Why most product tours get skipped | Hacker News Reader

Why most product tours get skipped

productonboarding.com

208 pointspancomplex176 comments

It's pretty simple to understand - when a user opens a tool, it's because they want to do the thing that tool does, now.

If someone opens my videoconferencing product 98% of the time it's they've got a scheduled call to join within the next 20 seconds. They're not going to be late for their meeting so they can read my release notes.

If someone opens my PDF viewer, 99.9% chance they want to view the PDF they just opened. Very rare someone opens the PDF reader because they're just having a look around to see if there are any interesting new features.

If someone opens my virtual whiteboard product, 95% chance they're in some sort of sprint review meeting and they want to write some virtual post-it notes right now. A tour isn't what they need.

If someone opens the ticket management product, or the expense report filing product, or the music playing product... you get the picture.

100% - that's why it's so confusing why PMs/PMMs think they need to keep adding these to their products.

> so confusing why PMs/PMMs

Because their goal metric is number of tasks closed/features delivered (and this counts as one), not customers satisfied.

Plus, social parroting - a misconception that if it's popular and everyone does it it "can't be wrong".

Thats true for point solutions. You often dont find a guided product tour there.

Guided tour does have its place where the product is a workflow, a platform offering, has bunch of features and you want to introduce the feature to them.

If you are paying 10-25k USD per year, you expect some onboarding specialist who gives instructions on integrating ACH and payroll systems etc. It is very common for non-technical folk to hop on a onboarding call.

People often try to automate that as it is expensive, but i think people prefer that human touch esp. when you are paying alot of money.

Actually I get interrupted by a tour or popup when using a "point solution" all the time.

Right. It's self-indulgence by product managers and/or designers who think users are as interested in the software as they are.

Worse yet, sometimes these tours seem to be a band-aid for an unintuitive UX. If usability was the priority, I'd discover new features on my own.

Also because generally in those cases you don't really want a guided tour of the whole product, you have a problem you want solving and you would like to see how to solve that problem with the product. Which either talking to a person who knows the product or reading through some documentation/guides does, but a guided tour generally does not (or at least does not do efficiently).

Or at the very least, at the price we're talking here, companies should be hiring a trainer who knows the product well, who can actually teach people and answer questions. not go through this, go through that, clicking that: half the things are not useful to their particular problems and shouldn't be taught at all to this group.

Too much of modern consumer-facing software think they're the ends, not the means.

this is so true and I think it's very instructive to have a regular look through this lens when thinking about building something.

You've got to think and care deeply about what you're creating while at the same time understanding it's of approximately zero interest to those who you're building for outside certain key moments of interaction. Try to just nail those as much as possible and beyond that, get out of the way.

I think this is the core of good design, that things make sense, are nice, and well explained to the point they are even fun to discover and explore when you care to go looking for them. If you don't care to, they're invisible and out of your way.

But but but … how else will we turn a minor value add into a sticky source of recurring revenue? After all, there are no other profitable business models.

It’s the hyper focusing on metrics. When a new feature comes out, the product people and managers are obsessing over the usage metrics for that one feature.

It’s why Windows feels like multiple different companies desperate for your attention, with internal adverts begging you to look at their new feature. Because that team needs people using it to look good on the analytics.

Vs a company like Apple which seems to operate at a higher level, they don’t care if you use iMovie or not, it’s there if you want it but they aren’t going to push every individual feature on you.

Apple has plenty examples of that behaviour as well.

To name one: if you ever connect any headphones with media controls and you accidentally press one of them while no media is playing, it will open up Apple Music. Its convoluted to stop that behaviour.

Its not as bad as Microslop but it does exist.

Yes, Microsoft suffers from schizophrenic management, it is easier for externals to talk between teams than internal teams themselves, there are quite a few stories on the matter.

Apple really doesn't care how apps are used, Radar issues go untouched for several releases.

EDIT: missing "management".

That, and they forget they’re just one single experience in a person’s day of hundreds. The trivial part of the user’s day that the app represents, in no way warrants interruption.

