Lauryn Isford: belief

Transcript context

…Are there any generalized learnings from that experience of just how to do a great onboarding experience? It sounds like probably avoid tooltips, instead just kind of ask questions and show them progress as they're going through it in kind of like an immersive experience versus here's the product, check out all the cool features. I think there is something to be said for reducing reliance on tooltips, but I'm not sure I would go so far as to say the tooltip is dead, as much as I maybe would like to because there are too many of them out there. The reason for this is that I do believe Airtable's customers had a very specific need which was that the effort required to build basic scaffolding was too much and they needed more support, guardrails, bumpers to help them through that, and this kind of guided or immersive wizard was the best mechanism we could come up with to reduce that effort required and to make them feel more supported in their journey. I'm not sure that this pattern is one that works for every product. I think it's one that works well for a complicated product, where figuring out where to go next and how to get started is actually very challenging or has a high cognitive load. So, I would keep that in mind, but in this case, it did work really well for us. I have seen some other products in the wild adopt similar patterns which gives me confidence that it is transferrable beyond Airtable and that there's probably something to it. That's definitely a big learning. I think one other big learning for us was that we had to meet users where they are. We have some awesome advanced features of really cool stuff you can do with Airtable, automations being a great example. However, users don't necessarily need to get that started on day one. They don't need to learn about the advanced stuff when they haven't even looked at a workflow before. So, we really worked hard to prioritize what the user actually needed and to consider what was necessary education versus what could be ongoing education and building it up. Can you talk a bit more about what that was? What did you actually do to understand the type of user, and then what did you change for them? Because we actually did something like this at Airbnb, and it was a tiny bit successful for host onboarding but it wasn't anything big. And so, I'm curious what it is you specifically did. Did you ask them a few questions and then grouped them in a group and then changed the way the rest of the flow went, or, yeah, what'd you do there?…

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