Day 471: Onboarding Brainstorm

product

I’m having a hard time figuring out how to design the onboarding experience. I keep trying to think of the “optimal” thing to do, but that’s leading me into paralysis so I just need to build something good enough and iterate.

At a high level, here’s the flow I’d like to create:

  1. User installs Browserflow
  2. User creates an account
  3. User runs a demo flow
  4. User browses gallery and finds flows they’d find useful
  5. User runs those flows on a regular basis
  6. (Bonus) User learns to build their own flows

The reason I’m including step 3 instead of trying to take new users directly to the gallery is that I want to reduce the number of steps between the user installing Browserflow and experiencing the benefits / seeing the potential of the tool. I don’t want to add the burden of choosing a flow to run, especially right now when the gallery is small and none of the existing ones might appeal to them.

What flow should I onboard new users with?

Given Browserflow’s breadth, there are an infinite number of directions I can take. The demo flow used in onboarding feels important because it’ll inform how the user thinks about the tool and shapes their understanding of what it can do.

Desired goals for the demo flow:

  • Create a “wow” moment
  • Spark ideas for things to automate with Browserflow

The reason why I’m having trouble deciding the demo flow is because I’m not sure what niche I want to target. Examples of what use cases I can target and what the demo flow could be:

  • Web scraping → Scrape a test page; scrape top X tweets from a user
  • Automating actions → Take a screenshot of a YouTube video without the UI elements; fill out a form
  • Data processing → Populate a spreadsheet that includes a list of movie titles with their Rotten Tomatoes scores

Of these, the last one (which is basically web scraping with a bit more structure) feels like it has the most potential for creating a wow moment and sparking ideas.

The downside is that the commands are working with spreadsheets is still a bit too technical so the demo flow might be overly intimidating to non-technical users, but I can work on improving that after I get this all together.