At Dots, we're constantly thinking about how to create the best experiences for Discord communities. This is something we brainstorm about on a daily basis.
Over the last couple of months, we’ve been reviewing a bunch of onboarding flows over on Twitter - highlighting what works and what doesn’t.
We’ve come to realize that the best flows focus on fundamental building blocks or what we’d like to call the ABCs of a great onboarding flow.
Join us in this article as we cover these ABCs, focusing on Scrimba’s welcoming process - a flow which they have built in house. We're big fans of what they've done here. So, take notes - as this is one of the more thoughtful flows out there.
If you’re unfamiliar with Scrimba - it is an interactive learning platform for front-end developers. They combine the best teachers with a custom-made interactive video format. Almost like pair programming with the teacher.
They have a very active discord server with over 30,000 members and more joining every day.
Add the personal touch
Right off the bat, the new member has a private onboarding channel created specifically for them through their custom bot. This sets a conversational one-on-one approach vs the broadcast nature of a single onboarding\welcome channel for everyone.
The conversational approach is further reinforced with a pleasant introduction and asking the user for their first name. It also saves the first name as the new server nickname for the user.
Finally, there’s a clear motivation outlined for the new user - finishing the onboarding process allows access to the rest of the channels.
Brevity: Sometimes less is more
A lot of onboarding flows at this stage present huge walls of text to the user - either in the form of community rules and guidelines, or very detailed channel guides.
Scrimba’s onboarding flow resists this urge and instead opts for a simple message that covers both in the space of a couple of paragraphs.
It also has a separate channel with detailed rules and guideline for the users who want to know more.
Our only nitpick here is that, this information is presented through a DM (Direct message). This is problematic as it takes the user out of the flow (more about why you don’t want to do this in our pitfalls article), or they might miss it completely by having it turned off in settings.
Focus on what’s most important - building your Community!
As the first step in a members Discord journey, onboarding sets the stage for how a member will interact with the community going forward (or if done poorly, how they either lurk or quit entirely).
Along with the helpful channel information mentioned above, the onboarding thread also has a short overview video on how the Discord community works and how to get the most out of the experience.
Additionally, a member’s discord account is also linked back to their Scrimba account. This acts as a valuable step in redirecting traffic back to the main site, especially for users who haven’t signed up yet.
This was a great example that their team built in house. If you are interested in a welcome bot like this in your discord without the hassle or extra resource investment into , you can join our discord to get access to our product which is a no code bot builder.
