
Ask HN: ReadBoard User Onboarding Process Review - abhishekdesai
I have been trying to get the user onboarding process right for my recently launched product &quot;ReadBoard&quot; based on following insight.<p>&quot;Please review your current onboarding (what do users experience during their first time inside your product and in the first week, including emails) and assess how much is about WHY vs. HOW.&quot;<p>from following article<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;uxdesign.cc&#x2F;dont-assume-new-users-want-to-learn-how-to-use-your-product-6ef9042efbca#.7n26n25hs<p>I would really appreciate if HNers can help me improve it further. Here is a link to review it.<p>www.readboard.io<p>Continue as guest (or sign up:)). Am I doing it right? WHY vs. HOW?<p>Further if you can tell me.<p>Are my users leaving because they can’t figure it out or because they don’t care to?<p>Thank YOU :)
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brudgers
0: If it meets the guidelines, this might make a good "Show HN" because Show
HN is for feedback on implementations submitted by the person who built them.
Show HN guidelines:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

1\. Amazing progress since the last time we talked about ReadBoard.
Congratulations.

2a. Having to pick five topics to try out the site is a distraction. I just
want to see how it works.

2b. There appears to be a topic for every possible tag. There are far too many
for a new user to parse.

2c. The tags are someone else's not mine, and therefore the tagging is
editorial. But the editorial work does not create a hierarchy of importance.
India, Startups, Philosophy, etc. are all given equal weight even though
surely some have better content than others.

2d. My suggestion is to narrow down the number of topics and focus on
providing excellent content for a few...or in the extreme eliminate topics and
just focus on good content. Either way this means deciding who the target
users are and are not.

3a. The user interface of cards takes up a lot of screen space. For me, it
does not provide enough stories per screen to easily decide what is or isn't
good. Or rather, because there are so few stories and I am selective, there is
a high probability for a screen to contain nothing I am interested in. So my
choice is to dig deeper or navigate away from the site. Not seeing anything
interesting makes navigating away more attractive and digging deeper less
attractive.

3b. My advice: make it as easy as possible for the user to find something
interesting because marginal quality content consuming significant screen
space makes work for the user. If I want that, I can go to Facebook.

4\. Reproducing the content from other sites on ReadBoard did not add value
for me because: there was latency while the site was loaded and it the text
was still surrounded by web widgets rather than standing alone. My advice:
look at Firefox's Reader Mode [and consider talking to an attorney about
copyright and looking into Google's definition of content farming].

5\. The Chrome extension is not a bad place to start app development.

6\. I'm not sure I want to share all my contacts.

7\. The guest experience was mediocre, since I could not try out the
discussion feature, and that's the core of the site. My advice is to allow
commenting without registration during the "Feedback" periods. Maybe a unique
URL that logs people into temporary accounts automatically when the "guest"
link is clicked might work.

8\. ReadBoard looks like the result of significant effort. My comments 3, 6,
and 7 all hit on what I see as the biggest challenge: focusing on the
interests of the user over those of ReadBoard as a business.

9\. Comment 5 indicates a way in which the interests of ReadBoard as a
business and the interests of [some] potential users align to mutual benefit.
Finding more such alignments is hard because it requires change, but the
easier path is by changing ReadBoard toward the user's interests.

Good luck.

~~~
abhishekdesai
Awesome! Thank you so much for taking time out and write such a detailed
feedback. Let me work on each of the points to improvise ReadBoard.

I will check "Show HN" guidelines and see if this is a right fit.

