So asking someone to basically sit in a lecture session where they’re somehow supposed to memorize all these things about your app, without having any way to know what of that will be important to them and what not. That’s a pretty difficult situation to put users in.
Per Axbom
And the other one, unsupported immersion, that would be just dropping them in, and help making them fend for themselves?
Krystal Higgins
Absolutely. So you know, it’s it’s one thing to have a really well designed product that sort of speaks for itself. But you do that thoughtfully by thinking about well, does it speak for itself with new users and existing users? But if you are just saying, you know, hey, we don’t have to worry about thinking about new users. Anyone who’s meant to use our product will figure it out. That’s a pretty exclusive route to take, especially because different people kind of learn things in different ways. So you don’t necessarily want to assume that the power users who made it through today are representative of all of the new audiences you might want to welcome tomorrow.
James Royal-Lawson
You also get that thing where people go, oh, our UX is so good,
Per Axbom
Yeah.
James Royal-Lawson
We don’t need to help them.
Krystal Higgins
Yeah, it can be can be such a difficult thing to convince a team of, right, and saying, actually, you know, it’s a good experience for those experienced users who have given us very specific feedback about how they want things to work but if you haven’t sat down and taken time to go, ‘what is this communicate to somebody who’s seeing it for the first time?’ and thinking about that thoughtfully, then yeah, it’s not saying that you don’t have a good experience for those existing users, but it is saying that perhaps you left out a batch of people in that thinking,
Per Axbom
That is such a common, I mean, that is so many people in usability argue for that and have done as long as I’ve been in the business that, that is why we do a usability test, so we won’t have to have instructions.
Krystal Higgins
Yeah, yeah. And definitely usability tests can help you understand how your core product design is contributing, or not so much, to the learnability and the comprehension of products. And I think there’s a great opportunity to make sure that anytime you’re running studies where it makes sense, try to split the participant group into some people who haven’t experienced your product before and some people who have, so you’re getting a balanced set of input from people who kind of understand your paradigms and people who just have no idea about how things are meant to work.
James Royal-Lawson
I suppose that leads on to one pondering or thinking about the question about, okay, onboarding, like getting on it, but you know, he said now about splitting up into maybe people have used product before and haven’t used before. So is there ever a point during your use of a product, where you’re no longer in need of onboarding? You know, does it come to an end?
Krystal Higgins
It’s a great question. onboarding has no one single end for every user. Like, it’s, it’s not, you know, as soon as you finish the setup flow or something like that. But there is a good definition of its end, which is, when people are getting into whatever you think of is core use of your product. So they’re in a sustained state, you know, first social media product, maybe it’s the person is contributing in some way to the community, you know, a couple times a week, whether that’s by liking something, or re-sharing something, posting something, anything like that. That might be one definition of core use, you basically want to make sure that people have managed to get to a state where they can sustain the things that are important to your product, if they haven’t gotten there yet, they might still be in kind of like the end stages of an onboarding experience.
James Royal-Lawson
It’s something we come across and think about or reflect on myself, sometimes when I see it is that, you know, you’ll open up an app, but you’re you’ve been using for years. And you know, it’s doing all the stuff you think you need to do with it, you’ve probably got a little list in your head of things that you’d maybe like to improve on it, but generally, you know, you’re getting on with life and the app. And then suddenly, you’ll get one of those carousel kind of things at the beginning. And it’ll go, ‘we’ve upgraded your app and here are the new features for you.’ And it’s effectively an onboarding video of things that have been completed in someone’s development sprint. I’m going to guess that you’re not a big fan of those.
Krystal Higgins
Yeah, look, those are moments that you definitely should call out in some way to somebody but for an existing user, you already know what they use and what they don’t use. Ideally, you know, you have some way of knowing that, but, you know, there’s no need to try and treat them like a brand new person by introducing things in a way that, you know, might be introduced to somebody who’s just opening the app in the first time, maybe give them a little bit more credit, put things you know, in line in the context of a page or a screen they normally go to, or call things out individually. Trying to, again, dump the information on someone and hoping they remember all those new features are added or upgraded is pretty tough. And it’s also tough when you consider that if some of the things you’re introducing are UI changes. Your toughest audience is probably your existing users. So you know, they’re going to have an even tougher time reworking all of their workflow, based just on a carousel, introducing a couple of new features.
