onboarding for nerds: how to ensure people get signed up to the app in a fun, but informative way!

Hey y'all, it’s your friendly neighbourhood founder, Natalie, here! Today, I want to talk about onboarding people. I know, thrilling stuff!

I’ve worked as a Product Manager in tech for over 7 years, and let me tell you… onboarding people to ensure they know what they’re in for, how to use your software, and how to keep them sticking around has been my obsession for that entire time. And it will continue to be so!

In the biz, we call this “user interface and user experience” (aka UI/UX). I read somewhere one time that tech is a really weird place, because how they refer to the people who use their software (“users”) is also how drug dealers refer to the people who buy drugs (“users”), so in this article I’m going to refer to you as “people”, because it’s what you are, and also likelike is trying to move away from that really off-putting “dopamine addiction cycle” that most dating apps are these days.

UI/UX is an art and a science, because people are unpredictable. People want extreme simplicity, but they also want to see all the options. People want to see as little information as possible before they get clicking through an app (admit it, you’ve never actually gone through the entirety of those “tutorials”, and you’ve skipped it pretty much every time!), but also get confused and frustrated when they don’t know how to use software. And then we have our beautiful, wonderful digital natives, who just have an immediate understanding of software, how to use it, and why or why it won’t work for them.

So the secret sauce here is to do just enough to make sure people get it, make it just simple enough that no one has to struggle to get up to speed, and just layered enough that people feel as though they’re getting good value out of what they’re paying for.

Likelike is going to be an experiment in that, and is really going to be a test of my skillset as a Product Manager (more on that in an upcoming blog, but if you want to know more right now, you can visit my other website nataliewilding.com to find out more about what I’ve done) to ensure that you’re having the best experience you possibly can.

We’re trying to make it human and humane, fun and simple, in a way that feels human, but also uses the best practices that exist right now in terms of UI/UX. That means we’ll be sending you an onboarding email, and we hope that’s okay! We’ll also be doing some “here’s what you need to know” type infographics and preambles before you get to the good stuff.

We’ll keep experimenting (not because you’re “users” of our app, but because we want you to have the best experience possible!), and hopefully you’ll keep letting us know what works and what doesn’t!

That’s all for now, keep it easy everyone, take care of yourselves, drink water (it is summer after all!), and I’ll see you next time!

• Natalie, likelike founder, dreamer, and UI/UX nerd