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What UI Designers DON’T Tell You About User Onboarding | Episode 443

 

Don’t experiment on your own revenue with broken game mechanics. Get our guide “Core Drives in the Wild” to learn how to apply real behavioral science to your product: professorgame.com/WildCD

Most apps lose 77% of their users within the first three days because they treat onboarding like a tax audit instead of a human journey. In this episode, Rob Alvarez breaks down why your “helpful” 15-step toolkit might actually be causing cognitive friction and driving users away. By moving from function-focused design to human-focused design, you can transform a bounce into a lifelong advocate. Rob explores the “Christmas Magic Mistake,” the “Hello World” principle for instant wins, and the “Miyagi Method” of scaffolding to ensure your users actually want to come back for Day 2.

Rob Alvarez is Head of Engagement Strategy, Europe at The Octalysis Group (TOG), a leading gamification and behavioral design consultancy. A globally recognized gamification strategist and TEDx speaker, he founded and hosts Professor Game, the #1 gamification podcast, and has interviewed hundreds of global experts. He designs evidence-based engagement systems that drive motivation, loyalty, and results, and teaches LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® and gamification at top institutions including IE Business School, EFMD, and EBS University across Europe, the Americas, and Asia.

 

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Lets’s do stuff together!

Looking forward to reading or hearing from you,

Rob

 

Full episode transcription (AI Generated)

Rob Alvarez (00:00)
Have you ever noticed how the more helpful your 15 step toolkit is, the faster people close the tab. That’s what we call cognitive friction. But if you know, if you know how to turn that into a human focused journey, you turn a bounce into a life long advocate.

Rob Alvarez (00:19)
picture this, you have just invested $100 in acquiring a user. They log in, they get hit by a bunch of pop-ups and they feel like they’re being drawn into some form of a tax audit.

It feels like work. They leave. And your acquisition budget is not coming back.

Statistics show us how 77 % of apps lose their users within the first three days through my work in gamification and now the Octalysis group.

I see this constantly. The drop off isn’t a technical failure. It’s not technology. It has to do with motivation and the core drives.

In the next few minutes, I’m going to show you how to go from function-focused design into human-focused design to guarantee how your users are actually wanting to come back on day two.

We will look at the Christmas magic mistake.

the Hello World principle and the Miyagi method of scaffolding.

Rob Alvarez (01:11)
But before we fix the psychology, you need to look at how this works in the real world. You might think this is a UI problem, but it’s often a missing core drive. If you want to see exactly how top companies are using these psychological levers, You need to check out our free guide, Core Drives in the Wild. It’s where we break down real world examples of gamification and behavioral design being used to build massive

retention, just go to the link in the description right now to get access. Let’s look at what actually works.

Rob Alvarez (01:41)
Recently, I went to a Christmas experience in Madrid. The storytelling was absolutely amazing. You can check that out in a previous episode. Characters were perfect, but we couldn’t even get started because it was so confusing when you arrived. The onboarding to the Magic was actually painful. It was difficult to pass from discovery where you found out about it. You got your tickets and you started going in. What do I do now? It was really painful.

This is a UI tour mistake. You are leaving your users, literally in this case, out in the cold. You’re ignoring Core Drive 1 Epic Meaning and Calling. By the time they get to the magic of your app, of the experience, they, or we in that case, are too exhausted to really care. Where’s that beginner’s luck mechanic to make the users feel like everything just goes their way?

Beginner’s luck is when

You use this mechanic to make the users feel like they’re a natural at performing these actions, that getting better at doing all these things is like, I’m naturally talented at doing this

So the question here is, is your software a warm welcome, or is it a cold line in the middle of winter?

So let’s talk about this Hello World principle. When somebody learns to code, they don’t start with setting up a very complex and deep database. They start with a simple line that says, Hello World, and they print it, or we print it, onto the screen. I know this because I studied software engineering and I did this for so many coding languages. It’s a tiny but instant win. It makes you feel like you’re a genius for five seconds.

