Dan Benoni’s Post

I appreciated the overview of the personalization section. I completely agree that no personalization is better than poor personalization. I found it interesting that the onboarding process seemed to be embedded with the belief that you would either be overwhelmed or simply incapable of selecting your own books. I think this is a trend in onboarding where apps try to frame their goals of getting you to click/ listen/watch, what most benefits them as a benefit to the you. Maybe Blinkist could benefit from creating a streamlined onboarding option for those who have more of a "seek and destroy" mentality. This feature would allow them to cater to the busy entrepreneur like you who just really needs a summary of a specific book fast. Once they earn your trust by meeting this need, then they can start branching out with other recommendations. As the onboarding process currently is, it seemed they assumed you just wanted to start a reading habit, rather than thinking you just need a specific book quickly.

My #1 takeaway: Why are your users using? Don't give them the experience that they didn't come in for.

As someone who is actually attempting to go through the dense brick that's Thinking Fast & Slow at the moment, I understand your resilience in enduring the Blinkist onboarding process.😂 As for the case study, would you say that Blinkist have curated their onboarding process around a specific use case - someone looking to improve their reading habit and in the process alienated the other potential users, such as yourself? By doing so, they are still sticking to their core offering but to that specific user demographic?

The most I struggle with while using Blinkist is with their recommendations, I would like it to be more personalized and engaging like Netflix. On the other hand, I loved the Lucid app, which actually shows visuals along with the book summary, it's engaging. It provides the first chapters for free, so you can decide if you want to further read it or not. I really hope that lucid would one day increase their contents with more books.

I think part of not giving up just before the end of the onboarding is a part of "loss aversion" Where you are compelled to not lose out on the time you invested more than you are compelled to see your summary.

Great case, as always, thanks Dan Benoni! Before answering your question, I loved the fact that you read Daniel Kahneman, he's great. I even talked about him in my TEDx talk about risk-taking. As to Blinkist's case, I have trouble picking "the one particular element" that stroke me more than others, they are simply all good, that's why I enjoy your cases so much. It actually made me think that onboarding similar to the business elevator pitch. You don't start presenting all your product features in a five-minute pitch, you pick the one that brings most value to the user and then you shut up. Only when the user starts asking questions, then you can reassure that all their fears have been taken care of. It's similar to onboarding, where you show the core value first, and only later start collecting the data and "improving the experience". Thanks again !

Great case study! My key take-aways: - Ask what to accomplish (what is the users job-to-be-done?) - When showing a comparison anchor it to the users goal. - Creating the expectation that you will personalise the experience with questions and not doing it in the end is worse than no personalisation at all. - Let the onboarding create something for the users that feels like it's from them, this will make them value it more and motivates them to stick around. - Don't waste too much psych, give enough value in return.

My #1 takeaway is to not overload the user with unrelated and undervalued steps when onboarding. I just stumbled upon your website and I find it to be the most intuitive and informative sites that I've ever experienced. I am not in the UI/UX world, but after going thru case studies makes me want to switch careers.

This is brilliant. Your pointed out a crucial portion in personalization: it has to be tailored to the incoming new user (and how they got there). I wonder if the Oprah book recommendation came up because it's one of the most popular ones among their *existing* members for your chosen categories. That's great, but not it's personalization based on new users. Missed opportunity to connect with what people are searching for (pre-app) to lead them into the app itself.

I haven't used this app before and since you recommended it, I will give it a try. On this case study's takeaway, I'm pretty sure like usual that onboarding is still the vital progress needed to nail, besides "the impact of transparency". I'm kinda impressed with Blinkist's trial paywall too, I've wanted Spotify to have this same transparent paywall when I got their discount offers.