How to make guidance no longer useless and transparent?

When using a new app, users often see some guide pages, but when operating, they just slide or skip them quickly as if they are transparent. At this time, everyone will definitely feel powerless, "These guides are useless." There is even a saying that "If a product needs guidance, it means that the product lacks friendly elements." It seems reasonable, but I don't think this can be generalized. In many apps, in addition to guiding user operations, guidance also affects the user's first impression of the product. As long as the guidance is well designed, it will not only be loved by everyone, but also play a huge role in the experience of the entire app! "Incoming Call" is an application based on voice communication. As an application that constantly explores and innovates, there are also many places where guidance is needed. Next, we will use some cases and combine the guidance of incoming calls to tell you how to make a good guidance that everyone loves.

Now, with the expansion of hardware and systems, the types and forms of guidance have more room for expression. Guidance pages, default guidance, video guidance, H5 guidance, etc. can all play a role in guiding users to recognize or use new applications. On the one hand, from the perspective of the product, the product hopes that users can easily understand the characteristics of the product and reduce their unfamiliarity with the product; on the other hand, from the user's perspective, a good guidance in an application can not only make them feel good about an application, but also make it easier to retain them. But no matter what form of guidance, a good guidance can make users have a certain understanding of the product and bring users closer to the product. Through the analysis of many well-made guidance (here we mainly discuss page-based guidance and H5), we found that the app guidance that everyone likes has some commonalities. Through summarization and refinement, we have come up with the following principles that users like after seeing them:

Easy to understand

Regardless of the type of guidance an APP provides, its purpose is to help users use the APP better, just like a caring housekeeper or friend who introduces or teaches you how to use a new thing, lowering the threshold for cognition and exploration. But if this friend talks too much and too miscellaneous, you may not remember what he said; and if this friend describes the new thing as "unfathomable" in order to highlight its style (self-indulgent guidance), then you may lose interest in learning more because you don't understand. Simple and uncomplicated guidance with easy-to-understand information can allow users to grasp the information we want to convey and understand the features or operations of the APP more easily, such as the following cases:

Interface from Dropbox

Dropbox's default guide is one of my favorites. When users first use the app, it guides them through the initial default page (blank page) with operations, which greatly avoids the embarrassment of entering the app with nothing. Moreover, the copywriting of this set of guides is not a rigid explanation of functions, but conveys relevant information through some easy-to-understand sentences with corresponding interesting icons, making users feel relaxed while reading and operating. Moreover, the overall style of this set of guides is consistent, which makes people have a solid impression of the product and makes it more friendly.

Be consistent

Good guidance is consistent in many aspects. The shaping of the visual style, the expression of product concepts and product features should be consistent with the product, positioning and brand to which it belongs, so that users will have a general understanding and feeling of the product when using it. The positioning of the product will determine the direction and route of the guidance, as well as the final form of guidance, so guidance is the place that best reflects the product's tone and brand. In addition to ensuring the consistency of the product and the user experience, the consistency of guidance can also further strengthen the user's understanding of the product and continue the brand impression. The following example:

Interface from Telegram

In terms of consistency, I think Telegram's pre-guidance is more representative. In this set of guidance pages, each page element seems simple but very detailed, the icon style is unified, the main title is one word, and the expression is very straightforward and concise. This set of guidance pages is consistent with the characteristics revealed by Telegram's products as a whole, efficient and clean, and this kind of temperament is conveyed throughout the entire product. In particular, each icon has a small animation, allowing users to feel the information it conveys more intuitively. This kind of detail is more likely to touch users and gain their recognition of product quality.

Resonate

As mentioned earlier, a good guide in an app can not only make them feel good about the app, but also make it easier to retain them. The key here is to resonate with users. Through a deep understanding of the product itself and insight into the psychology of target users, combining product features with user pain points, and then using visuals and copywriting to render an atmosphere to convey relevant concepts, arouse users' emotions and impress users. Resonating with users is conducive to their emotional identification with the product, and this identification will enhance users' further use and exploration of the product. As shown in the following example:

The interface comes from [blank]

This is the guide of the "Blank" APP. This app was previously known as one of the most beautiful apps. As an app with a very literary style, its guide also continues its literary atmosphere. In addition to the atmosphere rendered by the beautiful pictures and the matching fonts, the copywriting occupies a very important proportion in this set of guides. It is these copywritings that make this set of guides a level higher. The words used in the copywriting are popular, making users feel not alienated. The guide not only explains the product features, but also emphasizes the style and promotes beauty. It is very thoughtful. The copywriting at the end brings up the emotions and moves people.

