How Meetup Onboards New Users
useronboard.com
useronboard.com
[Edit: Keep it up, and I wouldn't describe any of this as critique!]
Slide 9, "Notice how de-emphasized Start is." Following the arrow, I see that "Find" and "Start" are the same size and believe are emphasized similarly in the header. What cue am I failing to notice that one is de-emphasized?
A subtlety that's lost is between Slides 26 and 28 the user has two separate flows and browser sessions. It doesn't come across clicking next,next,next without reading your text.
[Edit: I didn't notice there were titles, so the only recommendation I have is to put something in the center of focus -- a graphic, a blurred out gmail inbox, a "later that day" film satire, etc.]
On 35, I had a different reaction to the facebook button there. This flow seems like it's based on creating a non-facebook account -- most people here in the flow already have signaled to Meetup they don't want to use fb. Why ask again? It seems like an unnecessary widget that may carry overly strong emotions for some customers. I wonder if this hook successfully converts non-fb users to fb users.
On 44, what was the initial goal for creating an account? Wasn't it to do something specific within the group? At 44 it feels like this flow was a glorified "sign-me-up-for-the-newsletter" form instead of joining a community. Do you have any thoughts about what should be changed at this step in the flow? Should users get dropped back on the PDX meetup page? Should users get introduced to actual neighbors, much like a host would when you show up to a party? Does slide 44 always work that way for all meetups?
[Edit: Good point on 45-47, I guess I expected to see the whole page 48 be in orange pen! That flow looks very confusing to me, and I think I was trying to nudge you to call it out if you thought so, too.]
Slide 9: Good point, I was kind of unclear. I was referring to how that was the only place on the page that referred to Start, whereas almost all of the rest of page's content was Find-centric.
Slides 26-28: I kinda thought the interstitial title card alluded to that. Is there a better way you'd recommend?
Slide 35: Yeah, I tend to agree with you on that. That might have been an "orange pen" candidate. I was just commenting on their persistence, I suppose.
Slide 44: There's a chance this happened because there were no upcoming Meetups scheduled at that time. But I completely agree with you - hence slides 45 & 46.
Thanks again for your thoughtful commentary!
A few things:
#25 - Please don't even suggest that a site shouldn't validate email addresses immediately. Validation isn't just about keeping spammers off the site. It's also about not spamming the poor folks with common names from the consistently amazing number of people who don't know their own email address. I've witnessed a constant deluge of everything from bank statements to party invites from sites that don't validate the addresses their users provide.
#26 - I'd be really surprised if "hour" was any sort of admission about things on the meetup end. More likely it's a wise acknowledgement of the reality of user email beyond the large, well-functioning services like GMail. If you say a "few minutes" you'll have people in a vicious circle of hitting resend then clicking on the now useless (expired) confirmations as they trickle through their half-assed Exchange system or budget spam filter.
#30 - This caught me up when I signed up for meetup. It asks for a "bio", but it's used more like a title or tagline as 100 characters or so accompany your avatar on membership/attending pages.
Slide 25: Many gigantic websites allow you to experience the product without throwing up an immediate roadblock. Tumblr comes to mind.
Slide 26: It's all about providing behavioral cues to the user. You could easily have the "you might want to wait an hour" message pop up only when they request the confirmation be re-sent, for example.
Slide 30: Yep!
(Fantastic work on the site btw. Looking forward to seeing more.)
• Record the entire experience full-screen with Screenflow (http://www.telestream.net/screenflow/ - highly recommended)
• Paste stills into Keynote, annotate them, etc.
• Export to PDF, split it into individual jpegs via Automator, batch scale them for web via Ps droplet
• Display images on site with homemade slideshow js, plus zoom effect from jQuery Zoom by Jack Moore (http://www.jacklmoore.com/zoom/ - also highly recommended)
That's about it!
Also, that "short bio" section from page 30 is in fact problematic in Meetup groups I am members of. Most people say something like, "I'm new in town and trying to meet people." Well, for a lot of people, it's a year or two later, and Meetup still shows that same text. And it used to be buried on the profile pages, but they moved it to a much more prominent position, to be under your name in the attendee listing. So it tends to look like everyone on Meetup just joined the site.
So I added rss onto the end of the url (common practice)... "D'oh!" - error code dump.
fix that and I'll be back for more ;)
Nitpicking/design language question - would you use the term "affordance" to describe the avatar silhouette itself? To me, that's just a clue, an indicator, a hint to the general action possibility (affordance) of setting up an avatar.
In this case, I used the term pretty carelessly.
I am using Chrome 32.0.1700.102 m on Windows 7 Enterprise
I haven't looked at the API, but how robust is it? If I were to make a get-to-know-NYC-app, I would think that Meetup data would be more useful than either Facebook or Foursquare, just because of what it captures in its structures (or at least, from what I see as a web user)
Our API is awesome and not enough people know about it, which is why we just announced that we're hiring a developer evangelist.