We are thrilled to announce the Global Onboarding project led by the NEAR Foundation and in close collaboration with the Community through the Silicon Craftsmen Guild.
Overview
Blockchain based products can be hard to grasp - at first. The NEAR collective is on a mission to bring the many benefits and advantages of blockchain based products and services to the masses.
The journey towards mass adoption at NEAR started from day one and is built into the core of the technology, making User Experience (UX) a key consideration when designing and implementing the core architecture of the protocol. This approach has so far been very successful which can be experienced with features such as the novel NEAR account and permissioning model (human readable names by default!).
Today we are advancing on that journey through a range of adoption and onboarding initiatives across several teams and projects. The Global Onboarding project has been created to serve as the unifying layer that sits on top and brings together all the current initiatives and processes across the ecosystem.
What is Onboarding?
We know that the word Onboarding gets thrown around a lot in many different contexts.
For the purposes of this program, we would define onboarding as āthe process of getting a complete newbie to become an active user of your product or serviceā. There are a few pointers than can be distilled from that meaning, things that we want to hone in and get a better understanding on:
- Who are our users? The better we understand the people behind the hundreds of thousands of transactions per day - the better we can serve them and craft better experiences to onboard the next million users.
- What is the necessary information that new users need to have in order to achieve their goals?
- What is the best way to deliver this information to new users?
- Information should be contextual, delivered to users at the right time and place. While most things have been well documented somewhere (Gitbooks, Blog Posts, among others), it is a core principle to meet users where they are.
The objective of a successful Onboarding Strategy is to minimise the timeframe between getting started and deriving value. In the context of the NEAR ecosystem, we want to make sure we are always enabling people to find their path - user, builder, learner - and maximise their potential.
Onboarding is Product Management
A common pitfall when talking about onboarding is the assumption that the product is at an optimal state of development and new users simply need to be shown the way into becoming expert users.
In reality, products are constantly evolving and improving. This is certainly the case when it comes to nascent Web 3.0 and ecosystems such as NEAR.
This means the onboarding process is intricately related to product development - serving as an important touch point that can provide extremely valuable information in the way of market research and product feedback - what are users excited about, what are they struggling to understand or uninterested in, among many others.
The Global Onboarding project aims to provide an opportunity for experimentation, gathering feedback, rapid iteration, optimising cycles of growth, and increasing collaborations across projects and teams in the ecosystem.
Models, Frameworks + Strategy
To maximize our chances of success, we bring a simple yet powerful formula for growth, a North Star, against which we can evaluate what we are doing, help us priority what to do next, and evaluate progress.
These formulas, along with other frameworks that are commonly used in the wonderful world of Product are there to enable us to make sense of the constantly evolving and expanding landscape.
Growth Formula
Our approach is simple: increase the number of assets (dApps), the number of visits for each, and % conversion across the board.
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Assets: Increase the quantity of assets on NEAR and the quality of these assets.
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Assets is a deliberately broad term meant to include both our core properties such as NEAR website and social media channels, as well as all dApps deployed on NEAR.
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We are BIG believers in developing a robust ecosystem with plenty of dApps across all verticals.
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The focus here would be onboarding new existing projects, developers and founders, talent pipeline so existing projects can scale, and early adopters who are eager to get involved and provide feedback.
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Visits: increase the number of people landing on our assets.
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Areas of focus include understanding the users flows: discoverability and composability. A user may enter the ecosystem through any asset (their journey may start with an NFT or a specific IDO they are interested in),
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Conversion: Increase the number of people that land on NEAR assets and convert into active users.
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Ensure that all assets are optimise for conversion: clear value propositions with Calls to Action, smooth sign-up flows, etc.
We believe that focusing on each of the areas above - starting with NEAR assets - can not only improve the overall onboarding experience but also greatly accelerate momentum and growth.
Flywheel
The Flywheel effect concept was popularised by Jim Collins, in his book āGood to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Donātā. It describes what happens when companies are able to implement positive, self-fulfilling cycles in motion - āthere is not a linear process of continuous improvement but a critical transition point at which momentum takes over and the process begins to power itself.ā
We envision the following flywheel:
- Increase the quantity and quality of assets on NEAR, more applications with excellent value propositions and User Experiences (UX) lead to;
- More users entering the ecosystem - āCome for X, Stay for Yā. Each application will have their own marketing and onboarding funnels, serving as the beginning of the journey. Focus in ensuring they have a positive experience on NEAR that goes above and beyond what they would expect from a blockchain based product. Users become advocates;
- Increased word of mouth, FOMO. The combination between real adoption metrics and the energy of passionate builders and users gets picked up by crypto twitter, traditional media, etc. Increased brand awareness;
- Increase in price of NEAR as a result of people expecting growth resulting from a blockchain with real users and real products;
- Thriving ecosystem buzzing with activity, potential users and growth grabs the attention of developers and builders, attracting more talent to choose NEAR as the the best place to build or expand their project to;
In the example above we can see how the cycle can repeat an endless number of times, accelerating with each spin.
Whatās Next
It is clear from the rapid growth experienced this year and the strength of the community that many of the initiatives described above, and positive forces that lead to growth are already in place. Most teams and projects have adopted similar approaches to growth in their areas of interest, the Global Onboarding project is here to maximise integration between all of these existing initiatives.
Weāve spent the last few weeks meeting with most major stakeholders to understand all the current initiatives being taken, identify areas for collaboration, gaps, and priorities. Over the next two weeks we have three key projects:
- Near.org UI/UX review as a core NEAR asset, central to most journeys.
- Global Onboarding Survey to gather insights of what the experiences of active community members have been now.
- Ecosystem Mapping: identify all key plates, common user flows, and key areas of interest. These information will be valuable to all stakeholders as every group tries to stay up to date with everything happening in the ecosystem, always looking for ways to maximise opportunities.
The Global Survey and Ecosystem Mapping will be used to review the next stages of work.
More information on these initiatives and how to get involved coming soon!
In the meantime, we encourage everyone to join the conversation on the new Global Onboarding channel on the NEAR Discord.