Based on what has been said above, we can roughly conclude that a good APP guide should have the following three principles: "easy to understand, resonate, and be consistent". The relationship between these three principles is shown in the figure below. With these three principles, the guide will have the characteristics of being loved by everyone. Of course, these three principles are just a rough reference. The quality of the application guide cannot be generalized. There are many other influencing factors, but due to limited space, we will not elaborate on them in this article.

Through the relevant principles obtained above, we look back at how the incoming call guidance is done. As an application that is still exploring, the incoming call has gone through several rounds of changes and adjustments in direction. The changes in the product direction also affect the design of the incoming call. Due to these reasons, the overall consistency of the incoming call guidance design is insufficient. However, in addition to this, the incoming call guidance follows the other two principles (easy to understand and resonate), combined with the characteristics of the product, and thus forms its own characteristics, that is, intuitive and emotional.

This is the default page guide for incoming calls. The first one is the default guide for "traceless chat". "Traceless chat" (that is, self-destructing messages) is still a relatively unfamiliar and slightly abstract concept for many users in China. In order to make it easier for users to understand this concept, we break down this concept, transform it, and then gather it into a more familiar concrete thing in everyone's cognition - a shredder, so that users can have a synaesthesia understanding of "traceless chat" through it, achieving an intuitive effect. Combined with the copywriting, it gives users reasons for the benefits of using it, so as to motivate users to click "find a friend to chat" to operate; the second one is the default guide in the incoming call AIO. The main function here is to inform users that they can adjust the disappearance time of the traceless chat content. This can be said to be a supplement to the previous "traceless chat" concept. When using it for the first time and entering AIO, this picture will be animated to shrink to the corresponding clock position in the lower left corner, informing users of the operation position, and intuitively guiding users to operate, so that users can understand it at a glance.

This group is a guide page for guiding users to open permissions. As the initial guide, because opening permissions sometimes requires users to repeat operations many times, this is a place that easily makes users feel bored or even disgusted. For this reason, in the design of this group of guides, we created a little snowman image, combined with the needs of the product and the purpose of the guide, to create some small scenes to make this group of guides more emotional, plus clear purpose copywriting, to create a relaxed atmosphere, so that users can resonate when they see the page, so as to feel friendly and reduce the boredom caused by repeated operations.

Previously, we have roughly talked about some principles of good app guidance and the characteristics of call guidance. Next, we will talk about the design process of call guidance in detail based on a practical case. This case is an h5 guidance called "Class Address Book". "Class Address Book" is a communication-style promotion guidance for the call team address book function. By guiding callers to initiate and share on WeChat, Space, QQ and other platforms, callers can understand and use this function through link guidance, and non-callers are guided to download to achieve the purpose of attracting new users.

position

Previously, we conducted a large-scale promotion through the mobile QQ platform. After September, the number of incoming users slowed down, and we began to think about whether there are better ways to promote and guide users to a new round of user growth. Through discussions and analysis with product experts, we also explored some other promotion methods from a large number of competing products, and focused our target on promotion among acquaintances. Regarding acquaintances, they can be divided into several groups. Since this promotion needs to attract user participation through acquaintance relationships and attract new users to the greatest extent, it requires a high degree of trust between acquaintances and a large number of people in this group. In this regard, we diverged and analyzed every group of people we can think of:

Through analysis, we compared the trust and number of people in each group (as shown above). It can be seen that in the comparison value, "classmates" is relatively high among the two, with the smallest gap. In addition, the promotion time is around September, which is the beginning of the school year. Therefore, we focus on the "classmates" group and extend it to development and design.

Design direction

After determining the positioning, we began to enter the early stage of design. First, we determined the interactive process, forming a closed loop by initiating sharing and recipients registering to participate, as follows (due to the limited space of this article, the process part is not discussed in detail):

The initiation page and the acceptance page play an important role in this process. One of these two pages needs to guide users to share, and the other needs users to participate and guide them to perform the next operation. Because it combines operation and function, it requires more packaging than the general guidance page to attract users.

Style Packaging

We packaged this set of guidance with themes to make it emotional, which is one of the characteristics of call guidance, allowing users to have emotional identification. This set of guidance is to promote the team address book function, and with the addition of the group of "classmates", we came up with the concept of "class address book". For this concept, we need to explore the relevant characteristics and impression elements, and after divergence, we gathered a style theme: Party.

In our opinion, the concept of "class address book" is to let classmates who have lost contact or have not been in touch for a long time get in touch again. Therefore, we hope to create a party atmosphere, get rid of the dry and cold feeling of ordinary address books, and make users feel cheerful and happy. Therefore, in terms of design style, we tend to use a cheerful party theme to express it, so as to touch the user's emotions.

