Pitfall # 6 - deprioritizing onboarding
Get users on the right path.
👋 Howdy, Erik here. Welcome to the 6th edition of Early Product Pitfalls. Each week I bring founding startup teams ⏳ 2-3 minutes on a not-so-obvious pitfall when building new things.
🕳The pit
Launching your product with placeholder onboarding, or ignoring it completely.
🤖 What you might sound like
We need to optimize our core functionality before onboarding.
The users we care about most will be able to figure it out.
👀 You, knowing better …
You think about how infrequently you incorporate new routines into your life that stick. This reinforces a critical idea — getting users to establish a habit with your product is incredibly difficult. You conclude that momentum needs to start from login.
You know that in order to build momentum, it is important to be thoughtful about three critical phases of onboarding:
The Setup: you gather all of the information you need to guide users to the aha moment.
The Aha Moment: users experience your core value proposition for the first time.
The Habit Moment: users establish a habit with your product.
🎁 Example
Canva is an online tool where anyone can quickly and easily generate great looking visual content without needing to be an expert in Photoshop.
The Setup Moment
There are a lot of different use cases for Canva. In the setup, they seek to understand what the user wants to accomplish.
This selection allows Canva to determine what the user should see next to get them to the aha moment faster.
The first page the user lands on appears to have taken their selected intention into account. They see relevant project types under “You might want to try.”
The setup actually continues. When a type of post is clicked, a project is created. The user is taken to the main workspace. In this workspace, Canva has proposed templates relevant to the project type.
The Aha Moment
By clicking on a template, the user is able to see a great looking design take over their workspace. In three clicks, they have been taken to the doorstep of Canva’s core value proposition—quickly and easily creating impressive digital assets.
After some simple customization of an existing template, the user is looking at a beautiful custom asset that took minutes. One might exclaim “aha” but surely Canva would prefer “holy shit.”
The Habit Moment
Once the user has created a design, downloaded it and put it to use, Canva cares that this person comes back over and over. Canva’s habit moment is less obvious to outsiders than the setup and aha moment. They have likely looked at users who return repeatably, and noticed patterns in behavior that predict this retention. For example, they might see that their best retained users create two designs in the first two weeks. In this case, Canva might design interventions to encourage this outcome.
🔦 Light for the dark
“Nothing is as good as it seems, and nothing is as bad as it seems. Somewhere in between lies reality.”
Lou Holtz
The moment can tighten our focus and distort our perspective. Keep a cool head this week.
Go get em y’all ✌️
Erik