Transcript

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I cannot overemphasize the first run experience, that’s when you have the most energy and the most enthusiasm and momentum coming from the user.

00:00:14 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse, the company and the small team behind it. My name is Adam Wiggins, and I’m here today with my colleague Julia Rogats.

00:00:28 - Speaker 3: Hi, Adam, nice to be back.

00:00:30 - Speaker 2: And a guest, Jane Portman of User List.

00:00:33 - Speaker 1: Hi, Adam. Hi Julia.

00:00:34 - Speaker 2: And Jane, maybe you can tell us a little bit about your background and what you’re working on at user list.

00:00:39 - Speaker 1: Well, thanks for having me today. My pleasure to share a little story. User list is a tool for sending activation on boarding, life cycle, email and other kinds of messages to Sassy. Users, so we work specifically with SASS founders and provide great tools for them to run their SAS companies. And uh user onboarding that we have as a topic today is so hard for us because that’s like the primary application for our tools. So we’re sort of on a mission to try and help founders establish their better onboarding practices.

00:01:13 - Speaker 2: And just because I always like to unpack abbreviation, SAS stands for software as a service, so this typically would be web applications, often ones that are sold to businesses rather than either consumer applications or mobile apps or iOS apps such as Ms. Yes, that’s correct. What was your journey? What brought you to be passionate about this area or be working on this particular company?

00:01:38 - Speaker 1: So if we go back in time a little bit, this is my 2nd SAS product and I’m running this one together with my amazing technical co-founder, Benedict Die. He’s a real engineering wizard, like I would never pursue this conflict of a product without him.

When I was doing my first product, which was a little productivity app that didn’t go anywhere because it was not as crucial to the business, it didn’t like have a major mission, it didn’t have a good audience, and also while I was running it, there was no great tool that I could use for life cycle messaging, for user onboarding, etc. except for Intercom. Which back then wasn’t even pretty, to be honest, so it was super expensive, not very attractive, and it was not targeting small founders like myself.

So a couple years later, It was pretty obvious what to build because I was very sure that Sa founders need help in that area and I recruited two more people, Benedict and we had a marketing co-founder, Claire Suentrop. She later on decided to stay as an advisor.

She works on a popular marketing project, Forget the Funnel and Elevate these days. So that’s the story of fuselist and before that, I’m a UIUX consultant by trade. For the last 8 years, I’ve been working online with international clients and running my personal brand, UI Breakfast, and I also do UI Breakfast podcast, which is a nice design show. So that’s been out for a while as well.

00:03:08 - Speaker 2: And notably, we’ll have a crossover episode there. Mark, Mark’s going on with you at some point.

00:03:14 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m so excited to have him soon. So that show is sort of catering to my design interest and user list is something that we’re all passionate about is helping fellow founders pursuing that like bootstrapper dreams, slow and steady, kind of not funded, but self-funded growth.

00:03:33 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, having the pain yourself, that is having previously done a business and see where this is needed, that’s certainly one of the best ways to drive you to create a great product, I think.

And you already kind of teed up our topic here, which is on boarding. You actually suggested this one, but it ended up being serendipitously apropos because Yuli was actually deep in the project at the time.

We’ve, we’ve since released it, but deep in the project of redoing our onboarding, which we’ve done several times and is a challenge for various reasons we’ll get into later on. But before we do that, let’s start with the fundamentals. Can you tell us what is on boarding and why does it matter?

00:04:11 - Speaker 1: Well, firsthand congrats on your recent launch. That’s a big one.

Also very exciting. Well, going back to user onboarding, that’s the process that software people use to receiving value from their product. And this can mean different things in people’s heads because we often associate this with like tool tips or guided tours, so very like specific interventions, but it should. be perceived as a more abstract thing, sort of a larger situation in life that the person is in and how you can help them using different kinds of tools, interventions and no little things to achieve value using your product and your product plays a little role there because they usually don’t strive to be good users of your product, but they’re striving for achieving something else which is much, much bigger and important for them.

00:05:00 - Speaker 2: You wrote this piece that we referenced a little bit titled Inspire, not Instruct that focuses more on the helping people understand what I usually talk about the aha moment or the understanding how something can fit into their life or help them in some way or solve their problem rather than the nuts and bolts minutia of how exactly do I use this.

00:05:19 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s kind of meta because user list is a tool for user on boarding, but it’s also quite a big challenge for us to onboard our own users.

Once one of our users uh wrote back and said that they loved what they saw inside the app on the first run experience, and basically what we have is a single welcome video that does have not a single instructions inside it.

And our goal is to sort of set up the tone and then we just rely on their own skills to continue with the journey, because different software applications have different levels of complexity and ours is definitely not on the easier side of the spectrum. It has a lot of elements for the user to become successful, they have to complete the integration, they have to actually write the emails. Of course we do have like templates and everything else we can, but. You can take the horse to water, but you can’t make them drink if they’re not inspired, so we really strive for this inspiration component more than trying to like instruct them, um, towards performing certain steps.

