I share many of the concerns raised here but by far my biggest concern is how well new users are able to adapt to the forum layout and how easy they find it to use. So that got me wondering @wadestriebel if we have any stats that might help? For instance:
how many forum users do we have now
how does this compare with, say, 12 months ago
how many users create an account but then remain inactive
how many users create an account and the close it shortly afterwards
how does this compare with, say, 12 months ago? 109 users signed up between May 3, 2019 and May 3, 2020
how many users create an account but then remain inactive? What do you consider “inactive” - Does gaining a trust level count as being “active”?
how many users create an account and the close it shortly afterwards? You can’t close an account, but to date we have only done a handful of anonymizations
Other interesting stats that weren’t request but I think may be useful:
Daily Active Users/Monthly Active Users
Number of members that logged in in the last day divided by number of members that logged in in the last month – returns a % which indicates community ‘stickiness’. Aim for >30%.
From May 3, 2019 to May 3, 2020 we have an average of 38%.
New Contributors
Number of users who made their first post during this period.
61 so if we base it on the 109 users signed up that is 56% - I think.
Trust Level Growth
Number of users who increased their Trust Level during this period.
I will DM you - but main point is that post was a moving target - it was basically 5 different conversations all happening in one thread if you go back and read it
I honestly got nothing to compare it with. It just strikes me as odd that almost half of those that create an account don’t then go on to contribute in any way. They must have had a reason to create an account so why did they not use it?
Maybe preemptive registrations to preserve their brand space? Like, I’ve registered codepotent as a username on Instagram and others even though I don’t use the services.
Or maybe “I might use this one day”, or maybe they registered an account and then forgot about it / got busy with other things. Lots of possible reasons.
I think it’s reasonable to assume that the same kind of process repeats throughout a funnel, and just as a gut feeling I would say that around 50% user activity is actually pretty good.
Ya, this was kind of my thinking from my experience with SaaS products - the funnel to a single conversion is huge so 50% signing up and becoming active in my mind sounds pretty good. But again, if there are other forum stats to compare to I would be super interested in finding out how we stack up.
Summary: In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.
So I did find a report I could pull to find out how many people open the welcome message:
Over the last 12 months only 7 users have opened it.
So that indicates to me we need to make adjustments there. I have already started by adjusting the text to be more clear about “starting” an onboarding experience.
Wade, do you know how they track opens? Personally, I have my email set to not autoload images so if they’re tracking that way, they won’t pick up on me. I can’t imagine I’m the only one…
Oh I see, sorry I wasn’t clear - it is the message you receive on the forums, it tracks when you open that.
When you first sign up you will start with 1 notification over your user avatar, that notification is the message from @discobot welcoming you and offering onboarding
This is my setting, as well. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the default behavior of mail clients and apps these days.
Perhaps there’s a report that indicates who has earned the welcome-related badges over time? This might possibly give a better number of who is going through the onboarding. If users are unwilling to do the 5 minute onboarding, I would 100% expect them to have trouble using a modern piece of software, regardless of what that software did. In light of that “7 users” number, I strongly suspect that “usability” is merely a symptom, and not the underlying cause.