Onboarding and Other Improvements

Hi, Pincone folks! This week we shipped a few new things on Pincone. Our focus this time was not on existing members, but rather on newcomers. We improved our onboarding experience and added email verification to prevent spam accounts. But, we also worked on improving what Pincone looks like on your phones!

Onboarding

We're preparing to launch Pincone on ProductHunt this week, so we're hopeful we'll be able to bring Pincone into the hands of more people. This was the perfect time to improve our onboarding experience.

Before today, when you signed up for a Pincone account, we just dumped you straight into the Timeline on your Personal Pincone. That's it. No waysigns, no helping hand, nothing. This was OK (it wasn't) back when we just launched and Pincone only had a small subset of features. But, we've added a lot of cool things since then, like commenting, feeds, importing links, and more.

We brainstormed a bit, thinking about what type of onboarding we’d like to build. There are a lot of different ways you can approach onboarding. We landed on one of two options: tooltips or a welcome screen.

Tooltips are more engaging because they guide you through the product piece by piece, while at the same time pointing out where things live and how you interact with them. Our issue was that a lot of the things we wanted to show were more complex (creating a new team) or were not a part of your Personal Pincone. Meaning that they only appear after you are part of a team (liking something and mentioning others in a comment).

A welcome screen is more static, and you have a problem in explaining things to people all at once. This could be a little bit of too much information at once, especially because people might not be looking for all of these things immediately.

Ultimately, we decided to go through with the welcome screen approach (or in our case, multiple slides in a welcome popup). It felt more right for Pincone. Additionally, it’s easier to implement from the technical perspective. While that wasn't a key factor in our decision, it did mean we could build this faster and focus on more important things in our roadmap (like ingesting emails 💌).

Improvements for Small Devices

Around half of our visitors engage with Pincone from their phones, which is why we decided to make some small, but vital improvements to what Pincone looks like on smaller devices.

Recently, we shipped some improvements to how our search works. Apart from improving the search experience, this also meant that we could get rid of the search bar on every page, clearing up some screen real estate.

In this release, we decided to focus on tightening up that top layout even more. The header navigation area always had this great, big Pincone logo. While we do like it, you probably already know that you are on Pincone so it's not really that necessary. 🔪 Off it went.

Next, we decided to use that area to move the page title and actions in there, combining it with the menu icon to access your drawer. The Jump action is really useful, so we decided to leave it.

This new layout really makes Pincone feel more like a proper web app and we hope you like it.

As always, if you have any feedback or feature requests, tweet at us or send us an email to hey@pincone.com!