00:06:23 - Speaker 2: And I suspect there’s particular challenges when you get into B2B, as they call it business to business stuff, as well as very technical products.

We ran into that with Hiroku and it’d be interesting to compare that to the maybe the mobile app world a little bit later on, but you know I was curious to get your take on onboarding here.

And again, this has some nice historical touch points for us.

And that we met at a company called Clue, a reproductive health tracker, and while we were both there, you were leading a project to build the out of box experience or the UI, it’s kind of the cute acronym there, which you said maybe UB and onboarding aren’t quite the same thing, but in any case, I’d love to hear how you think about this now being a veteran of having built multiple first run experiences for apps.

00:07:08 - Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure. The way that I understand the UBI or the out of box experience is basically The way that the user sets up a piece of software, in many cases, this is, you know, if you’re installing something first, this would be part of the UBI. If we remember like for Windows users, I think this is still a thing where you have to double click on a thing and then you get the dialogue, where do you want to install the tool. So this would all be part of an Ubi. Obviously, in the app world, you just download an app from the app store and then you open it, and then what happens in those first couple of minutes, I would say, is the out of box experience. And so in the example of clue, there was actually different guided steps to make you see the app with some initial data, so it would ask you how old you were. If you remember when your last period was, if you know roughly how long your period is, and based on the data that you input there, you will then end up at basically the app’s main screen that already has a little bit of data filled in. So this was both a way to kind of get to know the user and get information from them that are relevant for the app to work correctly and also avoid then bringing them to an empty start screen, basically, because if you have an app that’s fundamentally about data input, The first thing that you see being an empty screen is kind of uninspiring, of course. And so to compare this with the new experience, I think what we’re trying to do with the onboarding here is to both inspire them to realize what the product is about and how it could fit into their lives, but then obviously also teach them how the app works and Muse, as we all know, is kind of a, a pro tool that does things quite differently from other apps. So some of the gestures are fairly hard to discover on their own, which is I think why it is important to teach the user a little bit on how to use the app without overwhelming them with too many things all at once. But at the same time also show them a little bit of content, motivate them to get some of their own content in. And so based on all of these incentives, we we’ve tried to put together a little on boarding, which I think we will get into this later. That hopefully brings all of these components together.

00:09:23 - Speaker 1: I’m super curious to hear what you decided on that because you have so many hidden things in news and um that really requires some instructions. So what is the form and shape that you decided to go with?

00:09:36 - Speaker 3: Well, we’ve historically been through a couple different steps here. I think the very first version when we were still in beta was basically just an empty board with 2 or 3 cards on them, and one of them, I think was a pretty long text describing what news is about. And obviously that was neither teaching the user anything nor being particularly inspiring because the last thing that people want to do. When they first opened an app is read a huge block of text. So that was discarded fairly soon.

00:10:03 - Speaker 2: In our defense, I’ll jump in and say that the earliest onboarding was actually that we didn’t let anyone try the app unless one of us was sitting right there to help them.

Onboarding was what you might call white glove or high touch, which often goes with, yeah, high-end kind of enterprise sales type products, but also I don’t know, maybe someone like superhuman has kind of popularized this a little bit, at least in the tech world’s imagination.

But yeah, we would just sit there either in person in some cases or over video chat and either first give them a demo, try to show them what they can do with it once they get better at it, but then once they’re in it, kind of direct them around a little bit and then, you know, that obviously wasn’t very scalable, but it was a good place to start where we combined the usability test with a user interview with an onboarding was kind of all one thing that was just done completely outside the software.

00:10:55 - Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s right.

So I think the thing that we did after this was to focus more on the inspiring part, so to really show people what you could do with Muse, what a muse board looks like when it’s filled with rich types of content. So we actually had a fairly extensive bundle of like pre-made onboarding content. I think it was one main board and then maybe 5 other different boards and different topics inside there.

With some, you know, hand drawings or sketches on there, different types of links, PDFs, basically every content type that’s supported in use was in there, but there was no instruction at all on how to use the app.

So people were kind of left to just explore on their own, which I think worked well in some regards, but I think one thing we also learned there is to just throw a bunch of random content at the user. Without any context on why this is important or why they would care about it seemed a little bit weird to users as well.

Like they come in wanting to do a certain thing and if they then find a board that outlines, you know, notes on a book that someone wants to write that maybe doesn’t align at all with what they’re interested in.

And so where we went from there, I think it was to try a little bit more of a learning the muse interactions based on a stack of cards that was in your inbox, like right when you launched the app, that was basically just a blank board and I think something like 12 or 15 cards that are arranged in a little stack in your inbox.

