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Our guest today is Samuel Hulick, user onboarding consultant and founder at UserOnboard.

I’ve wanted to interview Samuel for a long long time. I’ve read Samuel’s work for over 7 years now. I love his onboarding teardowns of many many apps that are both incredibly instructive and very hilarious. Always incisive, always insightful – I’ve enjoyed so much of Samuel’s work. My interview with Samuel today pinpoints how crucial user onboarding is – and outlines how to improve both upstream and downstream user retention dramatically by improving your app’s user onboarding experience.






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KEY HIGHLIGHTS

🤝 The ‘educational moments’ that Samuel looks for when he analyzes an app or product’s onboarding.

🤔 Why Samuel recommends thinking of software as a service rather than a good for sale or an object.

🧭 Why Samuel recommends letting users feel in control rather than taking them on a tour of the product’s features.

👉 Why Samuel suggests thinking about boiling down your business model to supporting human motivation – or helping people do what they want to do.

↘️ How Samuel recommends reducing stress in onboarding experiences that sometimes need to be long drawn – for instance, banks or fitness apps.

☝️ Why it’s important to wrap every ask in the context of why a user is better off for having done it.

👥 Why it’s important to build different user segments based off of the kinds of things that people are trying to do, rather than the kinds of people that they are.

🔄 Why it’s important to value an existing onboarding process and get insights from it before changing it.

💯 The concept of POP or ‘point of payoff’.

ℹ️ How some products and apps are customizing the onboarding experience based on information they collect earlier in the process.

KEY QUOTES

The case for simplifying onboarding

Rather than trying to slow them down and take them on a 20 step tour around all of your favorite new features of your product, instead to just focus on creating ways for the user to feel like they’re in control, and they’re making the decisions and the choices and facilitating that as much as possible, rather than dictating how the workflow will proceed.

Speak keenly to user motivations

If you’re signing up for a bank, you will be able to understand how funding your account is really going to be relevant. But, answering questions about whether you’re a terrorist or not might seem unrelated to your current motivations. And so, one thing that I would recommend is to front load the experience with as many steps that are highly relevant to what they’re doing as possible, so that they can feel like they’re making progress on the thing that they actually care about, that’s driving them through that whole process to begin with.

Why highlighting user benefit is critical

My biggest recommendation is, with any sort of user friction, or any request that you make of the user, is to just make it really clear how it’s to their benefit, and how they’re better off by having done it. And if you can’t make a really credible case for that, then you’re going to have a really hard design challenge because again, your whole workflow is powered by the user caring enough to do it. 

Sugarcoat the pills

I have a kind of an analogy where if you have a dog that needs to take a pill, you can try to hold its mouth open and throw the pill toward the back of its mouth and then keep its snout closed until it looks like it’s swallowed. And then a lot of times it’ll just spit it out and it’s all slimy and you have to pick it out on the floor and it’s just as big hassle or you can just put it inside a meatball and the dog just eats it up. 

So when you’re asking for sensitive questions like: what’s your birthday, if you can wrap it in the meatball, say ‘help your friends provide well wishes or gifts’ or something along those lines, or ‘what’s your phone number so people can find you more easily,’ or even things that maybe don’t sound super enjoyable, like linking your bank account to another bank, so you can fund your new account. 

If you can wrap that in the context of why somebody is better off for having done it and tap into that motivation, then it’s just a question of figuring out the right interface which is not nearly as difficult at that point.

Segment on user behavior

You’re referring to different user segments based off of the kinds of people that they are, rather than the kinds of things that they’re trying to do. And so that’s one thing that I would tease out early on, if I was in this hypothetical meeting. I would say, do we really want to focus on moms and dads because those don’t give you a really strong clue into what that person is trying to do and what their motivations are, which is what I keep coming back to here.

And so you from my standpoint, I would say what is it that moms are trying to do, what is it that dads are trying to do – and how are those different, and let’s start calling those segments by that name rather than by their colloquial person based name. 

Optimization vs. going nuclear

The one thing that I would recommend more than anything, and this might come as a bit of a surprise is to to really pay respect to the onboarding that is in place, even if it’s not something that you designed. 

