Q: How do users learn how to use your app?
Hello Hackers!
For those of you with users, How do your users learn how to use your app, and how effective is it. I'm trying to gather data for my app, https://searchegg.io
I found that +50% of users skip feature guides and the rest forget 70% of any training.
If you use help articles, youtube videos, or product guides, how helpful are they actually? And how much effort does it take to implement?
Thanks in advance!
Edit:
Do you think searching for features & help will make most UX irrelevant ?
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There are a ton of possibilities. Tutorial up front? Most will probably skip it. Have amazing UX so it isn't necessary? Ideally, yes, but unless your product is low on features, that's not overly likely. FAQs? Email sequence with tips? Product demos? Sure. But my favorite is to give them quick tips (that get increasingly complex) one at a time in-app as the user uses the app.
How do you come up with FAQs and quick tips?
Think on where people might have difficulty. Watch friends who have never used the product before as they try to use it. Keep track of customer requests/questions. Take those problematic points in the UX and either fix them or add tips/FAQs about them.
There are also probably some best practices for FAQs, like always include your refund policy, etc. etc.
Does that help?
How much time would you save if you didn't have to worry about UX, and your users just found what they were looking for?
I usually forget quick tips and guides in apps. Do you track if they're ever stuck or forget how to do that same task again ?
I don't track my users, I just keep an eye out for customer service requests, etc. so that I can find pain points.
How many of your users actually put in a request? I know silent quitting is a big problem in apps.
btw, thank you for sharing, I really appreciate it.
Yeah, not many — you're right about that. Silent quitting is real.
☝️ What she said
I try to make the product as easy to use as possible. Unfortunately, I always realize my intuition is wrong when I ask friends to use it lol. So I iterate based on how they use it.
I think this is a really good approach. Even I subconsciously tend to skip the product guides, assuming I'll be able to figure it out. So, I think the important thing is to start by making the app as intuitive and user-friendly as possible, and to observe how users use it, so you can make iterations as you go.
Some architects use this approach when they design buildings and neighborhoods. Rem Koolhaas famously did this for the internal hallways of his McCormick Tribune Campus Center at IIT. Before the building existed there was an open field that students would cross as they traveled to and from their dorm rooms and classrooms. Koolhass observed that the students had carved out fairly substantial ruts in the grass from walking the same paths over and over again.
The result was a highly irregular plan with diagonal hallways: https://www.quora.com/Who-was-the-architect-who-waited-to-see-which-pathways-pedestrians-would-take-through-his-or-her-outdoor-spaces-and-then-paved-sidewalks-to-match-routes-where-people-organically-chose-to-walk
Yeah, intuition is almost alway wrong imo lol. Has iterating the product just off of your friends feedback been enough ? and do you use any software to track what your users are doing ?
Actually it has so far… one of them is a really good UX designer so that definitely was plus. Plus all of them told me more or less the same stuff! For tracking I’m using google analytics, but it hasn’t been as helpful so far… we definitely need more users rn, so I’m focusing on that
Thanks, that was very helpful, wishing you all the best!
This is a great question.
I have this exact issue on Light Bulb.
I ended up building a how to page and a quick 3 page tutorial. Both of which are ignored and skipped a majority of the time.
In upcoming apps, like the one I'm building now, I'll be implementing one of the two approaches I've found to be optimal.
Lmk your thoughts.
I love the minimalistic design, hope you have a successful launch !
Huge thanks - I'm so excited to launch and see what others think!
I hope you're able to improve your users learning experience.
I am rooting for you 100%.
The friendlier the interface is, the less time is spent on guides. Of course, sometimes it's just impossible to display every feature in one place and minimise the depth of exploration of some tool's features, but as people tend to read captions and titles first when it comes to articles, the same they do when they use a new tool - they try to click here and there and if it doesn't begin to behave the way they expect, they just switch to another tool, hoping it will save their time.
To really know if there are some difficulties in learning how the app functions, for example something which could be improved to make it simpler, there are social listening tools, they collect users' opinions focusing on the most popular problems or advantages, so you know what you're doing right or where features could truly be improved.
Hi @Olga Kalachik, which social listening tools would you recommend and how helpful were they in understanding user behavior? I tend to skip things like surveys.
There are many of them, it's mostly about entering the keywords related to some topic/product/feature and starting automated monitoring via social media, websites. As I know Brand24, Awario, Hootsuite Insights and so on have a similar approach.
They collect mentions of a product, positive and negative, sort them, not just product, it can be anything you want to know real people's opinion about.
I haven't had much experience with such apps, but they are helpful in a way - all those spikes of discussions, when they took place, possible reasons for good and bad mentions, what they compare this product to, complaints... curious to see and make conclusions.
There are also user behaviour monitoring systems, they can actually track down user activities and report when some troubles happen or when something takes too much time. Of course, these are mostly big smart systems and used to prevent insider threat or suspicious behaviour, hardly anyone uses them for testing simplicity of some product or app.
I can recommend Syften [1].
To start, collect the list of your competitors. People are usually aware of only 5-10 of their competitors, but if you dig deeper, you'll find you probably have more than 30 :)
Then enter their domain names as the keywords you listen to. After a while you'll see why users recommend certain products, and what problems they solve for them.
[1] https://syften.com
The best UX approach would be to have contextual information associated with the UI.
Like a tooltip or infobox when they reach that action.
Going through a lengthy tutorial first doesn't enforce learning and is mostly a waste of time IMO.
But there are also startups like Framer do a great job merging the two approaches (contextual + show and tell) together.
Ideally, you'd have UX good enough that you can skip guides and still understand how to use the app.
I had someone e-mail me asking how to sign-up. When 1) Sign-up is not required 2) There's a big sign-up button at the top.
I believe that these questions are inevitable, no matter how perfect someone's UX/UI are, some will see this button straight away, and others will still overlook it and then complain that it should have been some place else, even if most of the people experienced no difficulties with this interface.
In my opinion the service and support should be so good that even such questions get responded quick and politely, however for sure they are annoying(
Thanks for sharing these gems. Are you in product management?
I used to be in marketing and PR, lots of crazy funny and disturbing stories heard from sales and product implementation managers about customer experience
That's actually pretty funny but common. Do you use any self-support software like help articles?
No need, I believe this is just common sense, lol.
My two cents: If your app has good UX, the main goal should be pretty easy to see, and any first time visitors would, within a few moments, get a basic understanding of how to use your app. Clear copywriting also helps!
This comment was deleted 2 years ago.
This is the way.
While i do agree with you, even with basic UI's some users can't find things.
Crazy question, but how much time and energy would you save not having to worry about UX, and your users could find & use any of your features?
This comment was deleted 2 years ago.