This is where your content lands when you bring anything into Muse. And that definitely had a little bit of a threshold for users in terms of figuring out what to do with that stack of cards. I think for some people, and even if I remember correctly during one of the app reviews, this was actually reported as a bug, like there’s a bunch of cards or like a bunch of little things hanging off the side of the screen, and we don’t know what to do with it.

00:12:55 - Speaker 2: Yeah, in the ideal world it was sort of. And they would tempt the user to grab it and drag it out and it’s a way to kind of draw you into that interaction without explicitly saying it. And I think that did work in a lot of cases. I ran some usability tests where I saw people be kind of puzzled what’s going on with these things on the side, and when they pull it out, they have kind of an aha moment and a sense of delight at having kind of figured something out, but just as often as not, it was uh what’s going on here, this app looks broken.

00:13:21 - Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and I, I definitely think the moment of like when you do figure out what to do with it and then you realize, OK, you can drag these things around. There are a couple, just, you know, I, I think it was like a gardening project, so we had like a set of cards that had some inspiring images, and then a little bit of text explaining what Muse is and what you can do with it. It also pointed you to a little panel that you can open from the main menu that we call it, I think just a learn panel.

That had some of the main interactions of the app explained just with some icons, and it seems like most people figured out how to use that and then notably a while later we actually introduced our handbook, I think there was an entire podcast episode on this, but we really went through lengths of recording videos of basically every interaction and everything that you can do inside the app. And put it on a website. So linking to this also from the main app helps. So if people really get stuck or they’re curious to learn more or to figure out how everything works, they can go and look at the handbook.

Basically, the new onboarding that we designed based on the pain points that we saw with the random stack of cards in the inbox is a bit of a combination of everything we did before, combined with like a quest-based system. So our main incentive here was to motivate users to figure out the app while Using the app without necessarily forcing them to do something in a certain order, or I think we all know these types of onboarding tutorials where you first open an app and they, they really don’t let you do anything but click on the thing where the error points and you feel a little bit like a child that is taken through like an obstacle course and There’s basically no freedom to just explore on your own.

00:15:08 - Speaker 2: Jane, I think your article talks about this, right, like the tool tips and the guided tours and basically says that stuff doesn’t work.

00:15:15 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and also there is this famous person in the industry of user and boarding, Samuel Heli, and he wrote a book that I’ve read like ages ago, that was kind of laid the foundations for my own thinking and we recently had a conversation with Samuel and yes, he confirms like up to date. This does not really produce great results because everybody wants to have an autonomous experience. They want to explore things on their own at their own pace, while tool tips like enforce working within the UI at some predefined scenario, and this is just not a great practice.

00:15:50 - Speaker 2: Just as an aside, it must be fun to to read a book that had a big impact on your career and what you’re working on and then get to interview the author later on.

00:15:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and we’ve been friends with Samuel for many years as well, so we have this kind of multifaceted relationship, uh, him influencing my thinking because he’s the UX consultant who only does onboarding for the last decade or so. It’s interesting how life has unfolded that these days we’re also establishing ourselves as an authority and user on boarding because we have a tool for it. And like, I don’t want to personally compete with Samuel’s thinking by any means, and neither do I want to reproduce his ideas, but it’s so amazing to be thinking in the same direction, sort of.

00:16:33 - Speaker 2: Nice. Yeah, well, give me the link to that book, as well as the episode after and I’ll put it in the show notes for the.

00:16:38 - Speaker 1: Yeah, he’s been super famous for these onboarding tear downs, and he has plenty of mobile experiences as well. So we just do web apps and he does all those consumer apps that have interesting first run experiences for end users.

00:16:55 - Speaker 2: Now Yuli, I think you’re about to start talking about how we landed on the onboarding we have now, maybe called the quest style. I’ll use this opportunity to tell a little anecdote from my own history, which is that many years ago I worked on this kind of a side project, some online multiplayer games.

It kind of early days of the internet in the 90s and ended up doing an onboarding. I wouldn’t have called it that then. I didn’t know that term, but that first run experience to help someone learn the game.

And the one I was inspired by was, or there was another game similar kind of one of these kind of D&D style online multiplayer games. And in this particular game, you had a magic sword that you started out with when you began the game. And I thought it was very clever because the sword would just talk to you and tell you what it thought you should do. So it would say, OK, maybe you should go over here now, maybe you should try talking to this person. Maybe you should pick up this object and we kind of take you through a bit of a, of a sort of a step by step tutorial. But the great thing was it was just saying that you could do whatever you wanted and you could just ignore it. And in fact, if you got annoyed and tired of it talking, you could just drop the sword and walk off. and basically just throw it away. So it was a really nice way to both give that guidance for someone that wants it, but then not. Take away in any way the user’s sense of agency or freedom.

00:18:13 - Speaker 3: Nice. I think that reminds me a little bit of the little animated paperclip character in early versions of Microsoft Word. I don’t know if they still do this, but I have a very strong memories of like my young teenage years having this little paper clip set off to the side and telling me things that in most cases, I didn’t really want to know. But sometimes also just helpful tool tips, but I think you also could, if you get an out, you could just remove it completely from your view, I think.

