Ask HN: Any great product onboarding experiences you've had lately? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Any great product onboarding experiences you've had lately?

92 pointsraykanani9946 comments

Looking for some examples of simple yet effective onboarding journeys.

There is a collection on boarding critiques that you might find helpful.

https://www.useronboard.com/onboarding-teardowns/

Their Super Mario Run example is great for the "what not to do" department.

http://www.useronboard.com/how-supermariorun-onboards-new-us...

Why can't I play the tour levels without network?! It makes no sense, and seriously undermines the value of the app as something to do on the train.

Nintendo amazes me: as an organization they make incredible games yet are terrible at everything else.

Don't forget, they are very new to mobile. Things that may be obvious to mobile devs are overlooked by a large company used to a captive console audience. Nintendo doesn't move quickly but they are very adaptable in the long run.

It looks like it's either console devs doing this, or Nintendo wrote some strict console-like requirements. Like login before you see anything and "you have to interact after the loading screen" silliness.

To discourage piracy. http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/12/super-mario-run-online...

I refuse to buy it purely for this fact. Not because I want to pirate it, but because I do most of my mobile gaming while on a plane. And I'm not paying for in-flight WiFi just for Mario.

The Duolingo example is an excellent illustration of good practice.

https://www.useronboard.com/how-duolingo-onboards-new-users/

@mikerg87 thank you very much for sharing! (I'm the person who does UserOnboard)

I recently moved from github pages to http://netlify.com.

And wow everything was just so easy, 5 minutes I had migrated my static site, custom domain and set up SSL.

Their documentation and customer support was fantastic.

I LOVE netlify. And Open Source projects are free to host!

Weird answer: the tutorial campaign in Factorio, each step is just the right size that you know what you have to do but you have to think a little bit and then the next step is slightly longer/more complex. I've not played a game properly for over a decade but thanks to the tutorial I'm over 60 hours in to Factorio and enjoying every minute.

AnyDesk, a german cross-platform remote desktop access thing.

https://anydesk.com/remote-desktop

When you download an app on e.g. Windows you're used to first going through the installation dance. This app surprised and delighted me by having the downloaded .exe launch into running mode immediately. After I had tried it out and closed it, it then asked me whether I wanted to keep it installed.

Wow. Thanks for the tip. This is really nice compared to TV.

* https://www.sendinblue.com/ (like Mailchimp, but easier)

* https://logz.io/ (log aggregation FTW)

* https://www.skylight.io/ (application performance monitoring for Ruby, similar to New Relic, written in Rust)

logz.io does not appear to support TLS on their homepage. I'm getting mixed content errors that are preventing stylesheet loading.

So, correct link may be http://logz.io instead of https://logz.io

Wow that is really weird.

Thanks for pointing that out. Should probably let them know.

UPDATE: I've let them know [0] and the root cause is simple.

[0] https://twitter.com/devstack/status/823762402382475265

I talked with them. They're using wordpress, so it may not have been easy. (If they're terminating SSL at an LB or cloudflare, these things can be really annoying to debug with wordpress too!)

So logz.io is literally ELKaaS?

Yeah it sets up pretty quick and they even have a free level.

http://www.blendle.com has quite a nice onboarding process if you ask me.

Apple's new AirPods onboarding is sublime.

One quibble: whoever believed that grey text on white paper was a good idea has issues that need to be addressed.

I thought that the Carvana trade-in onboarding was pure magic. A "custom" video that described the valuation of my car was so cool that even though I ended up trading in my car with a car I bought at a dealership I really wanted to be a Carvana customer.

https://www.carvana.com/trades

I'm a fan of the onboarding of https://privacy.com/ - simple and clean, the opposite of the traditional payments/banking sector.

Yes! Elasticsearch and associated tools.

Their docs are solid. Packages available for many platforms. The tutorial is straightforward. Kibana is excellent for real-time time series graphing.

(I'm really biased because of the last sentence.)

I loved https://zeit.co/now/ passwordless registration and overall first 2 minutes onboarding animations and texts.

I was very impressed with https://www.graph.cool/ and how they walk you through onboarding with tooltips for every step. Here's a screenshot:

https://goo.gl/photos/jhwZSqaXRxHXUwZi9

As a corollary, are there any good libraries for helping build more complex onboarding flows, or do these all tends to be hand-built from scratch?

I've seen a few javascript walk-through tour type libraries, but what about something that integrates with a backend to be stateful on what a user has done?

Not sure about the question is about new user on boarding. Recently, I just installed WhatsApp desktop app on my mac and hooked app on iOS device with desktop app and was blown away by simple QR code trick. I wish we build one click experiences for every integration/on boarding.

Somewhat Helsinki-specific, but the onboarding for the Wolt app is a beautiful one:

https://itunes.apple.com/fi/app/wolt/id943905271

Headspace's 10 day guided intro sold me pretty much after the first session: https://www.headspace.com/

It's kind of a tutorial run so I think that counts as an onboarding?

I was able to get early access to status.im and can say that of all the crypto space solutions out there, onboarding with the mobile app was really intuitive.

https://status.im/

ChromeCast was a pleasure and I was also really happen trying out Digital Ocean.

The plex app for the ps4 had a painless onboarding process that took about 30 seconds. It had you log in on a browser and put in a code the app gave you. It worked right away and left me impressed.

OutSystems platform free edition. https://www.outsystems.com/get-started/

I liked https://www.gitkraken.com/ onboarding

You can find here a few good examples. https://www.useronboard.com

pillpack.com --> fantastic ui/ux . couldn't say enough good things about them.

p.s. they are a mail order pharmacy that packages pills into sachets

https://capsule.ai has a very nice onboarding

Shame they don't actually say what it is... Some sort of calendar/reminder thing?

Maybe it's a nicer styled google location history?

We've put quite a bit of effort into our onboarding process at https://visualteamstatus.com/. Takes less than 60 seconds to go from nothing to a full account and dashboard with analytics. We think that's pretty good considering the integrations required between VTS and Visual Studio Team Services.

simple.com

Seconded! They recently changed their backend bank, and it was surprisingly simple to get things moved over, even given that I had a direct deposit in place, which necessitated a more complicated process.

I was pretty happy with the onboarding at flowkey.

freelancer.com as a client had me signed up before I even realised...

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