tech-company, startup-costs, customer-service, beta-testingI’m about to publish my mobile app (iOS/Android) on the respective stores.
My mobile app presents a relatively innovative concept.
I made a huge effort on UX and the app sounds really easy to use.
But I wonder whether this kind of tutorial should be present at the time of market launch.
(Yes, we can assume that it’s a kind of MVP)
Or should I prefer to “let” the user explore the app by itself, and really learn from its behavior?
Meaning, detecting what user really expects from the various screens, buttons, etc, without guiding them.
This is a subjective question but,
As a lean startup supporter, I should you should just launch the app already without the tutorial. Preferably your app design should come natural to the end user and they shouldn’t need tutorials/documentations.
You should learn the user behavior especially because you have an innovative concept. But you should definitely either watch users use the app or get heavy analytics. Most likely you’ll see that some of the experience you provided doesn’t come as natural and you might want to tweak them a bit.
If you do make a tutorial, you will teach the users how to use the app and you won’t learn if and why your design is good or bad.
After you think your design is solid and don’t expect any more significant changes, thats when I would recommend to make a tutorial.
//Nice link btw
There is only one rule I care about, regarding getting users engaged: Get to value fast
If your app creates genuine value just by opening it, you have a motivated user.
If it doesn’t, and you can’t see how you can change this, then is there one step that would get you there? Then that’s the start point.
Still no? Then you are going to need to make it super easy for your user to get from first open to first “wow,” any way that works. Videos can work, or can frustrate. Transparent overlays can pull users through, or push them away. Fully or partly forced initial workflows can be reassuring or enraging.
So if this is your situation, you should certainly do something, if only to split test whether anything is better than nothing. But I think I’d be wanting to instrument the app and establish a channel back to the user - push notification, email, something - so you can learn about first use experiences and try and draw them through. More data = more learning = more ways to make v2 work better.
So you weren’t asking about getting started, but it’s only worth optimising feature discoverability within your app once you’ve solved getting the user to value. When you get there, what next?
Happily, those same tools are your friends: instrument, and create a secondary path to engage or reactivate your users. If you see features that you believe are cool but aren’t getting discovered, you need to validate that they really are cool - that there’s some correlation between users who do find those features and evidence that they are happier / more engaged - and if not, lose the feature. And if they are cool features, just undiscovered, then you have all the usual options to explore - locate them more obviously, try ideas from the tutorial, or tease the user. All these and more are used by other widely-used apps, so look for good examples, and if you can, keep on instrumenting and comparing, so you can improve by applying your own taste and sound data.
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