My recommendation would be to value the onboarding that’s already in place and use that as a really valuable source of insights as far as conversion data, retention, things along those lines. Like at the beginning when we’re talking about the sequence of steps that people have to go through in order to to attain value. Let’s see how that’s currently performing in your current setup. And let’s make some targeted and surgical changes based off of where we see the conversion numbers providing the most attrition or the better conversions and wanting to double down on that or things like that, rather than just tearing the whole thing off – and just hoping that in one big guess, you get it completely right this time, whereas in the past that wasn’t the case.

Let numbers be your guide

Early into my career, I would come in and, and be able to pick out points where I was like, ooh, this is terrible. This is confusing, this is gonna be tripping up users. And then I go and look at the data and it says, like, the complete opposite picture, or I’ll talk to the designers – and they’ll say, oh, yeah, we hate this. It’s the grossest, clunkiest thing. But we can’t come up with a split test that beats it or things along those lines. So instead of really getting down into the micro details on a part that maybe isn’t playing a very big role in the conversion process anyway, I really like to look at the numbers and use that to set the overall strategic context, and then dive into changes from there.

How Call of Duty eased their learning curve

I recently heard that the Call of Duty multiplayer, I think it was maybe their mobile experience specifically created a whole pre designed environment where people would be joining matches after creating their account – brand new players joining the combat game environment, and they when they would first join new matches, they would be matched up with what would appear to be other live players who would just totally annihilate them if that was the case, because for people the learning curve is very steep with that game. 

But instead it was just you know, taco 67 or whatever. Just fake names on bots who were all deskilled very heavily, so that the right person would have time to actually get up to speed and then if I’m not mistaken, the bots that they would experience would actually ramp up the competitiveness as the person’s skills accelerated, until they got to a point where the person would then be released out into the wild, but they’d already kind of leveled up their actual skills before just going in and getting totally waxed.

Getting users to segment themselves for better experience

I remember last year, I believe, hearing about a guitar playing app for Android that was looking to work on their retention and early conversions and things along those lines and they implemented a simple sort of interactive questionnaire at the beginning that just basically asked: is this the first time that you’re picking up a guitar, or do you already know some chords, or can you play skills or things along those lines, and just by letting people slot themselves into categories, just very high level categories, they were able to direct people directly to the areas of information that would be most relevant to them. And, they saw their conversion retention numbers take a significant uplift from that. 

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW

Shamanth: I’m very excited to welcome Samuel Hulick to the mobile user acquisition show. Samuel, excited to have you.

Samuel: It is a genuine pleasure to be here.

Shamanth: Indeed, Samuel, as I was mentioning before we hit record, I’m excited to have you because I’ve recommended your work to so many people we work with, so many of our clients, some of the people who ask for advice, not just because it’s so in depth, but also because it’s so hilarious – a lot of your comments, a lot of your tear downs. So I love that about so much so much that you do. And I would love to dive into all things onboarding and really dive into some of your magic on today’s interview.

Samuel: I hope to be able to produce magic for you.

Shamanth: Indeed. Samuel when you are first are looking at an app or a product and doing a teardown. What are some of the first elements that you typically look for?

Samuel: Well, I guess it can depend. I mean, for a tear down, my usual orientation is to go through it and pull out what I guess you could call educational moments or little areas that might reveal what the designers were thinking when they made it or what challenges they were probably facing. And try to turn those into moments that I can translate into more universally relatable lessons. But then also, if I’m coming in to actually just specifically analyze an onboarding flow from the perspective of a contributor, as a designer or a strategist, then I would be looking at different things. So I’m not sure which between those two you’re more interested in but they have kind of different perspectives. 

Shamanth: Interesting. So you’re saying depending on whether you’re building something or analyzing something that would be different, right? So let’s assume you’re analyzing something because that’s something a lot of our listeners would want to do. And they’re saying, oh, I wonder why this is working? Let’s say they are looking at my competitive research. So what could some of the examples of such educational moments be? Are there any specifics you can call out to?

