After deciding against making an open sandbox account with a fake project for users to play around in before signing up for Readz, we needed to make a flow to help push new users through the following steps as seamlessly as possible:
1. Sign up
2. Create a project
3. Edit the Project and Save/Publish
New users were dropping off at each of the junctures so we had to optimize with smaller, bite size steps with obvious calls to action or explicit guidance.
Sign up Flow:
We removed e-mail authentication so there would be less distraction away from onboarding.
Create a Project Flow:
Multiple things had to change at this level of the UI to make it more user friendly.
1. Melding some steps together to give more context and less sense of feeling trapped with a decision — project type and theme choice becoming one step).
2. Changing terminology which would then affect the rest of the UI heirarchy — 'Project > Issue' became 'URL > Project' because of a change from mostly magazine focus to other types of projects, and making it so you understood that the top most level was the URL and the projects could be any type of project underneath it.
3. Making it so you could change the URL that you want your project to be on easily within the process, and that it would default to the last one you had used when making another project.
Editor Guide Tooltips Flow:
For help when first using the editor, a tooltip guide system was created to:
1. Have necessary tooltips that users cannot skip to point out very important areas that you need to know in order to go forward (Page Menu Buttons, Page List, Project Menu Dropdown)
2. Have other tooltips show up as you explore the editor to give you a heads up in certain areas that you can click out of if you wish. They also let you know you can turn off all guide tooltips if you want.
After implementing these changes, I was told that the amount of users who 1. Went through the full sign up process, and 2. Created a project increased by a good amount, so it was a very successful project.
