The Shift
David Chartier calls for better onboarding.
Technology has a strange knack for making us feel lost or inadequate. I stopped counting the number of family, friends, and clients who start tech (support) questions with “I’m sorry,” or “I must be dumb.” This feels unique to tech, too. Do you hear people apologize to their doctors or car mechanics like they do in tech? I don’t think so. And while there are myriad underlying problems that perpetuate what we could perhaps call “techxiety,” I believe one could be tackled fairly easily, and its solution could have a vast, positive impact for just about everyone: better onboarding.
The process of teaching a customer about how a product works while they use it is referred to in tech as “onboarding.” The first time you start up most new Apple devices, they tell you a little about new features or ask you to turn on certain things. Some App Store apps present a message after a big update. A few of the good ones will walk you through a new feature, ensuring you use it at least once to give you an understanding of how it works.
The industry’s onboarding techniques have improved in recent years. But considering that there are still so many people who feel powerless with, or even unwelcome by, technology, and the blossoming popularity of “digital literacy” programs to help people from all walks of life, I’d say we have a lot more work to do.
Think about onboarding you’ve experienced. Much of it has probably been in the form of a few pop-up pages the first time you run an app or start a new device. It’s good stuff, but it’s usually too much to take in all at once. It also usually vanishes once you’re done, leaving you with nothing to turn to for tips, insight, or help besides a big body of support documents.
More progressive and effective onboarding is surfacing, slowly. As much as I dislike the company’s invasive business practices, I submit Facebook as a leader here. It rolls out new features methodically, and when one is ready for you, the app displays a small pop up, sometimes with a quick tutorial. Infrequent, contextual, and never lasting long, these nibbles of onboarding feel more like a quick, pleasantly useful tap on the shoulder from your friendly neighborhood tech guru, versus being whacked with an overstuffed bible of feature details.
Other progressive apps are building in new kinds of systems that are onboarding, in-app chat, and support all in one. When you can’t find an answer, you can chat almost immediately with an expert from the company and get on with
Some apps are building in onboarding, in-app chat, and support all-in-one
your day. It’s one-tap access to that neighborhood tech guru, except they’re actually trained in the product at hand.
These new techniques and tools make a huge difference. When users are better informed in how their tools work, they’re more confident in their capabilities and more apt to explore further. As long as the trend continues, more people can feel in control of their tech, instead of the other way around.
David Chartier is a content strategist and writer with vast experience analyzing the tech world. He runs the website FinerThingsinTech (finerthings.in) and hosts its podcast, The Finer Things In.