Samuel: Sure, I would say general pattern wise as far as what I would like to pay the most attention to and what I try to downplay, as far as you know, keeping my attention away from the areas where maybe there isn’t as much of a ROI to them – would be one, just looking at the actual sequence of steps that the user needs to go through in order to arrive at a valuable outcome for themselves and also ideally for the business, a valuable outcome for the business as well. 

So just looking at that on a very practical level and saying, okay, if you sell software that helps people send invoices, what’s valuable to those people is probably to have those invoices approved and paid and projects to be accepted – and things along those lines. So if somebody’s starting from scratch, how do they go from sign up to having an invoice not only created in the system, but actually you helping them contribute to their own success. 

And also on the flip side, looking at it from the businesses perspective and saying, you are hoping that when someone signs up, they’ll convert to becoming a paid customer or whatever value generation milestone you have on your end as well. And looking at that from a much more analytical and statistics driven standpoint and saying, out of the thousand people who sign up for your product most recently, how many of those people went on to produce value for you and therefore, what does that tell you about your unit economics from an acquisition standpoint, things like that.

Shamanth: Right. And the way you written about this is about you said, hey, onboarding should always be directed toward an end goal, which is what you just said, and just trying to make us successful in completing an action, which in this case could be sending an invoice out? What are some of the common reasons this doesn’t happen in very many products?

Samuel: I wish I had a better answer. It’s something I have wondered about a lot myself in my own career. I think you know, one of the bigger things that stands out to me is that a lot of people think of their software as being inherently valuable – that if you add a new feature or capability to your software, roll out some sort of new screen state or workflow or things along those lines that you’re adding value to the product itself. 

And then it’s just a question of selling that product to the users. And what I would say is, instead of thinking of your software as an object, or a good for sale, to think of it as a service, you’re providing instead and look at it from the standpoint of how many people who went through a self service process with your product to come to some sort of end outcome that they were desiring?

How often does that happen? And how frequently and reliably do you provide value to the users? And how reliably does that produce value for your own business? That’s really where my mind is much more at. But yeah, it’s been a lifelong, or at least career long question of mine as to why people fixate on the screen states and the wireframes and things like that, rather than looking at the bigger picture.

Shamanth: Indeed, I think that’s a very helpful perspective shift in thinking about the product as a service, if it is doing something for the user. And, you know, for what it’s worth, I just realized, we call it software as a service – and focus more on the software, but not so much on the service pack. But I think that perspective absolutely makes sense to me. Something else you’ve written about is that during onboarding, you could have informative messages that inform the user, or calls to action that make them take an action – you have fairly strong opinions & perspectives about which is more powerful, which is more impactful. Can you speak to this?

Samuel: Sure. And I’m glad that my strong opinions are making it out there. So there are a couple of qualities that I look for in what I would consider to be a well designed workflow or user experience of any kind. A big part of that is relevance and identifying what it is that the user is trying to do so that you can have your software coordinate with them in getting that particular thing accomplished. And when you look at software from that sort of perspective, something that might sound appealing on the surface, like giving people a tool tip tour or little hotspots that show up and call attention to different areas or coach marks or different UI practices along those lines or patterns, I find oftentimes really just get in the way of what the user is trying to do. 

As a user myself, that is the majority of my experience with them. And also as a designer and seeing other users have their own speed bumps encountered along the way. So one general quality that I recommend really considering is not interrupting the user and not breaking up the flow of what they’re already coming to you to try to accomplish.

Rather than trying to slow them down and take them on a 20 step tour around all of your favorite new features of your product, instead to just focus on creating ways for the user to feel like they’re in control, and they’re making the decisions and the choices and facilitating that as much as possible, rather than dictating how the workflow will proceed.

Shamanth: Interesting. So it’s almost like having the user be a part of the experience by actually engaging? 

Samuel: Yeah, you look at what is driving engagement, what is driving value creation for your business, the fundamental dynamic that your business model is based off of. It’s really human motivation. And when somebody wants to make a particular change or improvement to their life or their circumstances, then they reach for an app, like, I want to be listening to music, so I go to Spotify. I want to get across town so I call an Uber or things along those lines, maybe not so much, right now. Yeah, Spotify, at the very least. 