00:18:40 - Speaker 2: Well, notably there, I believe this fellow’s name is Clippy and has become a punching bag for sort of dumbing down professional products in the software industry. So while on one hand, I think maybe had some good intentions in many ways represents for a lot of people what’s actually wrong with tutorials and software on boarding.

00:19:02 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I agree.

00:19:03 - Speaker 1: It could also take forms of different animals in addition to the paper clip. I recall.

00:19:11 - Speaker 3: Yeah, the amount of work they put into making that thing be really distracting was quite outstanding, I have to say.

00:19:19 - Speaker 1: We’ve just talked about how important it is to keep the user autonomous in their journey, but on the other hand, as a UIUX person, I cannot overemphasize that the first run experience, that’s when you have the most energy and the most enthusiasm and momentum coming from the user, so. Those like first few steps that you make really mandatory, yes, sure, you have to make them shorter so that they can then autonomously explore the app. But on the other hand, you shouldn’t really neglect that energy that’s coming with it, and if those steps are pretty fine that you might still want to take advantage of that momentum that the user has that very moment. So it’s not always that you just leave them hanging. Sometimes you really have to enforce something.

00:20:04 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think we struck a fairly good balance with the new onboarding and new. So what happens now when you open the app for the first time and you made it past authenticating yourself, you get onto basically a root board that has a couple cards on it.

One is another empty board, one is a text card, and then there’s another little text card on the side that just gives you a very brief intro about what news is and why you should care about it. And then the other text card is basically already a mini tutorial or suggestion. It just says take this card and zoom into the empty board next to it and then drop the card there. And notably, this is one of our, I would say, most complex or surprising interactions. We often get people to write in feedback that they can’t figure out how to move a card between a board and Based on this, it actually seemed like a lot of users really couldn’t figure this out, so we decided to make this sort of key interaction to be the first thing that we’re trying to teach users.

In a way, also because we think that it gives users a good idea about how new is different from other tools. It immediately teaches you this, you know, you can use both hands. It’s not all just use your finger to do something. You can use one hand to pick up a card and then you can use the other hand to do something else. So teaching people how we’re doing things a little bit differently from other apps was quite key to us here.

And then once you completed this first task, basically, We guide you to open a little panel that then has a list of other interactions that you can do in Muse, and they’re laid out as a sort of checklist, but you’re also free to just close that panel and explore on your own. And the next time you come back, you can come back to it and open it again. So it’s not like it forces you to do these things and do them in a particular In order, but it does sort of give you a rough set of what basic interactions are possible in the app, and it entices you to explore them a little bit. And if you get stuck on any of them, you can actually, and this is where we’re making use of the handbook and all those video content that we created to really teach you in a visual way how the app works. If you get stuck anywhere, you can tap a little button for each of the tasks, and it actually drops some cards into your inbox. When you drag them out, you’ll see that they’re like a little instructional card that explains how a certain thing works. And then also a card that plays the video. So a video of demonstrating, basically, you see two hands on an iPad actually doing the thing. So this way, we’re really trying to explain to people the things that are possible in the app. And then also motivating them to add a little bit of content of their own and to basically start exploring how the app feels when they use it for a real project.

00:22:50 - Speaker 2: I’ll say that the use of the two-handed card carrier that put a card into a board as the very first thing was a really great insight by you in terms of it’s this thing that not a lot of people figure out how to do because it is different. They expect that, oh, maybe I should be able to drag a card with one finger and kind of drop it on a board and it’ll go inside there, but that’s Muse has a. Different model and using both hands to do this complex gesture is not what they expect.

But we also see that when we show that to people in many cases just through our support channels they write in and ask how to do this and we explain it somehow or send a video or something and then they have this, oh, that’s amazing. I love this. It feels interesting. It turns on a light bulb a little bit.

So maybe to Jane’s earlier point of they have this energy right at that moment to try to kind of challenge themselves a little bit or try something a little different. And it’s something that’s hard to figure out on your own, but if we guide them to doing it, and then maybe you have a not only a little light bulb about here’s how I do this specific thing, but a light bulb of, like you said, this app works differently. I can use both my hands. I should be prepared for a slightly different experience.

00:23:56 - Speaker 1: Um, buckle in. For a different experience. I’m curious, you have such amazing videos with this over the desk camera and the hands using the iPad and everything. How did you produce those? Are there any secrets because like you can’t really do that on your own, to have some magnificent video editor hand or any other secrets?

00:24:19 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s our colleague Mark. So he set up a little home recording studio, which is not too fancy.

I think it’s sort of a boom arm that holds everything’s recorded with an iPhone camera, which of course are amazing these days. They do, you know, 4K 60 frames per second. And then the lighting turns out to be a really key thing so getting some lights on all sides so the shadows aren’t too heavy.

