How a nightclub saved my onboarding design
Time to put your dancing shoes on. Here are the three key lessons from a nightclub experience that will make your onboarding design foolproof.
I always think of onboarding experiences as an opportunity to create an unforgettable first impression for your users while also demonstrating the value it provides to them. From past experiences, I’ve seen it being treated as just a ‘feature’ that overloads users with irrelevant information for fear of product abandonment. Studies in psychology have shown that people have a finite capacity for remembering things, typically up to 4 at a time. So, if you teach them everything there is to learn about your product in one go, they will likely forget it tomorrow.
An approach that I often find effective in co-designing user onboarding experiences with my clients is to take a step back from the product that we are designing for and relate it back to real-life experiences. Matt Hryhorsky, design director of Filament Labs, calls this UX in Real Life (UX IRL), which is simply the idea of using the real world as an inspiration to create better user experiences within the digital world.
“UX doesn’t live inside our phones or our websites… we need to step way outside of those devices to have a better understanding of what people are doing in the real world.” — Matt Hryhorsky, Design Director of Filament Labs
These experiences don’t have to be anything complicated. I like to use a nightclub as an example (but I might switch to other scenarios depending on the project and the type of clients that I am working with). This reinforces radical customer-centricity amongst my clients whom I’m working with. This approach gives them the permission to look up from their screens, temporarily shift their focus away from the business perspective, investigate the physical world and explore how users behave and find their way in the physical space.
Because user onboarding is a critical component of any product flow, it’s important to bring your full creative self to this design process. Sure, there are often barriers to spending the right amount of time and energy on this phase, but one way to get that time and budget is to show a more direct value-add by spending time seeing how this translates to real life spaces to build a stronger appreciation for the work. Then it becomes easier for your end users to understand how they might get the most value from your product.
The ‘Nightclub’ Experience
Slightly more than a year ago, I decided to use this approach while I was working on the user onboarding flow for an online marketplace project. We were trying to solve an issue on how to better onboard our users to the key features within our website. I designed the look and feel of my workshop to be reminiscent of a nightclub environment — complete with a mini dance floor and a bar, both of which we defined as ‘key features’ of our nightclub. Our primary goal out of this workshop was to think of ways on what we can do in order to get our customers to start interacting and dance with one another on the dance floor. I convinced my clients/stakeholders to adopt different roles in the nightclub — as a bartender, a bouncer, nightclub owner, customers — and gave each of them different goals to accomplish. Getting them to adopt different roles than they were traditionally used to, was useful in getting them to shift their mindset towards becoming more customer-centric. By the end of the workshop, we got extremely creative with our end solution, as we figured out what worked and what didn’t. We ended up coming up with a solution that ultimately provided an empathetic, seamless and enjoyable experience for our users! #winning
The ‘nightclub’ experience gives us several helpful tips and reminders on how we can better onboard our customers to our product. Below are my three key lessons for using a nightclub experience to better design an onboarding experience.
1. When you give free drinks, you get rewarded as well (Reciprocity)
Picture this. You arrive at the nightclub together with a group of friends. You slowly make your way past the bouncer… and upon entering the nightclub, you receive a drink card that entitles you to one free drink. What do you do next? Locate the bar and claim your free drink, of course! What a great way to start your night with a win!
“Trust all of what you try, half of what you see and none of what you hear.” — Krystal Higgins, Interaction Designer
Giving a free drink card to your customers evokes a sense of accomplishment. You are getting your customers to start somewhere and complete a small, tangible task.. Note that you are providing them with more than just a free drink; they are also getting acquainted with the bar. Once they know where the bar is, the likelihood of them purchasing subsequent drinks increases.
The concept of providing free samples have been used by marketers for decades and is a common design pattern in the user experience world. This is a proven strategy that works in establishing trust while setting a positive tone amongst your customers. This is also effective in delivering value to your customers before they make that decision to sign up for your product.
Medium, an online publishing platform, utilises the free sample design pattern quite heavily with its non-paying members. Non-paying members are able to access up to three exclusive stories within a month that are currently only accessible to its paid members. After they hit the three article limit, they are blocked from all other exclusive stories until the following month unless they choose to upgrade their membership status during this period. This is a great strategy for me to enjoy some of the benefits that are currently exclusive to paid members, and may convince me to upgrade my membership status.
2. If other people are dancing, that means I should be too. (Social Proof)
Next. Imagine this. You enter the nightclub with your friends, and you can’t help but to notice that there’s hardly anyone dancing on the dance floor. How does that make you feel? And what would you do next? Would you be comfortable to be the first person to go on the dance floor? Or, what if there were other people dancing on the dance floor? What would you do then? Would you be more comfortable joining in on the action instead?
As for me, I’d feel quite conscious about being the first person to be on the dance floor and I might consider leaving the club for another. This could have been different had there been other people dancing on the dance floor, as seeing other people dancing will actually build my confidence and enable me to join them.
Nielsen Norman labels this as ‘Social Proof’ and describes it as a psychological phenomenon where people reference the behaviour of others to guide their own behaviour. This concept can be used in a number of ways — including user reviews, testimonials, quotes, and statistics representing the product’s usage — in order to help drive user decisions in the direction that your business might want them to go during user onboarding flows. This is extremely useful in promoting credibility within your product in order to increase adoption.
Large amounts of people doing something is a psychological indicator that they should do the same thing. We use the decision made by others as a guide to what we should be doing.
3. Get out of their way. No, seriously. (Friction)
Imagine you are busting your best moves on the dance floor… having a good time with your friends. Everything’s going exceptionally well until a club promoter keeps showing up in front of you and tapping your shoulders every other minute… asking you if you’d like to purchase more drinks and/or informing you of the latest hourly specials. How does this impact your nightclub experience, and is it in a good or bad way? You’d likely eventually get frustrated and end up leaving the nightclub… never to come back again. The annoying club promoter is what we would identify as ‘friction’ in user experience.
Friction is defined as interactions that inhibit people from intuitively and painlessly achieving their goals within a digital interface. Friction hinders decision-making and often leads to negative feelings about your product.
Anyone who uses Hotels.com, a hotel booking site, will be familiar with the activity alert that pops up from the bottom of the screen every 5 seconds. Although its main purpose is probably to speed up the whole decision-making process, it can also cause annoyance and encourages users to arrive at a decision that may be rushed and not well-informed.
It can be tempting to inform your users about everything there is to know in one go, by prompting them every single step of the way. Don’t overwhelm them in a single instance. Context is key in user experience and while you should strive to provide relevant information all the time, only do it when they need it.
People want more than just the nightclub
Regardless of why people go to a nightclub, their ultimate goal is to have a good time and have fun! The features that exist within the nightclub, such as the bar and/or a dance floor, are simply tools to help them do that. Your users have goals that they want to accomplish by using your product. Your onboarding experience should ultimately enable your users to achieve those goals, not just yours. And you can easily uncover what that goal is by engaging in conversations with them during testing and research.
The path to designing a good onboarding experience can be filled with a lot of problems along the way, as it requires a lot of continued investment and attention. However, the answer to that problem that you’ve been trying to solve regarding your product’s onboarding has always been around you.
So the next time you’re working on improving your product’s onboarding experience, don’t forget to look up from your screens and look to real-life experiences for inspiration!
👏👏👏 A special shoutout to Aimee Gonzalez-Cameron (#UXStoryteller) for all her sweat that went towards reviewing and pushing me to make this article more amazing than it would have been otherwise. Thank you. ❤️
