When I went to the Snap Summit^3 a few weeks ago I walked away with a few precious nuggets of information that I will be trying to implement in the upcoming months. From an events and conferences standpoint if I can walk away with a few solid things that I can actually put into action(and meet some interesting people), then I would call it a success.
So, one of the things that really hit home with me after sitting through a few panels was thinking about the differences between the experiences of a brand new user who has no idea what they’re doing(newbie) and a veteran user that has been around a while and who knows your system practically as much as you do(expert). A guy who works at hi5 said that on his network it’s very important to ensure that these experiences are vastly different, which a focus on making sure that a new user gets additional attention, hand-holding and interaction because if someone has taken the effort to be a part of what you’re doing, but doesn’t understand it, they’ll leave just as quickly as they showed up. A veteran on the other hand has already somehow already plugged in and learned how to be successful without any additional help, which means that they should have an entirely different experience as well.
After thinking about this more and more it has led me to rethinking the documentation, information and tools that we arm newbies with when they join HubPages and how we can continue to improve them so that more newbies eventually turn into experts. There’s no doubt in my mind that everyone wants to be successful, it just takes different approaches for different types of people. This brings me to my main point(and why I wrote this post), which is that I’m going to be spending some time on these things so that it can become even easier for newbies to get up and running and in-the-loop.
The first thing that I’m tackling is the HubPages getting started guide, which up until now has been a PDF that’s emailed out to newbies once they officially join up with us. This guide has a lot of great information, but with all of the new improvements that we’ve been adding lately some of it has become a little outdated and although a PDF is handy for most, we’d like to move the entire thing online as well. This project is scheduled to be done within a week or so and will hopefully be just the beginning of helping our newest members of HubPages get up and Hubbing better and faster than they ever have before. If you have anything that should definitely be included in this new user guide, please let us know in the comments below and we’ll see if we can implement them as well.