And so you want to be paying attention to that sort of context of purpose and aligning your app’s capabilities as much as possible with what the user is trying to use them for. So yeah, I mean, I would say that’s really the name of the game much more than it is to create a fixed idea of an object with a fixed state that users have to go through. Rather, you have the software adapt around the user instead.

Shamanth: Interesting. Yeah, I remember reading something you linked to a long time ago about how Super Mario teaches users how to play. And I thought that was very instructive for the reasons you mentioned, in that it does not tell the user what to do. Yep, it just gives you this sort of blank screen and the user has to take actions to figure out I think that’s absolutely an illustration of what what you just talked about?

Samuel: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you really look at boiling down your business model to supporting human motivation, and whatever particular way you do, you don’t want to undermine that under any circumstances. That’s the energy your company, you know, drives on. And so if you take away choice from people, take away their sense of connectedness to other people, autonomy, things along those lines, those are just factually proven to undermine motivation. And that’s pretty much the opposite of what you want to be doing.

Shamanth: Absolutely. Now, let’s say there’s an onboarding flow that needs to be long – or at least the company or the maker thinks that it needs to be long. One example I could think of could be a bank, or an insurance company that needs just a ton of info.

Samuel: Yep. And that’s government regulations as well. I mean, the designers aren’t just deciding to stretch it out or anything like that, you know, it’s just a lot of red tape to work around and things like that. Yep.

Shamanth: Exactly right. On certain fitness apps I’ve worked with that also said, you know, we really need to capture all of this data before we know what to give them. Now, in cases like that, where there’s so much data that you need to capture that could be a source of so much friction, how would you think about or recommend ways to make this onboarding a little less stressful, a little less frictionful, so to speak, for the user?

Samuel: Yeah, that’s a great question. I’ll assume that reevaluating whether those things are really needed or not, is not an acceptable Plan A, let’s assume that one’s off the table. So you’re just stuck with a long list of things, you know that you need to figure out, what I would recommend doing is being very thoughtful about the order that you’re putting those requests in. 

Because there are going to be some things that very closely tie to the value that somebody is expecting to get.

If you’re signing up for a bank, you will be able to understand how funding your account is really going to be relevant. But, answering questions about whether you’re a terrorist or not might seem unrelated to your current  motivations. And so, one thing that I would recommend is to front load the experience with as many steps that are highly relevant to what they’re doing as possible, so that they can feel like they’re making progress on the thing that they actually care about, that’s driving them through that whole process to begin with. 

And then you can also do things like in more generic sort of user experience design practices, like chunking them out into different stages or clusters, so that when you navigate from one set of them to the next, you can kind of feel like you’re making a bigger set of progresses, or you can attach it to things that way. But ultimately,

My biggest recommendation is, with any sort of user friction, or any request that you make of the user, is to just make it really clear how it’s to their benefit, and how they’re better off by having done it. And if you can’t make a really credible case for that, then you’re going to have a really hard design challenge because again, your whole workflow is powered by the user caring enough to do it. 

You really want to tap into that as much as possible.  

I have a kind of an analogy where if you have a dog that needs to take a pill, you can try to hold its mouth open and throw the pill toward the back of its mouth and then keep its snout closed until it looks like it’s swallowed. And then a lot of times it’ll just spit it out and it’s all slimy and you have to pick it out on the floor and it’s just as big hassle or you can just put it inside a meatball and the dog just eats it up.

So when you’re asking for sensitive questions like: what’s your birthday, if you can wrap it in the meatball, say ‘help your friends provide well wishes or gifts’ or something along those lines, or ‘what’s your phone number so people can find you more easily,’ or even things that maybe don’t sound super enjoyable, like linking your bank account to another bank, so you can fund your new account. 

If you can wrap that in the context of why somebody is better off for having done it and tap into that motivation, then it’s just a question of figuring out the right interface which is not nearly as difficult at that point.

Shamanth: Indeed and that certainly does also jumps out from a lot of teardowns of yours as well. This seems to be one of the more common things people miss – they ask for something and don’t explain why. 