Most of their managers want to be a bigger percentage of your day though.

My kids’ school uses a web portal to add money to their lunch accounts. My only task when I open this website is to pick an amount and click submit and give them my money.

Whose idea was it to show me a “what’s new” popup of all the jira tickets they closed in the last sprint?

What’s new? Nothing is new. It works just like it used to. Just take my money and leave me alone, please.

But if you have (through whatever process) sent them a complaint that, say, "it doesn't work right using Firefox X.Y running on Windows 7", then those release notes might in fact be interesting to you. So there actually is a reason for you to be able to see them. Not for them to get in your way, though. 99% of the people won't care.

99% won’t care, and 59% will find the what’s-new popup actively confusing, distracting, and hostile. Bad trade.

No it won't because you're either going to already be using some other browser and you won't care or you'll be once again trying Firefox X.Y and you'll discover it does work.

Often I see that there's a new feature, and I'm interested in it, but my options are do the demo now, or hide it. But I want to do it later! I'm admittedly terrible at operating GUIs, so maybe it's just a me issue

I want that too. Most of these tours interfere. A pattern I like is just a little dot indicator where the new thing is. It's not in the way. But if I click the dot, or it's menu item, then I see the tour.

Don't get in my face when I'm trying to get task done. Ain't nobody got time for that!

Perhaps I can interest you in the Firefox Mobile option: put a blue pip on the three dot menu and the "What's New" item that will never go away until you click on it.

I agree this is the silliest part! Even if you are interested in them, the only option is often now or never again. Even worse sometimes you open an app/site and the onboarding/what's new pops up with a delay and you end up accidentally dismissing it without even seeing what it was

New users are probably the only ones who really need guided product tours. If I'm a longtime existing user I'm far less likely to be interested in a guided tour.

Even then, a new user account doesn't necessarily mean a new user.

Every time I start on a new job, I have to click through Slack's, Github's and many other dev tools' stupid guided tours for the hundredth time

If your usability is good, you don't need a guided tour even as a new user because you can just figure out as a new user how it's supposed to work and get your job done. Guided tours and documentation should be limited to expert features that only a very rare subset of people need. The things everyone does should be obviously easy to use right away and so no helping or tour is needed.

I've never liked those "focus hijacking guided tours" and never really followed through any such onboarding process.

But they are so common, i don't know who designs them and makes me feel like 5yo.

You gotta understand, people will use the product you made, in a way that makes sense to them, not according to your devised "one way". And that's fine because it allows user to own his workflow using your product.

I like the "checklist" and "load sample data" approach better.

This is primary reason perhaps why my apps are growing fast.

>> But they are so common, i don't know who designs them and makes me feel like 5yo.

Often these are the product managers building follow-on features that don't get the usage they want. Users aren't using them, but monthly usage is the currency of so much PM work that they have to try to draw attention to it.

It's a race to the bottom, for any tool out there the negative reviews boil down to complexity. If not: no instruction.

Some people don't know how to operate a TV remote controller, unless it has 1 or 2 buttons.

It's protection against the frustration that a few experience: ultimately unable to use a thing or jam it. At the expense of the majority bugged by mild distraction.

I think if I'm honest, I don't deeply know everything about most of the products that I use. And if I were to dive deeply, I would spend all my time learning products than doing anything with them.

For me it is not a mild distraction. If it was one product it would be easier to take it in stride but I literally close hundreds of modal dialogs that never should have opened in the first place every day.

Final fantasy 7, released in 1997 had one. That’s the earliest I remember

I don't like the focus-hijacking things because it tends to obscure the parts of the UI that you will have to deal with in the next experience. You are given an accelerated tour that does not match the muscle-memory that you will need when you actually use it.

Raising the visibility of something, or pointing an arrow at it is fine, but don't dim and block the rest of the UI immediately because I might need it for context to understand what the hell you want me to click next and why. If I can't do that, then it's just a forced speedrun of 20 steps that I will immediately forget.

