Simon Willison’s Weblog

Which sites do a good job of guiding first time users?

23rd February 2012

My answer to Which sites do a good job of guiding first time users? on Quora

The Twitter sign up process is fascinating, and constantly evolves. I create a new Twitter account every six months or so just to see what their latest iteration looks like.

It’s interesting because Twitter is a particularly hard thing to explain to a new user—there are a lot of concepts to get your head around, and the natural reaction is “why is this useful to me”. The site just doesn’t make sense if you don’t start off using it with a good set of relevant followed accounts.

Here’s an interesting example flow: if you’re signed out of twitter and you visit someone’s profile page there, you’ll see a strong “sign up to get updates from person-name” call to action. If you start signing up there, Twitter will suggest accounts related to that person as additional things to follow.