Samuel: Yeah, and just state just tell people that they need to do. Yeah. it’s an unfriendly way to converse and relate with people. For sure. 

Shamanth: Certainly. Something else that you speak to emphasize in a lot of your tear downs is having a single goal, or CTA, so to speak for each screen or each UI. Now, some companies may push back, saying,  well, some of our users respond to message A action A, let’s just say moms respond to message A. Dads respond to message B. We want to have both message A and B, so we don’t want to have a single CTA on the screen. How do you address a pushback like that, if at all you do?

Samuel: Sure. Well, I would say, it sounds like the team could take a step back and get clear on what their goals are and what they feel that the right segments for this particular screen state would be to keep in consideration. And more specifically, this might not be in the spirit of your question. But one thing that stood out to me is you’re saying the examples were moms and dads, which I know is just off the top of your head there. But the thing that stands out to me there is that

you’re referring to different user segments based off of the kinds of people that they are, rather than the kinds of things that they’re trying to do. And so that’s one thing that I would tease out early on, if I was in this hypothetical meeting. I would say, do we really want to focus on moms and dads because those don’t give you a really strong clue into what that person is trying to do and what their motivations are, which is what I keep coming back to here.

And so you from my standpoint, I would say what is it that moms are trying to do, what is it that dads are trying to do – and how are those different, and let’s start calling those segments by that name rather than by their colloquial person based name.

And then based off of that, it oftentimes really helps clarify, well, maybe if we had two different conflicting or competing call to actions on the same screen, maybe it’s really only relevant to people who are trying to do this anyway, so we can either consolidate those or get rid of one of those or things along those lines. I would say especially in the case of your homescreen on your marketing site and things like that, I wouldn’t advocate only ever having one call to action per screen. 

But I think that it’s really worthwhile to get really clear on what the purpose of each screen is, so that what kind of role that plays in bigger workflows and helping people, supporting people in attaining their higher ambitions that are bringing them there to begin with.

Shamanth: Interesting. I like that perspective shift about it’s not who they are. It’s what they’re trying to do. And if that is distinct, maybe moms and dads are different, but if all they’re looking for is the exact same thing, maybe moms are not actually similar after all.

Samuel: Yeah, exactly. And it’s something that I find is a real trap in thinking within a lot of common software practices and methodologies to think of things like personas or different segments. I just released a Bandcamp review where I was trying to upload some music and I had to pretend to be like a label in order to do that, because they have options: are you a listener or a musician or a label? There wasnt anything in between. It wasn’t based off of what I was trying to do. So right, that’s not the most egregious example. But you know, it’s something where it’s clear when somebody has identified what somebody is trying to get out of something, the software should dynamically, as much as possible, help facilitate that. And otherwise, what are you really building off of other than just some sort of idea of a kind of person? So yeah, speaking of strong opinions, I got some strong ones there too. 

Shamanth: Please bring them on indeed. You know, something else you’ve advocated if that onboarding should be a part of the product design process, the planning process, and shouldn’t be slapped on as an afterthought once the product is ready, which is something I’ve certainly seen and you’ve absolutely written about having seen people do.

Let’s assume there’s a product manager or let’s say, a founder who’s in the process of building a new product, and they’re like, right, I read Samuel Hulick. We need to make sure we build onboarding into this from the ground up, but they’ve never worked on onboarding before. Where do you recommend they begin, perhaps either by way of educating themselves or starting to put in an onboarding flow as a part of the product.

Samuel: Yeah, so how to take their current setup and transition it to a higher performing onboarding experience. Yeah. I mean, yeah, that’s my main professional capacity in which I served. So I should have some thoughts on that, at the very least.

The one thing that I would recommend more than anything, and this might come as a bit of a surprise is to to really pay respect to the onboarding that is in place, even if it’s not something that you designed. 

