Google Nest Onboarding Misses
Google Nest’s (seemingly endless flow of) onboarding screens
Your primary objective as a product team is to get people up and running and gaining value from your product as soon as possible.
While true for apps where you only have seconds before someone closes and deletes, this has also become the expectation for physical devices. People need to feel successful quickly or they’ll simply push your product to the side, possibly leading to unnecessary returns.
Unfortunately, Google Nest, which used to have a great onboarding experience, doesn’t follow this. In forcing users into the app for all instructions, they created a poor experience that doesn’t take into account the different modalities of a complex installation. Not only does it feel tedious seeing only one screen at a time for an indeterminate duration, the experience of holding a phone while fumbling with electricity is cumbersome and frustrating. While there are some wins, such as well-executed animations, the missed opportunities abound.
Ironically, the first Nest team knew the importance of fast installation and onboarding and excelled at it, perhaps because they had to. In order to succeed in the market they needed to convince people to take on the daunting task of self-installing a piece of hardware normally in the purview of HVAC professionals and, with connectivity, network engineers. (That’s still a hurdle today, but it’s much more understood by the public now than it was at that point early in the IoT movement.) Their product team had to distill all of the possible configurations and types of HVAC systems into a setup that seemed easy, and they did this by balancing real world, in-app, and online contexts based on where someone would be in the installation process. They made the printed manual focused and clearly illustrated. They used the primary scenarios for the most common HVAC setups and stored the myriad other use cases in their online help section (with clear paths to get there). They offered immediate email responses for anyone with a tricky setup that didn’t exactly match the installation content. They even provided a mini screwdriver for the small screws that were de rigueur in existing thermostats. In short, they ticked most of Jakob Nielsen’s common usability heuristics but with their physical product. While so much of the technology that went into Nest laid foundations for the modern connected home, the UX considerations allowed for widespread customer adoption.
Fast forward past the Google acquisition and Google Home app integration, and Google Nest has abandoned those onboarding best practices. Take a look at the sheer amount of screens in the Google Nest onboarding flow (above). Having forty-something screens to get through installation and onboarding is a huge red flag, and putting them in a single linear flow is a risk almost designed for failure.
From an internal perspective, this many screens adds exponential complexity, which means much higher cost for any agile team looking to design, develop, and maintain an app. And because app page stacks don’t like multiple forked paths, at least not to the extent HTML can support, confusing tradeoffs emerge when forcing those into a single, linear flow. These tradeoffs create both experience and technical debt as the product grows in its life cycle.
For customers, a linear flow in an app gives no impression of how much is involved in installation/onboarding. How do they plan their time commitment? How do they know what information they’ll need? What happens if they need to pause and resume later? Hint: they often have to start all over. In my case, between complexities due to my HVAC type and WiFi connection order-of-operations oddities, I had to stop and restart five different times. This means I tapped through those forty-something screens five different times over the course of two days, forcing me to reinstall the old thermostat between tries just so I could have a heated home, the one job the Google Nest is supposed to do.
How should products with both hardware and app components approach installation and onboarding?
See my recommendations for UX Best Practices in IoT Onboarding.
1. Start with print
Following my suggested best practices above, Google Nest could have started with a print guide that illustrates the primary path of most installations. At points where they know steps can deviate based on either unit type or even level of comfort with more involved installation (ie, rewiring), the manual could include support links for more information and alternate paths. This would allow people to gather any needed information ahead of starting the install process.
2. Leverage the strengths of an app
Because of page stacking, it’s difficult for an app to allow multiple paths and logic trees in an onboarding flow. But an app does give the opportunity for animation, inline videos, and links to external resources. They could still include the installation instructions and structure them to complement the print guide, representing a bit more detail and providing direct links to support site content (this is where they can keep and leverage some of their wonderful animations). The app could also enable saving progress or else take a table of contents approach if someone needs to pause for additional learning or if the current task requires more than a few minutes to complete.
3. Mark the milestones
They could identify key points in the installation that mark completion of one task and the beginning of another. This would encourage people to complete phases that need multiple steps in specified succession without requiring them to continually start over if or when they need to pause. It would also propel people forward in the process as the sense of accomplishment grows with each mini accomplishment.
Moving instructions from printed manuals into companion apps is becoming more commonplace. To businesses it seems like a cost savings on printed materials, and the digital nature of an app seems like a better opportunity to provide instructional clarity and accommodate multiple paths. In reality, this approach simply pushes costs further down the road in the form of support costs (from confused customers contacting the help center) and development costs (for already-behind agile teams to make even the smallest content changes, a post-launch inevitability as you discover how the product lives in the real world).
It’s important to resist the urge to do this. First impressions are critical, and we should endeavor to design and build an onboarding process that makes a good one, as it will pay back well into the product and brand life cycle.