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uxdesign.cc – User Experience Design — Medium | Joe Steinkamp
Many of our digital products these days are becoming more complex and multi-faceted. As our products continue to grow, it causes a multitude of problems. One, the increased complexity and depth can quickly erode all the ease of use efforts you’ve performed since your MVP. Two, a problem arises where only a small fraction of your users are getting all the possible value out of your product.
If you answered yes to any of the questions above, then your experience is prime for postboarding.
While not a novel idea (or name?), we can all agree that communicating with our users doesn’t end with onboarding. Postboarding is just another tool in the toolkit. I define postboarding as a set of patterns similar to onboarding that are used for your product to communicate with your users after they’ve successfully completed a task/goal/milestone or whatever is pertinent to your product’s experience. The important aspect of this is after the triggering event rather than before, as with onboarding.
No pattern or best practice is appropriate for every context and postboarding is no different. To be clear, this is not a marketing solution — postboarding is user-serving and function focused. Lastly and most importantly, I haven’t yet been able to thoroughly test different postboarding patterns.
Questions to ask to confirm if postboarding is right for your context:
Screen/Modal
Directly after the user completes their task and receives feedback, show a full-screen takeover that either directs the user to appropriate next step in their journey or provides them with an easy opt-in action to enable additional abilities.
Notification
When an experience has no conclusive end, send a notification shortly after the session has ended to provide a quick action or an informational tip. If your users are comfortable with actionable notifications, support the action that way.
Passive In-App Message
When the message or action you’d like to present the users is more supplemental, display an in-app message on the home screen.
While my title suggests postboarding as an alternative to onboarding, I believe they can and should work together. The more important takeaway is to always question what you’re trying to accomplish with your onboarding and postboarding. Make sure it’s truly valuable for the user to get the most out of your product. Try your best to stay out of the user’s way but when necessary give them a helping hand, that’s the main purpose of onboarding and postboarding.
Postboarding, the alternative to Onboarding was originally published in uxdesign.cc on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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