Per Axbom
And that’s when we sort of delve into I think, with that example that James gave, is that there’s something new and there’s something new for me, because I’ve been using it for a while is that there are so many ways to look at different tools and techniques for onboarding because we mentioned video and these images and wizards. But one I particularly like is the hints one with the animation, where I think you had like a small dot vibrating or something like that, making a signal of some sort, which means that there’s something new over here and if you want to pay attention to it, you’re welcome. But if you don’t, that’s okay, as well, but it’s also within context.
Krystal Higgins
Yeah, 100%. You mentioned this. There are a lot of different patterns that we can use and I think teams tend to assume that, hey, we just have to invest in this one pattern. Maybe it comes as part of a plug-in or something like that. But the reality is that different patterns are going to be best for different situations. And so yeah, if you have, if you have a non critical update, or just a hint of something that you want existing or new users to understand, yeah, those lightweight kind of visual cues can be a great way to get them into that experience. And so you have to think really thoughtfully about, you know, is this a critical update, where is somebody in their context of using the product, what’s going to fit best with the screen? So it’s, it’s kind of getting back into the core product design, as opposed to thinking about onboarding being done on a completely separate layer that you can discard later.
James Royal-Lawson
I can imagine you’re in your team and there’s been a suggestion of doing one of those carousels at the beginning or something like that. And, and that’s been considered to be a cheaper route, because it’s something you can just slot in. It’s not disrupting anything else, it’s just kind of comes there, you push it in at, you know, point five there, and before they got to two. Whereas some things we’re talking about now with more in-context, onboarding, or assistance, in connection with a particular interactive element, that to me sounds more expensive, because now I’m gonna have to bolt something in in a particular place, which isn’t kind of like, just a nice little slot. How am I gonna win that case?
Krystal Higgins
Yeah, absolutely. Look, that’s it. That’s a tricky one. And you won’t be able to win every battle on this topic, unfortunately. But, what you can do is kind of back people off to what are the important things we need people or we want people to be doing in our product? What are the actions that we want them to be taking? You know, it all comes back to the content of what they want to put in that carousel. Like, what is it trying to achieve? And if you can get back to the ‘Well, we’re trying to make sure that they can successfully create their first document,’ then you go like, ‘what can we do in the actual flow of creating your first document to make this better?’. And in the book, I provide a structure of how you can break down guidance in one action to better see how guidance can actually exist throughout it. So in the prompt in the actual work of the action, and then how you follow up after that. And that helps people see how you can break down the work on a maybe per action basis, without necessarily having to just kind of like put everything into a carousel. So it kind of finds a middle ground between expensive and cheap.
Per Axbom
I actually figured out a response to that while I was listening to you, because I was thinking of, what happens when you redesign? Because that’s where I’m at right now in a project where there’s lots of things going on and it had to be built fast, because it was part of the pandemic response, but now there’s so many things we want to improve. But there are also tonnes and tonnes of instructions. And so on anything we improve, we need to find all those instructions and change it. So even just having a video or a text instruction makes things difficult and expensive as well, as soon as you have the redesign.
Krystal Higgins
100%. I experienced that on a project a while back for smartwatch, and we had a video and it was describing all the features of the watch. And then as soon as we needed to change things, the video needed to be retranslated, the images needed to be updated, the video needed to be recompiled. And so it was just like a large set of work for something that wasn’t even really benefiting the whole product. So you’re absolutely right. Like, the more of these kind of add-ons to get by in a short amount of time you create, the more work you’re going to have to do later to update them. The alternative is that you leave it and you don’t update it and then no one sees how out of date it is because they skip those things anyway.
Per Axbom
Exactly.
James Royal-Lawson
Thinking about it. Now, when you talk the redesign and all this, your organisation, how you understand, how your culture is internally must be a really great enabler for doing successful onboarding. I mean, if you’re, if you think back about when you’re proposing certain changes, if you’ve not got a culture that’s understood the benefits of onboarding, then I guess you’re gonna lose more of those arguments, aren’t you?
Krystal Higgins
Absolutely. It’s important to spend some time just kind of early on with your team, helping them understand what onboarding means. So whether it’s by no measuring what you have now and trying to tie it to retention or engagement or that core use that I was talking about earlier. Or trying to get folks to see how new users are experiencing your product today. Also just getting folks to try out new products of their own and put themselves in the new user mindset, right, so they can explore in journal experiences and other products that aren’t yours. Or they can try and go through your product by resetting all their settings, maybe signing out, whatever it takes to get into that new user mode to help see, like, hey, okay, you know, I understand now that we have work to do, and that it takes more than just seeing a carousel or one, you know, set of instructions in order for me to get proficient.
