| The short version: Our Aha moments, the features that made us different, were also the reason people weren’t sticking around. People expect an email client to work a certain way. Our unique features made us too different. They made the interface unfamiliar — if you didn’t engage with our onboarding, chances are, you were lost. We took all of these features out. Every single one of them. And by doing so, we created a bog standard email client. It did everything a regular email client did, and nothing else. It worked exactly as users expected it to — so we didn’t need our complicated on-boarding anymore. But that’s not exactly a compelling proposition. We took them out of the UI, but we put them somewhere else. We created a ‘Skills Center’. You accessed it via a button that we highlight early in the user journey. It is the only thing that stands out from an otherwise familiar UI. Now, when a user played with Hiri for two minutes and realised that there’s nothing new or different, inevitably they clicked on the one thing that was. And when they do — we have them. In the Skills Center, you can add the features that make Hiri unique. In your own time, you can explore these features and turn them on. It reduced our time-to-Aha moment from one week to one hour. Our conversion rate shot up from 1 in 50 to 1 in 10. |
There's a famous failure of this approach. Many years ago, there was a Macintosh graphics application designed by Kai Krause. It started out with a very simple interface. After you'd been using it successfully for a while, a new tool would appear. As the user demonstrated competence to the program, more tools would unlock.
Users hated that. When a rumor started that Krause was going to redo the API for Photoshop, user groups petitioned Adobe to stop him.