PrayerMate’s new onboarding process

I’ve been reading the fantastic User Onboarding website a lot lately, and it’s really got me thinking about the initial experience that PrayerMate users have. Anecdotal evidence suggests that people find it quite hard to get over that initial hump of adding all of their prayer points, and until you do, there’s very little to ever bring you back to the app. The result is that the number of active users has never grown nearly as quickly as the number of downloads.

With today’s update to the iOS app, hopefully that’s all about to change. There’s now an official “onboarding” process for new users:

Step 1: An explanation

For people who have already used paper prayer lists, the concept of PrayerMate is pretty self-explanatory. But if you’re completely new to the whole idea, it can be a bit hard to get your head around. So step one is simply to explain what on earth PrayerMate is for:

iOS Simulator Screen shot 7 Apr 2014 12.13.55

Steps 2 and 3: Creating some initial data

If you can get even a couple of your friends and family into the app, then immediately you’ll be a lot more engaged and find the app more useful. So I’ve added a couple of intro steps that encourage you to type in just a few names under two of the default categories:

iOS Simulator Screen shot 7 Apr 2014 12.14.12

There’s still plenty of room for improvement in the future here, but hopefully this’ll just take the edge off the first run experience and help people grasp the basic concepts of the app a little quicker.