Onboarding Users
Quora's sign-up page starts with a powerful value proposition - The best answer to any question - subtly suggesting the user about Quora's ambitions. Quora has a very smooth user onboarding process. It allows you to sign-up either via the most popular sign-up accounts - Google, Facebook or Twitter. This saves the user time, which increases the likelihood of a signup. Otherwise, you can complete a tiny 3-field form to register.
Once, you've completed the registration, it asks you to select at least 10 topics from a list of most popular topics. It asks you to "Find your Facebook friends" by stating that an average person has "34 friends with 17 answers" on Quora. A smart technique to collect more user information by "bribing" the user to see what his FB friends are doing on Quora. It also shows a progress bar on the top so that the user doesn't get impatient with the whole onboarding process.
What follows next is Quora's personalized news feed - a page where you can see the latest happenings with the topics and people you've just followed in the previous step. On the left-hand side, it shows the top stories and the topics trending now.
It follows with sort of a small introduction note to various important components - News Feed, Answering, Upvoting, Following. The introduction note is always displayed in the right sidebar. It would be more intuitive if the arrows are used to show what part plays what role. For example, if it is talking about upvoting, it should point to the Upvote button, as shown below. Unlike the website, Quora's mobile apps does this highlighting, enhancing the experience.
It follows with sort of a small introduction note to various important components - News Feed, Answering, Upvoting, Following. The introduction note is always displayed in the right sidebar. It would be more intuitive if the arrows are used to show what part plays what role. For example, if it is talking about upvoting, it should point to the Upvote button, as shown below. Unlike the website, Quora's mobile apps does this highlighting, enhancing the experience.
After the step-by-step introduction, it takes you to page with a semi-completed checklist composed of a few things that will make the user familiar with Quora's basic features. The list shows some of the points to be completed and rest to be checked - It employs a psychological phenomenon called endowed progress effect - people are more likely to finish something if they think they've made progress. Pretty neat!
No matter how simple the product is, it still needs to teach new users how to use and navigate it. If you don’t teach users, the abandonment rates post-signup will be high. In that sense, Quora’s onboarding process is very clean and intuitive, helping new users find friends, people to follow and topics they’re interested in.
User Engagement Tactics
The hardest thing after the user has been brought onboard is to make sure the user regularly uses the product. Once Quora has onboarded a user, it employs several tactics to keep the user engaged and maximize the time he spends on the product. 'Time on product' is an important engagement metric and currently Facebook is the king, with every user spending 20+ minutes every day on the average!
Notifications: Quora notifies the user if someone starts following them or someone has commented on his answer or if there is a new answer to a question one is following. Quora shows notification alerts when user is on the site, and also sends emails for notifications that you are subscribed to.
Quora Weekly Digests: To engage users via email, Quora frequently sends a Quora Digest. For me, I've set it on a weekly schedule, which means one email from Quora per week containing all the popular Questions & Answers related to the topics or the people that I follow. The email's subject is an interesting question instead of some obvious and boring line like "Your Quora Weekly Digest: Most popular topics this week". Personally, the question in the email's subject itself invokes so much curiosity that I'm compelled to open the email every time.
Related Questions: On the right hand side bar of every Question page there are a set of related questions, facilitating question discovery.
Notifications: Quora notifies the user if someone starts following them or someone has commented on his answer or if there is a new answer to a question one is following. Quora shows notification alerts when user is on the site, and also sends emails for notifications that you are subscribed to.
Quora Weekly Digests: To engage users via email, Quora frequently sends a Quora Digest. For me, I've set it on a weekly schedule, which means one email from Quora per week containing all the popular Questions & Answers related to the topics or the people that I follow. The email's subject is an interesting question instead of some obvious and boring line like "Your Quora Weekly Digest: Most popular topics this week". Personally, the question in the email's subject itself invokes so much curiosity that I'm compelled to open the email every time.
Related Questions: On the right hand side bar of every Question page there are a set of related questions, facilitating question discovery.
Driving Virality
Social Media Integration: It is very easy to integrate Quora into social media. It allows users to post any Quora activity on their FB timeline. For example, I upvoted an answer on Quora and it is instantly reflected in my facebook feed.
When answering a question, user has the option to share the answer to Twitter and FB through a simple checkbox. This many a times introduces Quora to the user's FB friends or Twitter followers - playing a huge role in getting the word out about Quora.
Whenever you open a Quora link shared on FB, Twitter or any other service, Quora allows you to read the specific post shared without signing up primarily to give you an initial look-and-feel of the service. However, if you get curious and click on any other question or topics on the page, it'll and hide the content in the background until you sign-up or sign-in.
Sharing: At the bottom of every answer, there is an option to share the specific answer to your networks (FB, Twitter, LinkedIn) or your blogs, or even via email. Personally, I've seen so many of the people on Twitter sharing posts from Quora. Just search "My Quora Answers" on Twitter and you'll know.
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