Specific design

With the direction and theme, the next step is to carry out more specific design. Before that, we need to think about the purpose of the product and the role of this page, and then combine the three principles mentioned above with the characteristics of the call itself to make this set of guidance have the DNA of the call and achieve the purpose of the product. First, let's analyze how we consider these two guidance from the interactive draft:

Copywriter

First of all, we must emphasize that in the process of guidance, copywriting is particularly important because it is the key to directly obtaining guidance information. The guidance of the initiation page is to let the caller take the initiative to initiate the invitation and spread. On the one hand, we must clearly tell the user what to do and guide the user to take action. On the other hand, we stimulate the user's enthusiasm through some rewards to increase the user participation rate. Therefore, we set the copywriting of the initiation page as "Create a classmate directory and get 1,000 minutes of call time". The purpose of the receiving page is to guide the user to accept the invitation and proceed to the next step. Then, this requires the user to have enough trust in this page before accepting the invitation. Therefore, the guidance copy here needs to be supported by real information, and this real information comes from the content filled in by the initiator through the guidance. The combination of the two makes this set of guidance complete and smooth.

Graphics

This is the area that best reflects emotional characteristics. The rendering of the theme style can also drive the user's emotional resonance. This determines whether the page can attract users in terms of feeling. According to the theme of the party, we want to highlight the sense of collectivism and the cheerful atmosphere. On the initiation page, we made it a "standing in a row" effect like taking a class group photo, highlighting the feeling of a class reunion; on the acceptance page, we made it feel like a welcome party, welcoming classmates to join, creating an overall sense of joy, and the little man and the initiation page echo each other, creating a connection. The initiation page is initiated by the incoming call application, so the color is more integrated with the incoming call app, while the acceptance page uses the caller's own brand color as the main body to highlight the brand sense. The sketches during the design process are as follows:

operate

Finally, the operation plays a key role in this set of guidance, especially on the initiation page. The operation part of the initiation page will directly affect the trust of the receiving page, so the copywriting of the school class information needs to be filled in to guide users to fill in real information. This real information will be displayed as the copywriting of the receiving page, which is related to whether the user will accept the invitation after seeing this page (receiving page); and the operation of the receiving page is to give users a sense of substitution with "I want to join", stimulate users' desire to click, and increase participation rate.

After considering and polishing the above levels, we constantly compared and considered, and adjusted and optimized every detail from color, font, elements, etc., and finally got the final output, as shown below. This is the process and thinking of this case.

During this period, in addition to operations and basics, I have done a lot of guidance-related designs. Although the call center has been online for a while, it has been constantly exploring and moving forward. Many sparks have collided and many new things have emerged, which has also led to the need for guidance in many places in the call center. Let's not discuss whether the guidance is practical or not, but from a design perspective, every detail should be strived to be the best and let users feel it. Through this period of work, when doing guidance-related designs, I have some small experiences and feelings, and I would like to share them with you:

1. Clearly determine the product requirements and the purpose of the guide

Although there are many types of guidance, different types of guidance are selected for different product requirements and guidance purposes. Therefore, you must be clear about the needs of the product, whether it is to display the product, let users learn how to operate it, or for promotion. Only with a clear direction can you choose the most appropriate method and style to guide. The changing product direction can easily make the product guidance inconsistent, which is not conducive to solidifying the specific impression of the entire product and affects branding.

2. Observe every detail of life

The design that can impress users must be related to life, people and things around them. Because it is related, it is not abrupt. What a good guide is has been explained in detail above, but in the final analysis, its core is to be natural. This naturalness is achieved through the combination of people's common sense understanding of things, life experience, and inner feelings. Therefore, designers need to have a sensitive insight into life.

3. Copywriting! Copywriting! Copywriting!

Important things should be said three times. The importance of copywriting has been emphasized in many articles. In the guidance, copywriting directly affects the user's operation and understanding of the entire product. Therefore, the copywriting of the guidance must be polished. Good copywriting can save a lot of trouble.

4. If you don’t need to guide, don’t guide

Although I think that onboarding is necessary, if there are too many onboardings in an app, users will question the overall product experience, and on the other hand, it will also dampen users’ enthusiasm for using the product. So unless there is a new feature launch, a major version change, or a necessary default page onboarding, don’t do it if you can.

Good apps are able to make good use of guidance as a tool. In addition to serving users, they also convey the temperament of the brand and products to users. Laidian is also constantly thinking about this aspect. On the one hand, it maintains its own characteristics, and on the other hand, it is also learning and making up for its own shortcomings, and further improving itself to give users a better experience.