Case Study: Reddit Registration and Onboarding
Reddit is one of my favorite products — I spend so much time on Reddit that I consider myself addicted.
First time experience — Desktop
Right away Reddit gives you the content. You can browse for hours and hours without ever needing to make an account. You can view the different communities and the content that they offer. However, you quickly realize that to join a community, you need to create an account.
This screen is pretty standard, and notice that it only asks for email, and not username or password. There are also Google and Apple register options. Note that it says “Continue with Google” instead of “Join with Google.”
The next step is to choose a username that exists and a relatively strong password. There is good education on how a username is used in the Reddit ecosystem. The password strength indicator is right in the password text box.
The only thing left is to get you to follow a few “topics” to build your feed. There are multiple categories, including a Recommend category that seems to give Reddit the flexibility to put anything here, including globally popular topics. Notice that they’re “topics” even though they are otherwise known as “subreddits” or “communities” but Reddit knows you may have no idea what those are.
That’s it! Short and sweet and you’re landed into the feed where content from the topics you just followed are shown. It’s nice that it clearly says the topic (e.g. “r/movies”) on each item, so you know why it’s there. The only other things to note:
- They ask you to confirm your email in the top right corner. Not too distracting but annoying enough that you eventually want to do it.
- They show that you have an unread message. Intriguing!
This tries to accomplish two purposes: explaining how Reddit works and educating you about the private messaging feature.
First time experience — Mobile
Right off the bat, you’re hit with a cute cat! They know exactly what they’re doing. As content plays in the background, they get you to enable your notifications right away, before you even get a chance to log in or register. Very interesting! What’s clever about this is they can nudge you to use the app even if you do nothing else after this point.
Different from the Desktop experience, the mobile app tries to get you to create an account or log in, although you do have the option to Skip in the top right corner. It’s interesting to think about why they decide to do this and not surface the content first.
Here, email, username, and password are asked all upfront, instead of just email on Desktop.
Interesting! Instead of choosing actual subreddits like on Desktop, you get a topic cloud on Mobile. And you have to choose something here to continue. There’s also a Popular Near Me option, although it didn’t seem to change the options available to me.
Ahah. A second step after you choose topics — it actually automatically subscribes you to the best subreddits for each topic. You get a little description of each subreddit. You can even expand individual topics to see and follow more. Interesting though that there are no explanations on what the “check box/plus sign” does, whether it means follow or join etc.
You get this explanatory toast while your content loads.
Lastly, you land on content, with the similar welcome unread message in your inbox.
Key Takeaways
- Treat native different from desktop. Native doesn’t need to be content first because people already have intent when they download.
- Guest experience is key. Don’t ask people to register until they perform an action that makes sense for them to create an account.
- Sending a welcome message to your inbox is a good way of teaching by showing.
- Topic cloud is a relatively effective way of gathering interest. You need to immediately show good content for the topics though.
- Topics might be effective entities in the feed, but perhaps only if they’re moderated like Reddit, vs unmoderated like hashtags.
- Keep it short and sweet!
