App Design Review of Evernote's First Time User Guide

It’s not often that we (as app user or developers) stop to consider how important the First Time User experience or the Getting Started Guide is.

If you had never heard of Evernote (or many other apps) then you rely on this introduction to do a lot of things. To sum it up, the first time user experience has to do two things:

1. sell the customer that the app will do what the user thinks it will do (they’ve already installed it but app store descriptions can be misleading), and;
2. tell the customer how to use it

Ultimately, large multi-platform applications have many, many, more features then there is time for a Quick Start Guide or First Time User experience.

What should be in a Mobile App First Time User experience?

I’d like to think that an App’s First Time User Guide needs to do 3 things

1. Sell the customer on what the app can do
2. Tell the customer about 1 feature that you want them to use
3. Tell the customer (immediately) what to do next.

In the case of Evernote, I think this introduction spends too long on selling a number of features that it actually stops the customer from get started.

I think the Evernote app misses the point here - the key thing to do first is get the user to Sign In or Create an Account. So the first time user experience needs to achieve this (because once you’ve logged in, the app will sync with Everynote on your desktop).

The introduction does do one thing interesting (visually it’s annoying) - the 1st screen at first glance, looks to have some thing wrong on the right hand side, as if part of another image was accidentally included in the app launch screen. Actually it’s the hidden 1st steps in the welcome guide.

Meet the author

Damien Saunders
An experienced management consultant and business leader interested in digital transformation, product centred design and scaled agile. If I'm not writing about living with UCTD (an autoimmune disease), I'm probably listening to music, reading a book or learning more about wine.
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