James Royal-Lawson
I love how all this is like, you’re kind of onboarded into organisations and then you have to onboard your team into the onboarding thinking, or mindset and then you have to think about how your users themselves are onboarding. Now, onboarding is a journey that continues all the way through their engagement with the product. It’s like wheels within wheels, and it’s fantastic. But I guess that’s having that empathy for other people. And what they need to do.
Krystal Higgins
Absolutely, like so much of UX design, this is a people-based activity, right? You can’t just you’re not just designing instructions, you’re designing a growth path for people and helping people learn. And as we all know, learning is not something that’s straightforward. It’s not like, you know, downloading information to your brain is a problem that has been solved or anything like that. So we have to understand that and know that if we want to see big gains or impacts from a better onboarding experience, we sort of have to invest in in making it a core part of our product design process,
James Royal-Lawson
I like that growth path. I really like that. I can imagine that goes down well with product management, when you start talking about growth paths. That doesn’t sound like a cost anymore. Suddenly, now it’s sounding like, you know, a benefit, a positive benefit.
Krystal Higgins
Yes, yes. And so, finding a goal for onboarding and a definition of core use that kind of maps to your business goals is going to help make that successful. It’s like, hey, if new users are, you know, able to kind of get up and running and contributing more to our product or ecosystem, then we’ll have made this much more revenue in the next year. Or being able to frame it as ‘Hey, you know, we want to scale to this big new audience while we’ll have more success there and therefore grow our total user base, if we invest in an experience that welcomes new audiences from places we might not have looked at before.’
Per Axbom
So what are the some of the risks and challenges that we should be looking out for that a lot of companies get wrong? I mean, we’ve touched upon some but I was thinking now specifically of your phrase, signup walls, and an example of the end user licence agreement where people often come into services, these tick boxes, and people or organisations say, ‘Well, we’ve told them now because they checked the box and so we’re okay.’ And it feels like that can backfire in so many ways.
Krystal Higgins
Yeah, absolutely. There’s, there’s a lot of challenges that can be imposed on new users from the decisions we make about our security infrastructure, or just how things should work. And that’s often a set of decisions made from, you know, expecting people to end up at a certain place, but not thinking about what it takes to get there. So you’re right, sign up walls are one. And look, some products you can ask for sign up up front, maybe they’re ubiquitous enough that people know and trust them. But for other products, it’s just another piece of overhead, people know that they’re probably going to get spammed by email from the company, they might put in the false information ahead of time just to get by the wall, just because they don’t know yet why they should sign up. Or it can force them to experience CAPTCHA, which is never a fun experience. And if you can’t find all the fire hydrants, you really can’t proceed. So it’s a terrible experience.
One challenge that’s worth pointing out is kind of associated with personalization. So sometimes we’re just eager to know more about new users for good reasons like we want to be able to personalise an experience around their needs. But we can get a little overzealous with that or not think it through enough. And we might end up asking people to make binary choices between things that kind of put them into a state that’s not representative of reality. So for example, maybe asking someone to classify themselves as either a buyer or a seller on a you know, e commerce product now the reality is that someone can be both of those things, and they might want to do both, but because you’re asking them to pick one or the other, you’re forcing them into a certain view of your product that might be hard for them to get out of later. And that can come in so many forms, you know, whether it’s by gender, or asking people to select a specific taste in music or something like that, the world is full of overlaps. So you have to be really careful with any exclusive choices that you’re putting in front of people that drastically change the experience they get at the end.
James Royal-Lawson
Oh, that’s really interesting. So something that might start off as an attempt by you to help the onboarding, that you’ve narrowed things down to make it easier to comprehend, you’ve effectively shut doors too early, and can push them into a dark room, which doesn’t fill up fulfil their purposes whatsoever. Right?
Krystal Higgins
Yeah, yeah. And it’s very similar to front-loaded instruction, where, you know, if you’re asking people to make a commitment to reading instructions that they don’t know how that’s going to help them later. In the same way, you’re asking people to answer question without knowing what that will do later on so they might make poor choices, because they just don’t know enough yet. So thinking about ways to kind of release them from that, or in other cases, making non exclusive choices. I haven’t seen a music app, thankfully yet, that does ask you to pick just one genre. Now they all do, you know, a sort of tag clouds sort of thing. So those are the ways to think about it. Like think about overlaps and openness and not trying to ask people to narrow their world down too early.
James Royal-Lawson
And leaving the door slightly open.