My recommendation would be instead to value the onboarding that’s already in place and use that as a really valuable source of insights as far as conversion data, retention, things along those lines. Like at the beginning when we’re talking about the sequence of steps that people have to go through in order to to attain value. Let’s see how that’s currently performing in your current setup. And let’s make some targeted and surgical changes based off of where we see the conversion numbers providing the most attrition or the better conversions and wanting to double down on that or things like that, rather than just tearing the whole thing off – and just hoping that in one big guess, you get it completely right this time, whereas in the past that wasn’t the case.

A lot of times it’s something that little pieces have been stapled on over the years. And nobody really took a very thoughtful kind of top down perspective on them. You still know if you’re out there generating organic signups that people are making it through. And so, what I often find are teams are so almost repelled or disgusted by their own onboarding experience and they want to come and make good and have a good experience and just sort of swap out one for the other like Indiana Jones with the little golden head. 

Shamanth: Right. Something is working, even if the designer thinks that it’s terrible. something’s working. So trying to identify what is that. 

Samuel: Yeah, well, and you know, I mean opinions are, there’s certainly something to be said for educating yourself and then familiarizing yourself with user experience best practices and things like that.

But early into my career, I would come in and, and be able to pick out points where I was like, ooh, this looks, this is terrible. This is confusing, this is gonna be tripping up users. And then I go and look at the data and it says, like, the complete opposite picture, or I’ll talk to the designers – and they’ll say, oh, yeah, we hate this. It’s the grossest, clunkiest thing. But we can’t come up with a split test that beats it or things along those lines. So instead of really getting down into the micro details on a part that maybe isn’t playing a very big role in the conversion process anyway, I really like to look at the numbers and use that to set the overall strategic context, and then dive into changes from there.

Shamanth: Right. Speaking of data and numbers, what are the key KPIs or metrics that you recommend looking at to assess the performance of an onboarding experience?

Samuel: Yep, I thought a fair amount about this too. So fortunately, I have some thoughts on that. The term that I’m currently working with right now is what I call a POP or a point of payoff, which is looking at your acquisition efforts as being an investment that you’re trying to recoup and thinking about all of the effort and resources, energy, money that you’re putting into marketing, sales, driving signups, creating new features to help put out press releases to drive up more interest – and all of that is really leading up to getting people in through the front door and getting them to sign up for your product. 

And what I like to think about in terms of like, CAC, cost of acquisition, for a cost of acquired customer, things along those lines – the idea that that’s an investment that you need to pay attention to how it’s paid back and ideally create a strategy around how to get more of your users to produce an ROI on the acquisition investment that you’re putting out there. So the one number that I really like to look at is either how long it takes someone to pay back their CAC if it’s close enough, but if it’s something where it’s like 18 months out, then I would look for an earlier proxy instead. But the longer term bigger picture revenue and retention numbers are where I would really start and then also looking at: all right, well, if that’s a long journey, if it even if it does take 18 months, they have to start paying at some point or they have to start producing value for you of some kind, and that’s what I call the point of payoff – it is when do they convert from being and I don’t mean this in a negative way but freeloaders so to speak or an investment that you’re hoping turns out when does that Investments start producing something, some sort of yield for you. 

And then you have two points in a timeline, you have the point of signup, and you have the point of them beginning to produce value. And there’s going to be a gap of time in between unless if you have people paying right out through the door or something along those lines. And so as onboarding what I really like to look at is, how reliably are you getting people to that point of payoff for yourself where you’re getting them to start producing some value in return for the investment that you’re putting into getting them and a bunch of other people to sign up? 

And then also, how can you get them to a point of payoff for the user themselves, in getting value that makes their investment worthwhile as far as the time and attention that they’re putting into trying a new product and things along those lines? The hypothetical invoicing company like I can guarantee nobody’s just signing up just to see what their onboarding is like other than maybe me. But if they go in and even if they create a couple invoices if those don’t actually get approved, and they don’t continue on and actually receive value from the product, it was really just a waste of time for them. And nobody’s going to do that day in and day out, or you’d have to be very highly motivated in order to do that. So you want to build your acquisition strategy around capitalizing on when people are feeling really in the moment and wanting to make something happen, and then actually delivering on that value, not just getting them to an aha moment where they can imagine the value, but actually receiving it.

