Love at user’s first sight — the most neglected user experience

Riel M
3 min readNov 21, 2022

I intentionally didn’t design for the onboarding experience. It’s something Growth squad has to do.

I was in a design jam session when another designer mentioned this while walking us through their designs. I was surprised and started shaking my head. First time user experience is not another squad’s work, it is every designer’s job.

Product design has evolved from designing pixels to designing holistically. We learned to think outside of the artboards and inside of the business. We asked ourselves questions of“what metric will this inititaive move and how can design be used strategically to help achieve that?”. We finally took the time to use research and understand our users more. But despite the acknowledgement of designing holistically, we still fail to design for the extremes.

When you design for the extremes, designing for the norm will just be a piece of cake 🍰

So what is “extreme”?

When I say extreme, it is about extreme users and their needs. Extreme users are types of users who are both at the end of the spectrum of service or product, and anything in its center is what we call the norm or mainstream users. But the it doesn’t stop there. All extreme users has one specific common need or shared experience, and that’s what I call the love at user’s first sight or first time user experience (FTUX). All types of users at some point has to start at the beginning. They have to be in their lifecycle, a first time user who is in need of a first time experience.

https://meem.ee/moving-target/

Love at user’s first sight

So how do you put love at user’s first sight of a product, a new feature or even a new page? Two key points:

First impression

Remember the quote, first impression lasts? It is the same with product! First impression is all about how you present your designs to your first time users. You don’t want…