I have spent the past 3 days trying to figure out how to use Anytype and I think a large reason for it was that I completely skipped the onboarding. Why?
Saw a million things in the sidebar which was what I didn’t want to see and prompted me to want to delete everything - which I did.
I was hoping your YT had a video on what each of the basic terms meant. It did not.
This is probably a nightmare for someone who is making the app to hear, but it’s the truth. I am just a dumb idiot user.
But I am also a dumb idiot user that really believed in the functionality of Anytype so I decided to just grit my teeth and learn how to use Anytype, tooth and nails. It also bothered me that onboarding was… the way that it was so here are my general suggestions for it:
Less items in the sidebar, it makes it feel like the space already belongs to someone else and isn’t my own
Maybe having an example dashboard there and some help documents in the favourites section will be a good way to start
Favourited help documents being How to use, Glossary of Anytype, Example Objects & Types, Collections and Sets (putting all the example objects, types, collections and sets into one document so the favourites section doesn’t look cluttered and the user will understand the difference of how it looks quickly)
use gifs instead of videos for the tutorials - figma from memory does this but i remember other apps that also use this method and make it very effective to learn the function of what they’re teaching you very quickly
I also put together an Anytype page example of how to explain the important functions to the user:
pages under the glossary can then be an expand to the full documentation and explanation of each term
even though this page basically has all the documents in the favourites bar, maybe you can expand the explanation in the different documents. For example for under glossary document you can have a toggle of the term with the full explanation instead of just a short sentence of the function. You can also put the rest of the objects/sets/collections you put in the sidebar into the example documents page instead
For the example gif, use a very generic thing that your users are most likely using the app for. I would imagine this would be a daily journal page or project and not something like a recipe organiser; however I am not making Anytype and haven’t been bothered to research what people primarily use it for so I’m really just speaking out of my arse here, but hopefully you get the point. Use an example that your users are most likely using this app for. I personally used it to organise my journaling, tasks, language learning and ideas
Have a YT video for each basic function (eg. Video on what an object is, video of what a type is, etc.). Figma also does this and it helps so incredibly with their onboarding process.
I hope this didn’t offend you and I am earnestly trying to give constructive criticism here. Also I am a dumb user, so if any of the info I used in the screenshots are wrong or is missing too much info, feel free to change it how you see fit. Or maybe you think I’m just totally wrong and that’s fine too lol.
Hope this helped with making the onboarding process easier and I look forward to the amazing stuff Anytype can do in the future.
Hi @jewlz! I was in a similar situation as you when I started using Anytype, I deleted everything and started fresh. I agree that the terminology is initially frustrating, especially if you come in with expectations from using other apps like Notion.
Your sample pages make a lot of sense to me, really great order of steps to take! I hope your suggestions are incorporated into updated onboarding.
Spot on @jewlz … This is my second attempt to use Anytype and I failed making anything usable previously… now I’m running into the same “onboarding” you describe: complex, obtuse, somewhat esoteric.
These are great suggestions, I hope the Anytype team takes some hints… Previously they’ve been dismissive at best.
I just discovered Capacities.io and they clearly took the time to solve these very basic onboarding issues to great effect… Maybe Anytype will make an effort at some point.
Well, I hope what you mean by “something like this” is that you’ll do the necessary discovery with the non-early-adopter potential user base to identify what their expectations are a an Anytype like product and change your current presentation and language to better suit the users without the unnecessary burden of front-loading the onboarding with terminology definitions and your existing idiosyncratic take on information al hierarchy.
Arguably your idiosyncratic mental model mixed with feature-prioritization instead of use case prioritization is your weakest part… competition is growing so it’s worth asking why people who seek your product out aren’t loving it right out of the box.
I think you are right. We see that only 10% of people who install Anytype convert to becoming regular users who truly love it and use it almost every day. This number could be much higher. It’s clear that the biggest problem lies not in the functionality and in “ux bugs”, but in the way we communicate and onboard users. This is precisely our priority for this year, and we already have a lot of data, feedback, and intuition to improve it.
I think you are being a little to hard on the onboarding, although I agree with OP. I think the onboarding concerns itself with explaining the “technical details” of Anytype, but does not give any “Best Practices” or “If you want to do this XYZ common case, this is how you do it”.
Apart from that, I do think functionality and “ux bugs” are the reason. The Anytype design/philosofy is what Anytype got right, with just a little gripes in my opinion (with the arrival of collections, sets should be advanced queries, and be functions, not items on the graph (see logseq’s live queries for an great example)).
Anytype’s design managed to avoid/solve a lot of cruft and legacy bad ideas on Notion/Obsidian/Logseq but, its very very hard to battle with obsidian’s product quality. On logseq, linking/“wikying”/querying is almost unbeatable.
I think @Curie 's videos are what Anytype needs to do, tutorials to do something. Other than that, until Anytype 1.0 or even 1.1/2 with lots of UX fixing, Anytype just has to accept that most users will revert to massive and estabilished solutions.
I know for me, I bounced around through a lot of programs in testing for a few months as they developed. It’s difficult when a few programs have major features one is missing but that one is missing major features that the other one might be missing.
Ultimately a program like this is supposed to help you, simplify your workflow, and help facilitate new ideas. But it is an investment of your time and energy to do the sort of initial setup.
I loved Anytype out of the gate but I didn’t know if I was immediately ready to make that commitment as a daily use thing when some of the key features I was hoping for were not there yet.
I would agree with Jewlz one of my biggest immediate gripes with Anytype as a new user was the preloaded stuff. It is useful as a demo but after that, it was just in the way making things more confusing. Now that we have multiple spaces maybe having the option for a user to start with a blank slate.
I’m completely new to Anytype and to this forum. So: Hi and thanks to anyone who has contributed to this project!
I wanted to share one small suggestion:
I downloaded the app, opened it, clicked “Join” and then wondered why the app said “synced” even though I thought the standard was local-only. I could not find where to change this.
Luckily, I found @Curie 's video here: Video - Anytype inital setup for local-only offline
… which told me where to change this setting and that I had to logout before doing so.
Maybe a few sentences about the gear icon she shows in the video would be helpful in the documentation (here: Setting Up Your Account | English | Anytype Docs ). I hadn’t noticed that icon before seeing it in the video.
This is the plan actually, the default state for Anytype will be Local-Only Mode. FYI, in this local (network) mode, Objects are still synced between the devices on your local network via P2P.
