Upboarding

For example, in an onboarding scenario, product tutorials are minimal, often optional, and would likely disappear after the user used a feature for the first time. In an upboarding model, tutorials are aplenty, teach broader concepts, and live in perpetuity someplace where users can easily find them again if they need to.

A focus on upboarding enables teams to give critical thought to how a user would naturally progress through a product experience, placing emphasis on the key points where users will want and need to learn new things.

The “take photo” button in Camera Go, for instance, displays text and an illustration to indicate which mode the camera is in, such as portrait, night, or HDR. And when the Camera Go app is opened, an animated guide explains how to use it, emphasizing imagery over text for those who struggle to read.

The user sees these tutorials each time they open the app, and over time, upboarding screens become less frequent and eventually disappear when the user becomes more familiar with the features of the app.

In another example, we introduced in Google Go – a “lite” version of the Search app created for NIUs – a set of short videos that live on the app’s home screen. These videos don’t just teach people how to use the app; they also educate them on the larger concepts.

Unlike most onboarding tutorials, the Google Go videos never disappear, allowing users to learn at their own pace. Ultimately, our hope is that novice users will be set up for success to attain their learning goals and confidence without the need for sometimes unreliable or unavailable informal teachers and that eventually they can teach others themselves.

Jiny, the World’s First Assistive UI Platform

Backed by Google Launchpad and launched in 2019, the idea for Jiny was originally conceived when its founders were conducting a study asking people on a train platform in India why they preferred standing in a queue for tickets rather than booking online. The question revealed that many of the barriers preventing users from adopting a digital product could be overcome with a simple voice prompt given at the right time and place.

When reserving a seat on a flight, for example, users might not understand which seats were designated as taken. The answer might be quite simple, actually, but without assistance, they could only guess. Jiny senses when and where a user might be struggling with UI and offers a gentle nudge in the users’ native language. “The white seats are taken” might be a prompt in the aforementioned situation, for example.

Jiny exists entirely within the app on screen, so there’s no need for an active connection or to disengage by being sent to another page or a third-party tutorial. Jiny is also hyper-contextual — it understands where the user is within an app and what roadblock they might be encountering. Jiny walks the user through the entire transaction, subtly nudging the user in the right direction, easing apprehension, and building self-assurance every step of the way.