Krystal Higgins
Yeah. And that brings up a good point, which is, it’s totally fun if you do that. If you make it clear how they can get out of the world later or change and expand their world.
James Royal-Lawson
I mean, now I’m thinking about how many times you know, with having UX podcast as a page on LinkedIn, the amount of times that you end up liking something, or even Twitter as well, you get the wrong account, because you’ve switched things to be a certain, LinkedIn is better example than Twitter, actually. Because there you do actually have a different new set of tools to manage a business page, than you would a personal page. So you can, you can get quite tangled up in what you’re doing and, and what’s going on because of a presumption that LinkedIn have made at that moment in time that ‘now, I’m a business’ or ‘now I’m a person’, actually, ‘now I’m still a person, I just just want to do slightly different things’.
Krystal Higgins
You make a good point. They’re like presumptive experiences, like, yeah, don’t be presumptuous about what it is that I am yet. You don’t even know me yet.
Per Axbom
So I’m listening to the show, you’ve sold me completely and I want to get started, I want to read, maybe I have some more onboarding in place, but I realised I want to reimagine that and do better. Where do I start?
James Royal-Lawson
You read her book, Per.
Per Axbom
I know, besides reading the book.
James Royal-Lawson
Alright, okay.
Per Axbom
You read the book, but probably, which one of the tools that you recommend, should you start with? You’re always looking for quick wins, so that you can actually sell it to the organisation?
Krystal Higgins
Yeah, yeah, look, and that’s exactly the point. It really depends on where you and the organisation is. If you’re looking for quick wins, there’s two ways you could kind of go about it. One is just measuring any existing kind of front-loaded instruction, that sort of stuff, and seeing how it’s doing, just seeing if people are acting on it so that you can have a story to tell to your leadership team if you need to. Another place to start really small is just, if you sort of have an idea of what’s an important action for a new user, you could even pick signup flow for right now, see if you can break that down and see how to make a more holistic, you know, a better approach rather to onboarding and guidance within the context of that action that would be helpful. So it could be what are the right places to prompt someone to sign up? And what’s the right context we need to have? How do I get someone successfully through the signup flow? What are all of the error cases? I need to guide them through that sort of stuff.
And then how do you follow up? Like, you don’t just sign up because it’s fun. How do I follow up afterwards and help guide people to where they can go next in their journey. Now, if your organisation is kind of like all, forgive the pun on board, getting a better onboarding experience, then you can invest in onboarding journey mapping. So this is when you try to map all the activities and actions that might exist from the different contexts people start out in. And then your definition of core use, whatever that is for your product. How would you imagine they would go through that journey of arriving at core use? So that’s a place you can start If you want to spend more time, and it’s a collaborative exercise, because your whole team can engage with you, and start to see the bigger picture,
James Royal-Lawson
Well, I definitely feel like I’ve started to see the bigger picture in all of this. This has been really good fun and really interesting, Krystal. Thank you very much for joining us today.
Per Axbom
Thank you so much.
Krystal Higgins
Thank you, this was great.
[Music]
Per Axbom
So we didn’t get into one of the models that actually I was enamoured by, which is when Krystal was talking about core use, she has a model for identifying where people get into the onboarding, to get further into using well, to the core use, really. And it’s just three circles. So I love the simplicity of it. It’s just this smallest circle is of course, the core use that the person is trying to get to, the circle beyond that is routines, so what types of actions are going to get them there. And the big circle around all that are the onboarding actions. And the beauty of that is that she has arrows pointing from either side, showing that, well, the person could come from either direction here, or from anywhere around a big circle, which means that it’s a nonlinear journey for all users and acknowledging that is really powerful, I think, and it makes helping people realise that they can come into the service from just about anywhere, and we need to be prepared for that.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, and I think this is like a, I guess, underlying theme that we had during the entire conversation with Krystal about the the nonlinear aspect of onboarding, and product use and nonlinear aspect of pretty much everything that we deal with, in this realm. And that unavoidably gets us into what we talked about in Episode 271, last time out, about loops and arcs, learning loops, and and nonlinear experiences.
Per Axbom
Exactly.
James Royal-Lawson
It’s onboarding. Yeah, the different ways you can start, Krystal’s diagram has the two starting points, which for simplicity is wonderful, just showing that they can be there or there. It’s enough to get the point across that not everyone starts, not everyone comes in from the same angle. But it’s almost a case that it’s a unique angle every single time, potentially.
