A great first use experience

I recently joined a site called 'Action Method', and I was wowed by their startup / first use experience. It was really easy, intuitive and instructive. In product management / design, the first use experience of a product is critical - it is the point where you'll hook a user or lose them forever... there are countless applications that I've checked out but abandoned because I couldn't navigate the product or understand its benefit to me quickly enough. This is sad if you've gone through all the effort to create a great product / service, but then the product falls down on execution because people can't actually get over the hurdle of initial investment. Some of the great strategies that Action Method used were as follows:

1) Offer a video summary of the application (I discussed this in a previous post as well)


2) Take you through a quick tour of the different screens - they laid out the steps that you would take in the order that you would likely do them. It was pretty intuitive.

3) The part I liked the most was the way they included a brief written description of a given screen with the option to close that description and never see it again... this was really helpful for me and not too invasive

Just a few good things to consider when building a first-use experience. What also shouldn't be forgotten is that the user flows need to be SUPER-INTUITIVE... i.e. the click flow should be exactly how the user would be thinking about things, and aligned with the way they would discover the different functionality of the application.

All for now,

1984