We talked about this a little bit in another podcast episode that I can link back to, but basically kind of came down to a combination of these a few pieces of equipment using the iPhone. Camera and then what for me was a surprise, which is filming a screen seems weird to me, but actually it works really well because the high quality of cameras these days combined with the brightness and pixel density of the iPad screen means basically looks great.

00:25:08 - Speaker 1: So it’s an actual screen recording, that’s quite amazing. I thought it’s a combination of some magic editing. As they do.

00:25:16 - Speaker 2: Right. I’ve seen, um, I read a post somewhere someone doing this for I think an iPhone demo video where they essentially did like a green screen or a chroma key on the phone screen, and then they record the hands doing the motions and then they record a screen recording and composite them, and that would be nuts for us to do. I mean, even aside from that we’re a small team and just don’t have the resources for that kind of thing.

It’s also that we have these really complex interactions and trying to replicate them twice once for screen recording and once for like recording the hands would be tricky, but yeah, weirdly enough, just filming an iPad screen works fine and actually I’m pretty sure that’s what Apple does for a lot of their videos too, so I guess it works.

00:25:51 - Speaker 1: Do you have any other tips for the video content during onboarding, like from my experience, keeping those short is very useful, but also a big challenge because the shorter you want to be that the harder it is to record a good one. Because I’m the one on the team who does all of this stuff and it’s amazing how much infrastructure there is in a software application that does not relate to software that’s got to be done, like the docs, the videos and everything.

00:26:17 - Speaker 2: That is a really great point.

00:26:18 - Speaker 1: So what are your tips for the videos?

00:26:20 - Speaker 2: Well, we, you know, maybe we did it easy because we’re in some ways, it’s a very simple format, right, just hands and an iPad on. and these things are often 5 seconds long or something. What do you do in your videos and actually maybe that’s a lead in. I was going to ask you more about this whole other world of B2B apps and the fact that I think onboarding is not just what’s in the software, but it’s also email exchanges, maybe there’s a sales component or demos, obviously videos, which could be on your YouTube channel or whatever. I’d love to hear the larger picture of what that whole experience is for your customers.

00:26:54 - Speaker 1: I think experience for our customers is one thing, is what we offer, but there is this whole spectrum of different interventions that you can apply to try and affect people’s behavior to some success or maybe to no success. It really depends.

We only cover as a tool, we only offer email as the most classic and powerful way of getting in touch with the people, and we also offer. In app notifications, which are like a little chat bubbles, but without the chat that appear in the corner of the app that you can use to supply some helpful information.

But there is also such a wide range of tools, and I don’t mean tools like autopilot or chameleon or a dozen other tools that offer guide through tours and things like that, but you can also offer demo calls such as white glove on boarding, as you mentioned before. You can invite people to. book with you at certain stages of the app, you can, you can make fun of a little bit.

00:28:01 - Speaker 2: Yeah, super cheesy, but it actually does work, you know, it’s a little more scalable than a one on one thing, but you get on a video call and you can kind of walk through. Some script, but then you can also answer people’s questions, that sort of thing can work really well for the right kind of product.

00:28:16 - Speaker 1: You can do office hours, you can do an online community where people try and even help each other, but I would never recommend that at a small scale because it takes so much energy to support that.

But if you have that, there’s this people out there who seem to be, you know, revived by communications with others like we’re not among those, so.

Having multiple customer conversations in a forum that would like drain our productivity to zero and we’ll never get things done, so maybe later when we have like a community manager or someone, and also the docs, videos, everything that’s in this materials ecosystem that you can produce and help the people.

There’s this delicate play of the formats and different calls to actions that are all around the place in the emails and inside the app. For example, in Muse, if you have a handbook, how do you help people open it? How do you leverage this uh different experience, you have the app and you have the browser, how do you not lose attraction? It can be really, really different for multiple products. So you put together this delicate play, and then it’s usually traditional to have email as sort of the main thread. where you pile up those interventions and offer different kinds of help along the cycle. And, uh, there might be opinions.

For example, there’s this wonderful email expert called Val Geisler, and she’s amazing. She has wonderful email on boarding tear downs, but she says that whatever you undertake that makes you send less email is not great.

Well, we might be missing out on that, but we do think that less stuff is actually better. And the best email is that the one that’s not sent, so we highly encourage our customers to use behavior data to actually filter out some of the communications that are already irrelevant, like if the future is used, there is no need to promote it anymore. In the ideal world, the user will just like figure out themselves and not have to do anything. So yeah, it’s so interesting, it’s so specific to a particular product.

00:30:21 - Speaker 2: The email one is, I think, worth drilling in on a little bit there.

I mean, you mentioned it as being kind of the standard or the center point for the back and forth. I think that’s really true in B2B enterprise stuff, which is where I spent a lot of.

