How we build Scrintal’s new canvas experience from scratch

1. Onboard new cohorts in 1–1 meetings every week

We onboard about 5 new users to our product each week on Thursdays. The reason we keep all the onboarding to one day is that everyone can easily adapt to this schedule and we can make sure that all decision makers in our team can join. In the beginning it’s best not to do mass onboarding, because as a product builder one needs to learn as much as possible and as qualitatively as possible.

One of our onboarding sessions 🎉

2. Give minimal instructions, record everything and repeat

It is very tempting to explain the product. However, to make the best out of the experience, we stay quite and watch the users explore on their own. Sometimes users can be stuck, but staying silent and taking notes on where they were stuck helped us greatly.

3. Iterate the product after every onboarding cohort

We fix bugs, change design and behaviour after each Thursday. This practice gave us a fast development speed, and made us on track for the launch. We see all our new solutions as new hypotheses. We design and ship solutions to user problems quickly and test them in the next onboarding.

4. Take note of the things users figure out easily, and take ages to discover

We took notes of things our user did and said as well as those they didn’t do. If you, as a product builder, think a feature is a killer feature for you, but users have a hard time discovering it on their own, you should take this very serious. We took discoverability very serious. Many of our iterations were related to making some features more discoverable.