Those five seconds, that very quick initial win that you get by just saying, wow, I told this machine here to tell me hello world, and I actually managed really, really quick, is a very, very strong hack. This is represented in Core Drive 2 development and accomplishment.

In your app, Hello World is the first major victory. If you’re a project management tool, you don’t ask them to set up a whole workspace, ask them to win their first task. You don’t always you typically see in terms of digital badges or even progress bars, which most of time for me are a big improvement to show development. You do want to make it such that they feel that they achieved it.

and you can feel the actual win. And let me stop here for a second because when we talk about gamification in terms of behavioral design, people tend to go to badges and leaderboards and those things. And specifically about badges, badges can be used to a very good extent. They can be very useful and they can be very powerful as well if you know how to do that. But keep in mind that a badge, especially in an app, is literally a collection of pixels. If you don’t have meaning behind those badges, they lose completely on any motivational power.

And you can get a lot of that power even without the badge. Like in this case, if you’re able to do hello world, you don’t need a badge to tell you you are able to say hello world. You already feel that win. How can you look for that win exactly in that moment? Remember that that first major victory is the exact second that your user is realizing why are they even on this app they just bought or they just registered for? So what is the hello world moment?

for your project. How can we get there in under 30 seconds?

Now let’s completely move away from the digital world. Remember Karate Kid and Mr. Miyagi?

He didn’t put Daniel San, right? Remember Daniel San, the way he called him, right into the ring on day one to set up for this great fight.

Essentially, he didn’t want him to just get punched in the face.

It all started with wax on, wax off.

Daniel thought he was doing chores.

but he was actually building the muscle memory to be able to block the attacks.

This is scaffolding. You’re hiding the fighting or the very complex feature until the user has mastered waxing, which are the core actions that they need to be able to use that feature. We see this in games all the time.

Once people have acquired those skills, all you need to do, or a very clever thing to do, is introduce them to some form of Core Drive 3 empowerment of creativity and feedback so they can discover their own skills, what they’re now able to do and use it in a way that they didn’t imagine before and that they can come up with. Leave them some creativity on the ground so that they can actually express their ways and their strategies to do these things.

When this complexity is now here and they’re able to do, we were talking about before a project management app, when they need to manage a whole project, they don’t feel overwhelmed. They actually feel ready. It doesn’t mean that the task doesn’t exist and they don’t have to put in the work. They’re ready to put in the work. Remember Daniel San wax on wax off. Then he would got to the big combat. It’s not that he was not going to do the combat. It was not, he didn’t going to do the fight, but he now felt ready. He had to put all that effort.

But now he was ready to face that big challenge.

He now has the muscle memory of wax on, wax off that allows him in his own way and in the heat of the moment, quite literally during that fight, to be able to defend himself from these other masters of karate as well.

This doesn’t mean that Daniel wasn’t frustrated at some point. Miyagi made him wash cars. But when the punch finally came in, his reflex was already trained. Are you throwing your users, your users into the ring a bit too early?

What are the wax on wax off activities that you can throw in to build their confidence and their skills before you throw them out into the ring?

Remember that onboarding, as we’ve seen, is not a checklist. It goes well beyond checklist. Checklist is functional thinking. They have to do this, this, this, and that. And that’s fine. You need the checklist, but it goes well beyond the checklist. There is an element of seduction here. You want to motivate your users into taking certain actions.

You want to sell the meaning, provide an immediate win, and then, only then when they are starting to be ready is when you start unlocking little by little all of that complexity.

If you don’t If you don’t master wax on on and wax off.

You’ll never be able to stay or even really compete in the championship.

So stop guessing why your users are churning and start looking at the behavioral science behind the ones that actually do stay.

head over to the link in the description and check out our free Core Drives in the Wild guide.

We break down the exact gamification strategies that are working right now.

Grab your access and let’s start designing for humans. And as we always say least for now and for today, it is time to say that it’s game over.

 

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