My career, it is unusual, perhaps even non-existent for consumer applications. In fact, we’re in an age now where I know younger people that just don’t have email, right? That’s just not part of their world.

And in any case, the way that for example, the App Store and so forth is set up really doesn’t encourage that sort of thing.

We discovered that same you discovered pretty early on that this was a really important Channel for our target audience because our target audience tends to be kind of thoughtful reader types. They like reading and writing long form things and so we made the perhaps controversial choice to ask for an email right off the bat. We don’t ask for a name or anything else like that, but we want to be able to have that direct communication channel and if you send feedback from the app, that comes from your email address so we can reply to it. And we don’t use it for a lot. We don’t do any kind of like drip campaigns and stuff like that. I know that sort of thing is very standard when you sign up for Notion, you get a series of emails saying, here’s some information for, you know, your next step in using the app or whatever. But yeah, it seems to me like email, at least certainly for us, and definitely the more B2B world is a key piece. How do you think about or or how do you approach this whole world of, I don’t know, drip campaigns and follow-ups and that sort of stuff.

00:31:46 - Speaker 1: Your app is really at that price point when you’ve got to have a more serious relationship with the people about their billing, about their content, and you really have to use email, at least a little bit to make sure that this relationship and that this content is intact if they lose like their device or something like that, isn’t that true?

00:32:08 - Speaker 2: Absolutely. Even aside from the practicalities of the reset, I think.

Being kind of a spectrum where on one far extreme you have consumer products which are big scale, you download from the app store. There’s not really much of a relationship.

It wouldn’t be practical for an application maker that has millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions of users to have personal relationships with their users. They just can’t do that and the users probably don’t want that either.

And then on the other extreme, you might have the classic, you know, multimillion dollar top of the market enterprise sales where it’s, you know, you have a personal relationship with your salesperson, you go out for steak dinners, they come to your, you know, your wedding or whatever, that like really, really deep long term.

And then of course there’s a bunch of stuff in the middle. I think for Muse we kind of discovered that we ended up maybe kind of in the middle, little closer to the lightweight side, but having that email so we can build a personal connection when you send a message with a question, you get an answer from some me or you there or someone else on the team. You build up that relationship over time and it builds trust in the product and maybe makes you more inclined to part with money or believe in the product both now and in the future.

00:33:18 - Speaker 1: That reminds me of a phrase that I really like and there’s high touch, there is low touch, and there is tech touch. Which means that you can imitate the high touch relationship, but it’s scale, because you have like thousands of downloads and you can’t really honestly offer your hand to everyone, but you can offer your help using automated means and then some of the people will use it to generate genuine relationships.

00:33:44 - Speaker 2: I’m a little bit, and again, I’m curious to hear what you think about sort of the drip campaign method. I’m a little skeptical of some of that myself when I get those follow-up emails from a product I just signed up for.

I don’t really tend to read them that much, but maybe a version of the tech touch or at scale thing is something like our email newsletter, which now goes out to thousands of people, and I write this in my voice. It comes from my email address, and when you reply, that reply comes to me, and depending on the the issue, we get more or less responses, but I respond to every single one of them.

And I really enjoy making that connection with our audience and with our users. We’ll see how that scales over time already with this recent launch, we found ourselves pretty buried under the communication, but that’s important to us is to feel connected to the folks that we’re helping or trying to help our product.

00:34:31 - Speaker 1: Yeah, as makers of the tool that does that, we’re under no false impression that this is a magic bullet to nudge people with email, but it’s still the most reliable channel, so you can use this to make super personable. And then maybe that will result in some real life communication and that’s as much as you can do. If you don’t have any other channels, you can’t really call them well, unless you ask for a phone number, which also is an option, but that’s as much as you can do as a founder to get in touch with them.

00:35:04 - Speaker 2: Julie, I know you’ve done a lot of kind of usability tests and in particular kind of there’s the ad hoc form of usability test with, you know, grab a person that’s nearby, a romantic partner, a roommate, a family member, as well as maybe the slightly more structured, try to reach out to people you know are in your target audience, but you don’t know personally. How do you think about that as fitting in with and and particularly for this recent Muse on boarding? And we’re a little bit restricted in the in-person usability test these days, but what’s your approach there?

00:35:35 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think the sort of ad hocability tests where you actually watch a person use the app for the first time. are super helpful and super insightful because I think you often tend to have the user stumble over certain things and then eventually they’ll figure it out, which is probably fine, but to actually identify those initial hurdles, it’s quite hard to do that just by looking at maybe, you know, aggregate analytics data or something like this.

So actually physically watching someone use your app, get really stuck or frustrated with something, then figure something out, having the aha moment. is always super insightful and it’s also always a little bit painful because of course, you know, if this is a piece of software that you look at every day because you’re developing it, you develop a certain blindness to certain things. So seeing someone get confused by something that you just take for granted is, yeah, is obviously always a little bit surprising. But it is super important to do these tests and to take your learnings from there.

