Designed for Use, 2nd Edition

Getting people up and running

Nowadays, a lot of applications need some kind of signup procedure to work properly. Our Twitter client needs to have access to Twitter, for example. But even something like a todo list or a password manager probably wants users to sign in to a service that synchronizes tasks and passwords between devices, and your word processor may want you to sign into an account, because you’re paying for it using a subscription service. So that’s one situation where you want people to do something before they can start using your product.

Another situation is where the application needs data from the user to work correctly. An example is a weather app that needs to know which places the user frequents in order to show relevant ...