Cool App Onboarding

January 4, 2017

A few months ago I was working on Whask, and because we were looking for a market fit we were always prototyping things, working to reduce the friction, accelerate the adoption, increase the conversion and keep up the retention.
Startup life.

In this context, and even if it is not my job, I had a chance to work on the UX. I'm passionate about thinking of new ways to onboard user: it is challenging, and no clear winner has been found yet.

Even today at Augment we are still working on user tests to found the best way to introduce augmented reality to our users. And trust me, it is not easy.

Prototype

At Whask we were targeting youth people, and the chat bot trend had just started. That's how I came with this idea: a chat bot to introduce the App features and onboard the user.
It seems very logic for me.

At that time I made this GIF to show how it could work


An image is worth a thousand words

translation:

  • Hello, welcome to Whask2
  • To learn about each other, tell me your name ?
  • Jérôme
  • Nice to meet you Jérôme
  • To create your account we need your phone number
  • 0659919272

But we haven't had a chance to test it, neither implement it, Whask didn't find its way.

Live code

Two or three months later I still wanted to test that idea on a real App. So we decided with my friend Damien (designer) to give it another try.
We use the old — still fashionable — good idea of Squarechat: Geolocation + anonymous chat App to be the base for our experimentation.

And this is the result:

Conclusion

Of course the App is not finished at all*

But as you can see, the bot explains the concept of the App, ask for an avatar (not implemented), explain why the App needs location and notification, ask for it, and when the user responds it continues the discussion.

It is very interactive and streamlined.

I think it works pretty well. It has not been user tested, but I have a good feeling about it.
For sure this was a Chat App, so this kind of onboarding seems right, but I guess it could work for other things than chat App.

As a user, it would not surprise me if an App starts that way, and for me, it is a great improvement compared to any other kind of blocking tutorials. I hate 3 steps tutorials with sliders or other annoying overlays.

I'm not saying it is the ultimate solution to all your onboarding problems, but give it a try :)

Tell me what you think about it!

* Squarechat2 will never go live, I have other priorities