The Eatery’s first-run experience.
Massive Health released their first product today: an iPhone app that appears to rate your meals, hot-or-not style, called The Eatery. Its signup flow touches on a few things I enjoy thinking about:
1. The “several page tutorial” pattern. Users can’t continue without paging through a set of instructions:
Long content scrolls, forcing horizontal and vertical swipes, but the team did a good job accounting for this by cutting the text at the fold:
This sort of pattern is especially common in iOS apps: they adopt the · · · · · · that you see on the home screen, and ask the user to page through a brief slideshow to learn the program. This is in contrast to the first-run experience where the “blank slate” state is annotated with arrows and suggestions for where to go. To-do list app Orchestra does this quite well.
I’ve seen the introductory slideshow used quite well (my favorite is probably Thicket, although its slideshow is put out of the way of the user). That said, I tend to favor the latter approach because it puts the working interface in front of users faster, which may decrease the bounce rate after the app has been downloaded.
2. Putting a form in a tutorial that appears like a gallery. I don’t know if these multi-page instructional demos enforce the expectation that users will treat them as if they were image galleries. On the fourth page (of six), the above form appears, encouraging users to select any sort of dietary restriction. Will users expect this? I was thrown off by it. Is it required? I couldn’t tell at first glance.
3. Checkboxes on a single select dialog. This might work better as a radio button, but I’ll concede that it would look less nice from a visual standpoint, and it may be less likely to invite interaction. Nonetheless, I want the ability to select multiple options, with “No restrictions” clearing all other responses (and a response elsewhere clearing “No restrictions” accordingly), as I can imagine a world wherein a handful of folks are (for example) both vegan and gluten-free.
4. Interesting copy. “Don’t watch this video. It’s boring.” Reverse psychology carries a small risk with first run experiences. My doctor is boring; this app is supposed to not be boring. I’m left wondering what the “Feed” is supposed to be. This could be solved with some copy like Instapaper’s first-run experience, which replaces an ostensibly blank list with some instructions on adding articles to read later.