Shamanth: Right. Yeah, I think that perspective makes perfect sense. You start to get at least some nonzero value, which hopefully is a predictor of long term ROI or recouping that investment.

Samuel: Yep. And if and if your your signups are if you’re getting over 1000 signups a week, you could just use weekly cohorts and just see what percentage of your signups from the 30th week of the year went on to hit those those value milestones and look to bring that number trending upwards as much as possible. That’s really kinda the name of the game.

Shamanth: Certainly. Samuel you’ve seen, like hundreds, if not way more than that numbers of onboarding experiences. What is something that has surprised you lately? 

Samuel: I think as far as just design patterns or concepts are concerned and how they can relate to onboarding, I would certainly say that the biggest one that I think it’s very impressive to me when people are doing it right now, because I think they’re ahead of the curve and I think it will become a much bigger deal in the future is customizing the onboarding experience based off of information that you collect earlier in the process and dynamically getting people to the outcomes that they’re they’re most looking for, rather than just having a one size fits all onboarding experience that people go click, click, click through, and then it’s over. 

So to use an almost extreme example,

I recently heard that the Call of Duty multiplayer, I think it was maybe their mobile experience specifically created a whole pre designed environment where people would be joining matches after creating their account – brand new players joining the combat game environment, and they when they would first join new matches, they would be matched up with what would appear to be other live players who would just totally annihilate them if that was the case, because for people the learning curve is very steep with that game.

But instead it was just you know, taco 67 or whatever. Just fake names on bots who were all deskilled very heavily, so that the right person would have time to actually get up to speed and then if I’m not mistaken, the bots that they would experience would actually ramp up the competitiveness as the person’s skills accelerated, until they got to a point where the person would then be released out into the wild, but they’d already kind of leveled up their actual skills before just going in and getting totally waxed. So that would be an example of a dynamic onboarding experience rather than just here’s an introduction to the buttons. Now, best of luck.

Shamanth: Interestingly, I’ve seen Words with Friends do something very similar based on what level it sees the user to be at. That’s definitely very fascinating. Indeed. And it also goes on to show how things are changing, even though there could be principles of onboarding. They can be more interesting and cool ways of applying some of these things. 

Samuel: Yeah. Just as one other example,

I remember last year, I believe, hearing about a guitar playing app for Android that was looking to work on their retention and early conversions and things along those lines and they implemented a simple sort of interactive questionnaire at the beginning that just basically asked: is this the first time that you’re picking up a guitar, or do you already know some chords, or can you play skills or things along those lines, and just by letting people slot themselves into categories, just very high level categories, they were able to direct people directly to the areas of information that would be most relevant to them. And, they saw their conversion retention numbers take a significant uplift from that.

So just a very simple example of just kind of bucketing people into different experiences, again, based off of what they’re trying to do, which is very different at different skill levels when you’re trying to improve your guitar skills, rather than who they are. If they had asked, you know, are you a student or a grown up or an old person, you know, I don’t even know. That wouldn’t be a good one anyway. You know, or are you a mom or a dad like those are not necessarily going to, maybe they’ll have something to do with skill level, but probably not in that case especially..

Shamanth: No that makes complete sense. Samuel, this has been incredible. Yeah, so those are the key questions we had today, and I want to be respectful of your time. This has been incredibly insightful, much like so many of your tear down so many of your writings that I’ve read. Thank you for appearing on the mobile user acquisition show. As we wrapp, can you tell us how we can find out more about you?

Samuel: Sure. Everything that I put out there, especially regarding user onboarding goes through useronboard.com. And if you go there, you can view over 50 tear downs of different popular web apps experiences, as you mentioned. I’M also starting to put out a whole lot of new content starting this past couple weeks. So it’s a funny timing as far as the global pandemic is concerned. But if you’re looking for ways to pass the time and learn more about onboarding, there will be a lot of new material headed your way soon.

Shamanth: Wonderful. For sure, I’m excited to check out a lot of your new material. Thank you again for being on the mobile user acquisition show. Samuel. It’s been an honor to have you.

Samuel: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.

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