ROMAN NURIK: I think onboarding is one of the hardest
things to design, right?
Those first 30 seconds of using an app are critical.
If users get annoyed or confused in those first 30 seconds
they're just going to uninstall your app.
Then all that work you spent designing
every single little interaction to its perfection
in the rest of the app is just going to kind of go to waste.
My name is Roman Nurik.
I'm a designer on the Firebase team here at Google New York.
Today I want to show you the onboarding experience
for this app called Notion.
It's an email app, and I think the way it onboards
new users is done really well.
It's really interesting.
So let's take a look.
So I'm going to go ahead and open up the app,
and the first thing it does is it asks me for permission
to access my contacts, which makes a lot of sense
for an email app.
So I'll go ahead and accept.
One thing it could do is maybe ask for this a little bit later
in a slightly more contextual way, but I think overall,
this is fine.
Next it's going to ask me to sign in,
and the nice thing here is I don't have to type anything.
I don't have to enter an email and a password.
It's looked at the stuff on my device
and it's let me just choose something and move forward.
One thing I should say here is that for an email app
this makes a lot of sense, but most apps,
you should try to probably avoid requiring sign
in or registration up front.
You probably want to give the user
a sampling of your content, a little bit
of a feel for your app before asking
them to commit to your app.
The next thing it does is it asks me to choose
a notification frequency.
This is really clear and makes a lot of sense as well,
but one of the things I might suggest here
is you could potentially just show notifications,
and then in that first notification
that a user receives, they could choose their desired frequency.
I think this is fine, though.
This is very common to ask about notifications up front,
so it's OK.
But this could be potentially one way
to reduce the number of steps in onboarding, which is really,
really good for conversions.
The next thing that it does is it shows
me this conversational card.
It shows me my email, but then it
says Notion needs a little bit of time to understand my email.
I think this is great.
It's really friendly.
It's really engaging.
It makes it feel like I'm talking
to a human, which really makes this app approachable.
Now, once Notion understands my email,
it's going to take me through a tutorial that
teaches me about some of the more advanced features.
And the first step here is it shows
me the difference between important and unimportant
emails.
I think one of the things that could be a little better here
is there could be a slightly less subtle visual distinction
between these.
It's a little unclear--
or less clear-- which one's important,
which one's unimportant.
So either using some sort of motion or showing it in context
might work a little better.
Now this next step is really, really interesting.
Most tutorials have a Next button in every step,
but here there's no Next button.
To proceed you have to use this gesture to swipe.
I think this is kind of a gutsy move.
It's really good to kind of force people
to learn this key interaction, and I
think this makes a lot of sense because it's really important
that I learn this.
If I don't learn this, I'm missing out
on a huge part of this app.
So I'll go ahead and make that gesture,
and then it shows me the results of having done that gesture.
So it kind of gives me that sense of confidence
that this is what happens after I take that action.
So this last bit here is I've learned how to use Notion,
I'm scrolling through, and you'll see this floating action
button that shows a number or a count of unimportant e-mails
that Notion has found for me to archive.
So once I press this, it selects all those unimportant emails
and then I can take action, archive or delete.
Now the cool thing is, once I press archive,
it shows me a way to make that even faster.
I think this is super, super important.
It's taken this context of I just performed an action,
and it's teaching me about ways that I can speed that up
even more.
One of the notes here is that I think
this uses a dialogue which takes me out of my flow.
One of the things that the app could do
is potentially show a bottom sheet that isn't modal.
So that's how Notion onboards new users.
I think it's really, really delightful overall.
I think the fact that I didn't have
to type anything in the first couple of seconds,
I could just select an existing email account
to sign in was excellent.
You definitely don't want to lose users
just because you have these long complicated forms to fill out.
Also, one thing that's really important
is the language they use was really friendly, casual,
informal.
And that kind of tone, that kind of language
makes it much easier for users to form
an emotional bond with your app, which I think is really great.
And lastly, I think that Notion was
really sensitive to context.
It almost felt like the actions I was taking,
Notion was responding to really well in the right moment.
So I think that overall, it's a job really well done.
Definitely take a look at the app if you get a chance to,
especially if you're designing an onboarding
experience for your own app.
So that was my take on Notion's onboarding experience.
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