User goals change over timeUser goals change over time
A user’s goals 1 week into using your app and 6 months are rarely the same. “Elder users” often won’t even retain the goals that they had at the start of their experience. Apps with continued user involvement enable the user to accomplish multiple goals to maintain users through full goal transitions.
New users do not yet have the vocabulary to understand the app. User skill level increases over time, giving the user new vocabulary to conceptualization and express desires that they didn’t ha... as User skill level increases over timeUser skill level increases over time
Imagine that you have just started to use Excel or Photoshop. Both of those apps have an insane amount of functionality, and it would be unreasonable to expect the user to understand what is possible and how to do it immediately. Over time, with continued User Involvement, they will simply grow more comfortable with the app.
The most successful app adoptions come from a project, because they give the user a reason to increase their skills. As they work on their projects, they'll bump up agai... so being aware of the situations in which features are useful means you know when you need to learn how to use them.
Due to principles of Difficulty MatchingDifficulty Matching
The emotional experience of Flow
A flow state is often characterized as optimal human experience. It’s an experience where you are fully focused and energized in what you’re doing, often experiencing a high level of creativity and losing track of time.
The general emotional experience that is being described here is that when a task is too challenging for a user’s current level of ability, they’ll get frustrated and give up. Alternatively, when the task is far too easy, they are likely t..., we know that if we ask a user to learn something too advanced early in, they will likely get frustrated and give up. This is a common problem with Notion and Roam users: they see people using the applications in advanced ways near the beginning of their experience and they think that they have to implement everything right from the start.
These users would have far better outcomes if they simply operated at or slightly above their skill level to accomplish their current goals, but were aware of what could help them accomplish their future goals so they know what they can learn when those goals arise.
Let's take the example of learning queries in Roam. Nobody needs to learn queries in their first week of usage. The most successful app adoptions come from a projectThe most successful app adoptions come from a project
#stub
New users do not yet have the vocabulary to understand the app. A big mistake that many people make when they try out a new app is that they’ll try to understand features in a very abstract sense. They will try to understand what it is without knowing what it is for. When people make this mistake, Adoption goes down. Projects allow the app to Speak to the user with a shared vocabulary. They put functionalities into context, closing the feedback loop on learning the usefulness of said f..., so we don't want users to try to learn queries as some abstract feature. Ideally, when the user starts a project that requires queries, they would recognize that queries would be useful and learn them at that point in time.