So we did this a little bit with the current onboarding and definitely restructured a few things that some of the wording wasn’t quite understandable to people, but where we were maybe using some internal words that for us is super clear what they. but the user who sees the app for the first time is not quite clear on that terminology. So this is always a good sort of feedback check if people actually understand the way you communicate. And then on the bigger scale, I think what we’re trying with this new on boarding as well is to actually try to measure. The success of how well users are onboarded, and I think that the task list that we came up with basically lends itself really well to this. So whenever the user completes a task in the list, we send like an event to our servers and based on that can calculate a sort of onboarding score that each user has. So how many of the basic interactions have they performed at least once. And then based on this, you could imagine doing some IB tests, maybe you reshuffle things, you slightly change the wording on a couple of items, and then you can compare the score of that version versus the other version and see if, you know, those small tweaks really make a difference in the long run.

00:37:49 - Speaker 1: Were there any surprising discoveries that you’ve learned using these AB tests?

00:37:54 - Speaker 3: I think one of them is still the basic interaction of picking up a card and then dropping it into a board after you zoomed into it is still not clicking with quite everyone, even though we feel like we’re explaining it the best that we can.

And maybe that means that it’s still just too weird and people just aren’t used to doing these things, or maybe it means that we have to think about explaining it better again.

Or maybe it also means that the interaction just should be changed and maybe we should come up with a different way of doing this.

So definitely by looking at the data we have now, there’s quite a few things that we want to try to tweak and potentially do differently. So it’s quite helpful to have that information.

00:38:32 - Speaker 2: Also noted on the split test front, I think we, you, I should say ran the initially ran the previous onboarding, which was this deck of cards garden thing kind of alongside the new on boarding and so then we could just compare how far looked at those aggregate analytics to just see in general the people that in this group got this far and the people in this group got this far, and I think that’s a, we don’t have a necessarily a lot of split test work on.

Our team, we’ve done a little on the website here and there just to try some small ideas, but this is a practice that I know a lot of Silicon Valley firms speaking to a product manager from Pinterest some time back that said they had a really good practice that they never rolled anything out without kind of a 90/10 split test, that even the new thing would be up alongside the old thing for a week, and they could look at some of their core metrics and just sort of, first of all, make sure nothing regressed, but also have a pretty specific idea of well. is we’re rolling out this new thing. It’s not just that we like it better, or it looks better or it feels better to us intuitively, but that we can actually show the way that it affects our core business and it’s probably not quite the way that Muse would go about things, but that approach of trying to be a little bit rigorous in, OK, we want to help people be more successful. Does this help people be more successful and that that’s not just based on our intuition or even these anecdotal reports, but it can be based on data to some extent.

00:39:58 - Speaker 1: You just touched upon a pretty important topic that how do you transform like one-off efforts on improving your onboarding into some organizational practices that help you be consistent at improving that. And two things that are super easy to do is one assigning a. On boarding champion in your company who will take care of this thing in your app, and they would vote for it in the internal meetings and things like that. Another one is regularly, maybe once a month or once every quarter, going through the entire boarding experience of your app, including the payment. The sign up and everything and everything changes so fast, you just gonna have absolutely fresh mind every time and you’re gonna have some surprising discoveries.

00:40:46 - Speaker 3: Yeah, definitely. I think you feel like you designed a good onboarding experience and now you can go off, develop new features for your app, but you have to continuously keep in mind as you’re adding new features or as you’re changing things that that might affect how the user goes through the. the first time, like maybe you need to promote those new features, you need to make it part of the onboarding. I think for us now is the case that every time we add a new interaction or a new feature into the app, we basically have to record a new video for the handbook, which made it extra important to make the lighting situation and the videos cropping and everything easily reproducible because we don’t want then the new video to look completely different from the old one.

But yeah, I definitely agree to what you’re saying, to always keep this in mind and to regularly revisit it and see if it needs to be adapted to how your app evolved since.

00:41:33 - Speaker 1: I once interviewed Max Zillemann of Ulysses, and I know you’ve mentioned Ulysses a bit on the show, and they have so much of this infrastructure in different languages that introducing new features and producing materials to support that in like dozens of languages. It’s an enormous part of what they do as a company, like you can’t overlook that by any means.

00:41:55 - Speaker 2: And once you start to localize, you make the cost of every change higher, and you’re adding on to your earlier point, I think, which is that the onboarding tends to get less tension just because it’s naturally in front of not only your team members, but also your longtime users.

Because of course, they go through it at the beginning and not so even if you’re in good touch with, you know, we tend to have the best relationships and the most ongoing communication with our customers, those are sort of by definition, people have already not only successfully onboarded but found value for the app in their lives enough that they’re going to pay for it.

And so as a result, the onboarding experience is something that we just personally see less of, and you can go back to run through it. And and realize ways that it’s come out of date or there’s rough edges or something’s changed in a new version of the operating system that makes something funny about, you know, the screen where you type in your access code or what have you.

