Onboard!

[chadwhitacre]

We redid the unauthenticated homepage in #2544, dropping back to a very simple call to action. In the process we lost what little meaningful onboarding of new users we had in the form of the leaderboards. In #2584 we've started talking about building out a homepage for authenticated users, and I believe that onboarding is a vital part of that. I'm thinking of the signed-in homepage as a dashboard that focuses on the four interesting things you can do on Gittip:

• Give money
• Receive money
• Take money (from Teams)
• Commune (though community page should occasion some kind of communing #967)

I'm thinking we want an onboarding workflow that involves all four of these elements, prioritized in that order.

[chadwhitacre]

Rough sketch:

[chadwhitacre]

For each section we need something inviting when there is zero data, and then some interesting dashboard-y snapshot when there is actually data (i.e., the user has started using Gittip!).

[chadwhitacre]

Though the functionality available when there is zero data should still be available when data-full. E.g. if I want to play the giving game again I should be able to. :-)

[chadwhitacre]

@seanlinsley and I were also talking about whether to target ourselves more towards givers or receivers, especially in our homepage pitch. Over on #2544 we decided to go with a focus on receivers, but tonight we started developing a theory based on breadth and depth: givers for breadth, receivers for depth. Yeah, if we target givers then we get a lot of people giving a little bit—"Hey, fun! I can give quarters to all my friends! Feels good!" But it's the receivers that decide to take the plunge and try to make a living off of Gittip that will drive deep adoption. Here's the twist: how do we find receivers? Maybe by going for breadth. Maybe the next person to make a go of it as a receiver on Gittip is going to find out about it when someone they know thinks of them when playing the giving game.

[chadwhitacre]

@deltab points out http://www.useronboard.com/ in IRC

[Changaco]

I like it. The first remark that comes to mind is that you can't join a team like you join a community, you get added to a team.

[chadwhitacre]

Well, you join a team by contributing to it, no? I was actually thinking that that might be a field we add to team profiles, "What's the process for joining your team?" For Gittip, for example, the answer would be something like, "Start giving us pull requests and participating in IRC and GitHub conversations. Ask us to add you to the team if we don't ask you first." It's not as simple as clicking a "Join" button, but there is something I can do, an action I can take, if I want to join a team.

[Changaco]

Rebased on master.

[Changaco]

Added some commits.

[chadwhitacre]

I'm abandoning this in favor of search for initial discovery. The browse idea was driven by the principle "recognition is easier than recall" from Seductive Interaction Design, Chapter 1, and Thinking Fast and Slow, Chapter 12. But over in "'Pay Your Hero'" I realized that we only need first-time users to recall one person during onboarding, so search is more appropriate after all.

[rohitpaulk]

:( I think that we should keep this open. As you said, we want people to tip their friends even if it's a quarter each. I doubt that that's going to happen if they have to search for each friend one by one

[Changaco]

Reopened as #2809. We do want to show suggestions to users about who to tip.