We stopped describing Fliply and started running it
The new Fliply onboarding doesn't summarize what the app does. It lets you do it — flashcards flip, a quiz plays out, and the illustrations react to what you tap.
The old Fliply onboarding was clean. Five screens, sparse layouts, every question with a clear CTA. Welcome. Here's the structure. Why are you learning Chinese? Pick a goal. Pay now. By the time you reached the dashboard you'd been told what Fliply does — but you hadn't actually seen it work. The first flashcard that moved was after you signed up.
So we rebuilt it around the opposite instinct. Stop describing the product. Run it inside the onboarding.
A few specific things changed:
- The flashcards animate on screen two. A live card stack flips through thank you / 谢谢你的帮助 with the audio cue active. You can see how a card behaves before you've been asked to commit to anything.
- There's a quiz, mid-onboarding. Screen three plays a short demo — hello → 谢谢 / 你好 / 再见 — showing the prompt, the options, the right answer locking in. You haven't taken a quiz yet, but you've seen exactly what taking one looks like.
- The illustrations respond to what you tap. Pick Travel as your reason for learning, the illustration shifts. Conversation gives you a different one. The page isn't a static form; it reacts.
- Daily goal got identity. The old version offered 5 / 10 / 15 as pill buttons. The new version names them: Casual (5), Regular (10), Serious (15), Intense (20). The number does less work; the label does more. People pick the version of themselves they want to be, not a quantity they want to commit to.
The thread under all of these is the same one: stop summarizing the product, let the user touch it.
We refreshed the App Store screenshots the same week, and the shift turned out to be the same one. The old set was a feature list — Word decks for all levels, Multiple ways to master every word, Smart Review Scheduling — phones angled, bright orange, uniform layout. The new set leads with positioning ("Chinese, simplified.") and a five-star testimonial, then narrates a journey across the rest: level by level → flashcards that work for you → learn, review, and test yourself → hit milestones → write what you learn. The information density is roughly the same. The new set is telling a story; the old set was reciting features.
Whether the new flow lifts activation is something we'll know in a few weeks. The thing we already know is that it's the version we'd demo to a friend. That used to not be true.