Snapguide is an iPhone app that allows people to create and share nicely-formatted “how-to” guides from their mobile device. I recently downloaded it and went through their first time user experience, with screens included above.
The good bits:
The most enjoyable part of my first time experience using Snapguide was that I could browse published guides and create drafts of my own guides without needing to sign in. I was able to upload photos, add steps and add supplies to my guide, and was only prompted to sign in when I tried to publish it. If I didn’t sign in, the app saved all my partial guides as drafts under a default profile called “You”.
By providing free samples, the app gave me a way to try out the product’s core functionality before deciding to create an account.
Additionally, Snapguide provided starter content whenever I was faced with a blank slate. It provided sample topics and tags when I had to enter a title for my guide, and it showed auto-completion hints as I typed in items for my supplies list.
To be improved:
Snapguide has a fairly lengthy 6-screen product tour at the beginning. While lovely, it involved multi-stage animations for each panel that I had to wait through before it would progress to the next panel. The “Skip” option only accelerated me to the sign in/up prompt (which is also the 6th panel in the tour), and then I had to tap “Skip” again to continue on. Given that the app allows so much robust draft-saving without an account, I’m curious why they made the sign in/up prompt so prominent.
There were also several modal popup hints. These were less effective than, and inconsistent with, the inline hints that were used on screens like “Title Your Guide.” These modal hints required me to tap the “OK” button, and then tap the action they were pointing to, when it seems like they could combine the two actions.
Snapguide uses many different onboarding techniques that might overwhelm the new user; they may benefit from paring these down.