User Onboarding: Explainers vs. Feedback Loops

In this event, Rob will discuss his work developing the onboarding for GuidedTrack, a simple programming language for creating online research, prototyping apps, delivering instructional material, choose-your-own-adventure stories, and more. He will cover the iterations they've gone through, from "explainer" oriented onboarding to a focus on "feedback loops" to some combination of the two.

Since GuidedTrack is a programming language (albeit a simple one), it can be thought of as a horizontal product, like Excel, Notion, or Roam. People can use GuidedTrack for any number of purposes, so we can't optimize for any one user goal. And while you can learn a lot quickly, it has a high ceiling, so people are going to continue learning it for months or years. Additionally, the target user includes people who have never coded before in their life, who are incredibly easy to spook with anything that looks remotely like code.

This has been a challenging project, and Rob is excited to share what he has learned through the process and where they are now.

Bio:
Rob has two roles: one is as a behavioral product strategist for Spark Wave, a startup studio that applies social science, strategic thinking, and iterative experimentation to create socially beneficial software companies from scratch. The other is as an independent behavioral design and gamification consultant for tech products. This means that he works with tech teams on product decisions that will influence user behavior such that people are using the product more effectively. You can follow his writing and learn how to work with him here: www.robhaisfield.com/about