Shiny Disco Balls
Readers of this newsletter know by now that I tend to end up in strange situations, with no one to blame but myself and my own idiosyncrasies.
About 15 years ago, I bought a 1st generation iPod Shuffle. Given that my preferred way of consuming music at the time (and still today) was just endless playlists, I thought it would be the perfect device for me. After unboxing the product, I plugged it into my PC running Windows XP…and realized I needed iTunes to actually move music from my laptop to the iPod. And this is where I made things unnecessarily difficult for myself; I refused to install / use iTunes (it was super clunky on Windows). Also, I thought it was a terrible (and ill-communicated) portion of the experience (to have to install desktop software to get a mobile device to function). In my mind, I should have been able to just plug the device into the USB port and drag and drop music files over. But you couldn’t.
Eventually, I found a hack whereby using WinAmp (which I loved) sort of worked. Sort of. It would occasionally bork the device and you’d be stuck with the iPod endlessly playing one song on infinite loop. This is the state my device ultimately ended up in, and for years I had a single song to remind me of my attempt to mess with the Apple walled garden.
I know what you’re thinking…what was the song?
But the moral of the story is not to keep your strange musical tastes to yourself.
Whether you refer to it as Out of the Box Experience (OOBE), New User Experience (NUX), or First Time User Experience (FTUX), you can bet motivated users will do the strangest things during setup because they have an intuitive sense for how they’d like your product to work.
I’d love to hear from readers on the lessons they’ve learned trying to improve user onboarding - please chime in via comments👇. And if you enjoyed this post, please consider subscribing.
further reading / references
if you’re like, you sometimes wonder what happened to Winamp: here you go
UserOnboard is one of my favorites sites to browse through for UX teardowns
it’s interesting to read Apple’s original iPod Shuffle press release - you can see that they viewed the tight iTunes integration (and AutoFill) as a feature vs hurdle
interesting read on deliberately adding onboarding friction to pre-qualify users
childish drawing / interpretation
