User Onboarding ROI Spiral

When you are onboarding your audience / users / customers, try thinking of it as an ever-increasing spiral of their attention.

They invest time to get a payback, which encourages them to invest more time to get a bigger payback and so on.

So, say we have an imaginary web app that creates the "Our offices" page for a company website.

The pattern for the user should be

• invest time (i.e. put in my company name)
• get a payback (i,e. a great looking page with my company name in lights) which encourages them to
• invest more time (i.e. add in details of offices) which
• gets a bigger payback (e.g. a map with the offices on) etc etc.

The mistake is to expect the user to enter all the details up front - e.g. the company name, and the office address, without giving them an early payback.

I know I make this mistake in product design all the time, so hopefully posting this will remind me at least to get it right next time!