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 InvolvementUser Involvement
Imagine purchasing a gym membership in order to lose weight or grow more muscular. Having a gym membership is not enough on its own! In order to successfully accomplish that goal, you would need to work out regularly on the right muscle groups. You might have a higher likelihood of success if you participate in exercise classes or hire a personal trainer. Your outcomes are shaped by your own behavior in the gym.
User involvement is defined by the set of user behaviors that lead to experienci..., they will simply grow more comfortable with the app.
The most successful app adoptions come from a projectThe most successful app adoptions come from a project
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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..., because they give the user a reason to increase their skills. As they work on their projects, they'll bump up against the boundaries of what they know.
Apps with continued user involvement are responsive to increasing skill levels over timeApps with continued user involvement are responsive to increasing skill levels over time
Near the beginning of a person's personal productivity journey, they may be fine with using Apple Reminders as their form of task manager. Eventually, User skill level increases over time, so they may want to sort tasks into projects. Apple Reminders can handle that, so the user remains satisfied.
Eventually, they read Getting Things Done and realize that the Lists within Apple Reminders just won't do the trick. According to the principles of Difficulty Matching, this is the point where they.... This is a major reason for the importance of Continuous onboardingContinuous onboarding
Horizontal products like Notion, Airtable, Excel, and Obsidian are all powerful/flexible and require learning and expansion of use cases over time to wrap your head around them. Given that, why do they only teach people how to use the app for the first few minutes?
It's not just horizontal products though. Continuous Onboarding applies to most apps that aren't just "open, press a button, and close." Are you continuing to add features over time that would benefit users that are more than a mo...: if people’s skill grows over time, why would we assume that only teaching users about how the app works near the beginning of their experience is at all effective?
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..., and the app can only keep up with changing user goals if user skill level also increases. Help the user to recognize situations for functionality usageHelp the user to recognize situations for functionality usage
User goals change over time as User skill level increases over time 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 Matching, 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 ... so they are able to use those situations as opportunities to improve their skills.