So creating some kind of organizational practice to make sure that stuff gets attention because that is your first impression and that is the place that’s the sort of the moment you can convert someone into a Someone that’s gonna use and love the product, or they kind of shrug their shoulders and say, huh, I don’t see what the big deal is and never come back.

00:43:10 - Speaker 1: And it’s so much economically viable to invest in that because sales and marketing costs are enormous compared to the cost of these little interventions that you can add to like dramatically increase the activation rate and just make better use of your marketing money. It’s scale with every single user, virtually any improvement is a great improvement.

00:43:33 - Speaker 3: Yeah, definitely, I think that’s one thing we were kind of trying to achieve with this new onboarding is that we have lots of users coming into the app and of course, naturally people will always turn for one reason or the other, like maybe they just realized the product isn’t for them.

But we really wanted to eliminate the risk of using someone just because they can’t figure out how the product works.

So once you kind of went through the app a little bit, you tried out a few things and you then realized, yeah, I don’t really know what to do with this. That just maybe means that the product is not a good fit for you. But if you actually do have the motivation and that there is a way that it fits into your life, but you can’t figure out the most basic things, and we saw this by users emailing into support by like, how do I delete something or how do I erase something. And so really putting some focus on teaching them the basics so that they then based on that can decide whether or not this product is a good product for them was quite important to us.

00:44:27 - Speaker 2: Looking forward to the future a little bit, we’re seeing lots changing, including, for example, the importance of video content, but Jane, with your eye on and your specialization on the onboarding space, what do you see as potentially being improvements through technology or practices to onboarding for the future?

00:44:47 - Speaker 1: Well, we’ve been pretty mature in terms of the tool set that people can use, but it’s great that organizations in general are starting to realize the importance of user onboarding and just investing resources in that more and more, and even smaller founders can now afford certain tools that were previously just for enterprise companies.

And that’s an amazing trend because previously it felt like this ecosystem of marketing and growth hacking and everything, it was really mature, but what happened after I sign up was a little bit kind of vague and not touched upon.

And these days we can observe a wonderful trend of this product led trend word, product led growth and things like that, which essentially means just looking at what’s inside your product and what’s better for the user. So that’s definitely a wonderful trend.

00:45:35 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s a great point. The cultural awareness, whether that’s within a particular company or in the whole industry, you know, we saw that happen in this huge way with design, for example, it’s not that design didn’t exist before, but it came to be something that probably originally pioneered by Apple, but now it’s in the zeitgeist where people say, OK, we should be thinking about design as a first class thing and I think onboarding is not something that has that same. Awareness as this is a critical piece of any product that you’ve ever build. It’s a huge opportunity both for your product and for your marketing, and it deserves its own attention and name and people to think about it like you said earlier, like the assigning an owner on your team, so that aside from any technological improvements, the culture shift seems likely to only produce better onboarding experiences in the future.

00:46:26 - Speaker 1: And I think that 2020 has already taught us a lot is thinking about sensitive moments about how that intervention that you’re applying can be relevant to the user at this particular moment, uh, because a lot of things have been going on and your drip campaign is definitely not at the top of their priority list, like reading through that. And it feels like there is no hack of just sending more email. Now you have to be really thoughtful and considerate and maybe send less but be more personal and sensitive to all these things and we’ve had a lot of big lessons this year about that.

00:47:03 - Speaker 2: Excellent. Well, yeah, thoughtful, considerate and personal, those head on 3 of our values here on the Muse team and I think that.

And I think that furthermore, you’re right, in 2020 specifically just because of the state of the world and society and so forth, those things are perhaps especially important, but I think they’re important all the time and if we can get more in the habit of our products and our companies and the way that we engage with customers and potential customers as being a little more personal, a little more tuned in, I think that’s a win across the board.

Absolutely. Well, with that, I’ll just say that if any of our listeners out there have feedback, feel free to reach out to us at @museapphq on Twitter or hello at museApp.com by email. We’d love to hear your comments and of course ideas for future episodes.

Jane, thanks for coming on, for pioneering slash advocating for better onboarding through your work at user list and where can folks find you online?

00:48:00 - Speaker 1: It’s definitely user list.com as our primary internet touch point, and we are at the moment working on a comprehensive on boarding guide, which puts together all the resources and what we want our customers and our audience to know for the right mindset about user onboarding and that’s gonna be up very shortly, should be live by the time this is out, and it’s available at userless.com/user onboarding.

00:48:27 - Speaker 2: You heard it here first, folks, breaking news. Alright, thank you both for taking the time today.

00:48:33 - Speaker 1: Great pleasure.

00:48:34 - Speaker 3: Thank you. Yeah, thanks for having us, pleasure.

00:48:36 - Speaker 2: And we’ll see you around. Bye.