How can experimentation and prototyping improve your app's onboarding process?

Never trust your own opinions about your product. Test and learn to constantly challenge your assumptions. Gather as much insight from your user base as possible and understand your different user profiles. Their experience of your product could vary radically.

Experimentation is a process of trying out various combinations of parameters or variables which influences the desired outcomes or expected responses. Researchers deal with the experimentation process to gather useful insights into the specific phenomenon investigated. Prototyping is required as a proof of concept for ideas leading to innovations or improvements in the product, process or systems being researched and developed . Both the experimentation and prototyping in achieving operation excellence at one level of tactics and business excellence at strategic level of planning and implementation.

In my 7+ years experience in video streaming app business, the best way to do the experimentation is by launching it and modify it gradually. Start with the internal base first who are also fans of your app, get the learnings, try to modify the app based on the learning, then launch it to a small base of your users, listen to the feedback, modify, and launch it to bigger base, and so on. Make sure you set a measurable metrics to define your success. Once you launched a version to the entire base, keep evolving by keep listening to your target audience and market insights.

Experimentation and prototyping enhance app onboarding. Understand users, create low-fidelity prototypes, conduct user tests, and analyze data. A/B testing refines the process, while analytics provide insights. Continuous refinement, personalization, and user feedback improve user experiences. Experiment across channels, employ cohort analysis, document results, and collaborate for effective onboarding enhancements. User-centric design and data-driven decision-making are vital for creating a smooth, engaging onboarding process.

Experimenting is all about taking on your intuition & trying out different ideas without the fear of failure! It is vitally important that startup founders are not afraid of failure when experimenting stuff!

Prototyping and experimentation are indispensable; they provide invaluable insights into user behavior, guiding refinements. Real-world testing helps avoid resource wastage, ensuring every feature or design element contributes significantly. By adapting based on user feedback, startups can create seamless onboarding experiences, enhancing user satisfaction and app retention.

Seen from the Virtual Reality angle, prototyping and (user-)testing are even more important than for ??flat?? apps. Two factors are at play that require even more care than in a 2D case : firstly, a large number of the users will have zero to very little VR experience, so designers can not rely on UX conventions or habits that can be generated for instance by PC-based applications or web browsing. Second, the interactions can be much more complex in VR as you need to take into account volumes, depth, and it can be very tricky to limit or direct the potential moves of the user.

User onboarding is an essential element of successful user experience. If organised badly, the user will be hard to get back, since they will rather prefer an alternative with a better UX. Performing experiments and testing prototypes are ways to effectively find a good onboarding formula. App creators should experiment with educational and instructional elements like i-cards and pop-ups that will guide the user through the app. It is also vital to bear in mind that every test or experiment should be followed by a thorough analysis of collected feedback. Gathering feedback for the sake of it never works. Onboarding is particularly crucial for web3 products. A bad one is definitely a huge impediment for mass adoption of the technology.

To experiment and prototype your onboarding process: 1. Define goals and objectives. 2. Generate hypotheses for different onboarding strategies. 3. Conduct A/B testing to compare variants and measure metrics. 4. Analyze results to identify successful approaches. 5. Iterate and make improvements based on insights gained. 6. Use prototyping tools to create interactive versions of onboarding. 7. Conduct user testing and gather feedback. 8. Iterate again based on user feedback. 9. Repeat the cycle to continually refine the onboarding process.

Low and high-fidelity prototypes serve different purposes, allowing for comprehensive testing. Experimentation methods like A/B testing offer valuable insights into user preferences. Iteration based on meticulous analysis is key; it's about continuous refinement. This iterative process helps startups tailor their onboarding, ensuring it aligns perfectly with user needs and preferences, ultimately driving user engagement and retention.

Real user testing is invaluable, offering genuine feedback. Keeping experiments focused ensures clarity. Flexibility is key; don't hesitate to modify or discard hypotheses based on real data. It's about refining and adapting, not sticking to preconceived notions. Stay agile, learn from the feedback, and continuously optimize your approach for the best user experience.

For Virtual Reality apps, as well as for others, in our experience one key element is observation and measurements. For example, once the use cases you want to test are set and the environnement described to the user, one good practice is to observe time to completion, amount of attempts,pass / fail / pass with help indicators . Detecting UX issues is pretty quick and doesn’t require more than 5 to 8 users.

The best practice I can share from my experience is setting a very clear strategy for experimentation and prototyping. It includes a hypothesis, metrics to measure success, the means of testing it, and a framework of analysing results and making an ultimate decision that will affect the final product version. An approach based on metrics is undoubtedly key to success here.

Usually, we determine the stage based on the AAARRR framework and then we choose a suitable experiment according to the stage, we only test one hypothesis in each experiment, we start with experiments with low fidelity and then step by step we go to high fidelity.

For example, in one of my recent projects, we decided to increase the conversion rate in a mental health app powered by AI through changing the onboarding technique. Hypothesis: a short onboarding video will grow the conversion to paying user by 10% compared to the old method with static educational pop-ups. Testing tool: A/B test (group 1: show pop-ups, group 2: show video) Test length: 1 week Results: CR of group 1=20%, CR of group 2: 35% Decision: replace old pop-ups with a new video. This is a good example of experimentation with onboarding based on a metric-driven approach.

When creating a web3 app, consider that a web2 user should not even understand that the product is built on blockchain. Make the onboarding process as smooth as possible.