
Dropbox's Onboarding Brilliance - jarederondu
http://theindustry.cc/2012/08/07/dropboxs-onboarding-brilliance/
======
patio11
After publishing a video on improving the first run experience for software
applications, I now have a small flock of little birds telling me that you
should really, really consider doing this.

Dropbox has one of the best I've ever seen -- seriously, sit regular users
down and watch them interact with it, it will be worth your time. There is
still _significant value to doing this_ even if you're not going to nail the
execution nearly as well as they did. It should be _embarrassing_ how easy it
is to wring huge increases out of the standard drop-folks-in-the-app-and-pray-
they-think-like-your-tech-lead experience.

~~~
guynamedloren
> _After publishing a video on improving the first run experience for software
> applications, I now have a small flock of little birds telling me that you
> should really, really consider doing this._

Not sure if it's sentence structure or my stupidity, but I'm not sure what
you're saying here :)

Are you saying that all software applications should have a 'how it works'
video, or that you made a video about the 'first run experience' and everyone
should have a better 'first run experience'?

Thanks in advance!

~~~
patio11
Sorry for the oblique phrasing -- I was trying to avoid being self-
promotional. I'll rephrase to make it more comprehensible but it's going to
require an ad:

I made <https://training.kalzumeus.com> <\-- a video on this subject. (The
site trades access to the video for your email address and permission to
contact you.)

Subsequently to publishing that, people who I am declining to name (+) got in
touch with me and presented several independent confirmations that, yep, their
first-run experiences that they wrote using the video's advice did meaningful
things to their business.

\+ There is an idiom in English "A little bird told me that...", which reports
a comment made by someone whose identity you want to keep secret. A "flock of
little birds" is an amusing image for reporting the same comment made by many
people, or at least I thought it was.

~~~
brlewis
When the way to make your post sound less self-promotional is to make it less
comprehensible and useful, please go ahead and be self-promotional, i.e. put
the link in there and be specific about what success people have told you they
had using the technique.

If you've become shy about self-promotion due to downvoting, please ignore it.
Downvoting on HN seems random in the last year or two. Please think only about
how helpful you think your comment is, as if you were oblivious to how self-
promotional it might sound.

Helpful pointers to something you made will always sound self-promotional;
there's no way around it.

------
jmitcheson
A good article.

Dropbox's onboarding is very good, but one thing I wonder is: has it always
been that good? For example, what was the onboarding process like when Dropbox
very first launched - was it terrible, average, or pretty much like this the
whole time?

I guess the reason I'm interested is that we all have these really early stage
discussions in our startups about how perfect to get the onboarding process
before launch, and it would be cool to know the story about Dropbox for a
reference.

~~~
nicholassmith
I signed up for Dropbox maybe 2+ years ago, the onboarding was pretty good
then so it seems like they've been doing it well and improving from there at
the very least.

------
eungyu
It didn't feel the same when Kicksend did it.

------
eps
Rather than classifying this as Dropbox's brilliance, it might be more prudent
to point out the lack of diligence and thoroughness in user experience
modeling on part of other software vendors.

It is bloody obvious than a guided tour of a program or a service is a really
good idea. Anyone who ever tried using their own software while pretending to
be an uninitiated user can attest to that.

~~~
solutionyogi
Everything seems obvious in hindsight. Trust me, if what Dropbox has done is
as obvious as you seem to claim, a lot more software vendors would have done
it.

