Rob, explain Continuous Onboarding right fckn now, in one breath, standing on one foot

Visakan Veerasamy challenged his Twitter mutuals to explain their thing in one page, so naturally I thought I'd share it with you.

Horizontal products like Notion, Airtable, Excel, and Obsidian are all powerful/flexible and require learning and expansion of use cases over time to wrap your head around them. Given that, why do they only teach people how to use the app for the first few minutes?

It's not just horizontal products though. Continuous Onboarding applies to most apps that aren't just "open, press a button, and close." Are you continuing to add features over time that would benefit users that are more than a month into their journey? How are users going to find those features and mentally connect them to greater goal accomplishment? Other examples include Substack, calendars, email clients, PDF readers, etc.

User goals change over time. The goals they have six days in are going to be different than the goals they have 6 months in, so it needs to be the case that user skill level increases over time in order to match their changing goals. Apps that are responsive to changing user goals over time foster continued user buy-in, so it makes sense that the app should continuously teach people how to use its app better.

Continuous Onboarding never stops. As users accomplish more of their goals, their self-efficacy goes up. They feel as though the effort they've invested was worthwhile. Through learnable design, their mental models align with how the app's, and things "just make sense." Both adoption and retention go up, allowing you to escape the Sisyphean cycle of acquisition and churn.

Continuous onboarding is explicitly designing an app to facilitate the user's growth from beginner to power user, recognizing that's not all going to happen in one day. Users feel heard and capable, so they stick around for longer.

It should be noted that some apps have a more expansive range of potential use cases than others. It may be the case that the user can learn your app in 10 minutes and then be done learning. The important thing to Continuous Onboarding is to think about Goal Resonance- how will a user discover that the app helps them accomplish a goal and execute the sets of behaviors that enable them to accomplish said goal? The user may have a lack of imagination as to what user goals they can accomplish, so how can we expand their conceptualization of the product's utility?

"Explainer content" (documentation, app tours, videos, etc.) is valuable, but isn’t scalable. Most people ignore explainer content. Learnable design, on the other hand, means that, as the user attempts to do something, the app communicates how it works through feedback loops. Make the impact of the user's actions more clear and immediate, while signaling how it brings the user closer to or further from their goals. Pay attention to the user's choices, and based on those, connect users to the functionality that matches their intention.

In many ways, this post is a rough outline for the whole book. If you click around the links, you’ll find long trails to follow. My task now is to figure out how to package it all to make sense and flow well in a linear order. As always, please comment any thoughts or questions!