Per Axbom
Right. And your example, I think, during the interview was excellent. And you might have used the service a long time ago, but then you are essentially a new user coming in, but with a total complete set of experiences than someone who would use the app for the first time. And so just helping people where they are, that’s the challenge. But also, if you map it out, that can become easier, of course.
James Royal-Lawson
Remember, as well, the stuff we’ve had in well, human interaction, in Computer Interaction where they talk about interfaces, adaptive interfaces, according to your skill levels. We’ve even discussed this before.
Per Axbom
Right, yes, yeah.
James Royal-Lawson
You’ve got novice users and then the interface would learn and understand how experienced and how much of an advanced user you become over time, and adapt its guidance, according to your skill level.
Per Axbom
Right.
James Royal-Lawson
Which is a wonderful sounding thing, but complex to put into play and practice.
Per Axbom
Extremely complex, and perhaps even a bit dangerous, making assumptions about people and what they are understanding.
James Royal-Lawson
But on a basic level, I mean, in the book, Krystal talks about use of things like local storage, or cookies and so on, or being logged in, as simple indicators may be of experience level or whereabouts you are. I mean you’ve got to be smart with using all these signals, but at the same time, careful. What we talked about at the end of the interview with closing doors too early. I mean, we’ve got that constant balance of, do you shut the door, do you leave it open, do you leave it open a little bit? Do you kind of completely hide the door? There’s so much to process and take on board, that joke again, about what to do and when in the context of the users usage of your products?
Per Axbom
Exactly. That makes me think of affordances, we also didn’t talk a lot about during the interview. But affordances of course, being a huge part of UX is a huge part of onboarding. And it’s about designing something in a way that people understand how to use it based on how it’s designed. And I think the example she had, or one of the examples, was when you open a new document in Dropbox paper, the document’s not empty and this is the thing when you open new stuff, don’t make it empty, actually. make it prefilled with small guides so that you can actually start using it straight away you understand where you put the different labels?
James Royal-Lawson
That’s a good point. And that’s something you would do in situations such as empty searches. I mean you don’t make use of the of the empty state. Don’t have an empty state, exactly what you’re saying, with an empty document or, or no search results, or even a page not found. I mean, don’t let yourself have dead ends. Explain. Explain where you are because it might not be obvious. Now we’re kind of drifting off onboarding and into kind of more general usability, Per, maybe? I don’t know,
Per Axbom
It is. But it’s it’s such a huge part of it. Because what I’m really doing now and what Krystal I think gets across so well in her book is that onboarding can happen just about anywhere. Now I’m thinking of off boarding, but because I was that made me think of the email and you unsubscribe. And so there’s potential there that just don’t have an empty email saying, you unsubscribe. There’s so much potential for actually communicating with the person.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, no, exactly. These things, learning loops, but we’ve also got, I suppose, in some ways, un-learning loops, in a sense that if you are driving off boarding, then you’ve got to kind of like, you know, get people off things. One thing that comes up in my head, when I think of all this is just especially connections with a previous episode, as well, that I really enjoy how interconnected all these things are. You know, that there’s so many overlapping, disciplines, areas, concepts. And this is really what gets us going and all this and really keeps us interested in working with this wonderful world that we work in.
Per Axbom
Yeah.
James Royal-Lawson
Recommended listening. Well, I guess by the obvious recommendation, given that we’ve been talking about beginnings, is Episode 258. ends with Joe Macleod.
Per Axbom
That doesn’t make complete sense, actually, from beginning to end.
James Royal-Lawson
Exactly. We talked about off boarding with Joe, and we’ve been talking about onboarding with Krystal.
Per Axbom
And if you can spare a little bit of your time, then join our small community of volunteers. Always looking for help with transcripts, publishing and links for our show notes.
James Royal-Lawson
Yes, just send us an email. Remember to keep moving. See you on the other side.
[Music]
Per Axbom
What is the difference between a poorly dressed man on a tricycle and a well dressed man on a bicycle?
James Royal-Lawson
So what’s the difference between a poorly dressed I’ve already forgotten the joke poorly dressed man on a tricycle, and a well dressed man on a bicycle? This is the most complicated joke you’ve ever done. I don’t know Per I’m lost.
Per Axbom
A tire. It’s so beautiful.
James Royal-Lawson
Ohhhh, It’s really, really complicated bad.
Per Axbom
It’s complicated
James Royal-Lawson
I put more effort into remembering what you’ve said than I did anything else.
This is a transcript of a conversation between James Royal-Lawson, Per Axbom and Krystal Higgins recorded in September 2021 and published as episode 272 of UX Podcast.