It feels like many of these forgot that the point is to teach for the future, not to boost extremely short term interaction metrics. Showing (much less a single time) is not usually enough to teach, you need to establish context so they understand why instead of just what, and generally offer repetition.

UI/UX design is a dead art. Probably because it costs money and requires actual thought.

It feels like vendors just tack on the first thing that pops into their head. How do we tell users about the new feature? Pop-up dialog! That should work.

> But they are so common, i don't know who designs them and makes me feel like 5yo.

The great secret of the industry is that it's mostly run by clueless incompetents. And their only strategy is to copy from every other product because they don't have original ideas or enough conviction to lead in a new direction. They just want to show up, punch thier timecard and go home, so we get the laziest suite of product implementation possible.

The left-hand side of the customer base bell curve gets more attention because they call and email the most.

If you design for the most competent users, there's no metric for that.

If you design for the least competent users, customer support metrics get better.

Exactly. These guided tours should be triggered by users, and never automatically. For example old school Windows apps have a question mark button on their title bar that the user can click to activate help for any UI element.

Unfortunately, even by the time old school, Windows was doing help, documentation was afterthought and usually worthless.

I 100% agree that no one uses your product to watch a walk-through, they’re there to do a job. The author primarily talks about new user onboarding.

While they do make the point about introducing new features, they don’t address how to make an interrupt-driven announcement successful with existing users.

Has anyone seen a good way to make ongoing update announcements

Linear has an in-app changelog in the bottom right that doesn’t get in the way of work. It’s synced with their changelog on the website and can be revisited anytime clicking the help menu icon. Pretty elegant.

You can just have a bell icon that displays a little red (1) so the users know that they have a message/notification that they can, but don't have to, read.

Another reason why I often skip them is that for "tech" products, the tours almost never cover how I want to use the product. Instead, they tell me how the vendor wants me to use the product.

Browsers are especially notorious for this. When I get a tour for a new feature, it's almost always just some new, tacked-on junk to disable. "Check out our bundled VPN", "Use Copilot to shop for socks", "You now have more privacy choices" (meaning we opted you into some invasive data-collection feature). I just want to browse the internet.

Well, exactly. How are the KPIs on the new feature they shipped going to meet target unless they add a user nudge toward desirable behavior?

Yep. And ironically, the most complex software I use - IntelliJ and davinci resolve - don’t have any onboarding at all. They’re great! The makers of resolve have some excellent video tutorials on their website and a manual that is many hundreds of pages long. But it’s up to you to search that stuff out.

agree with your points, but damn, resolve has some strange UI patterns / key combos etc compared to other software i've used.

maybe if you're a video editor coming from years within the field, the metaphors make sense? for me, having mostly done audio stuff, it was a bit of a journey.

i dont think an onboarding thing would be the solution, though

If you haven't done it, I really recommend the official resolve training:

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/tra...

The UI patterns make a lot more sense after watching the people who designed it explain how it works, how to use it and why it was designed that way.

Yeah instead of making some crappy onboarding tour, the time is better spent improving usability/discoverability of features.

So many programs still don't have a feature where yoy can just search for the menu option you need rather than going through 10 menus.

Microsoft is terrible for this in general. Every windows setup involves microsoft accounts and asking you to setup multiple rubbish SaaS like onedrive.

Literally! An example of a product that does it well is the game company Puzzmo. They don’t force you to read instructions. They actually minimize them and let you “figure it out”. They’re there if you want them but most ppl just want to play so you can do that too.

100% this.

If you want to offer a product tour, then offer it as a small dismissible notification-thing in the corner of the normal UI. Otherwise you run into this situation while also constantly being annoying to everyone who has used your product before.

Product tours and tutorial wizards and all those educational experiences can be excellent, but they must not get in the way. Visible is fine, interruptive is not.

Interestingly, there are basically two kinds of programs I am sometimes happy to see guided tours embedded in:

* Creation programs (image/video editors, 3D rendering... hell, even a slides program or an IDE). Doesn't mean I won't dismiss them sometimes anyways, but these are tools that often I do want to get an initial idea how to use, that I have allotted some time to play around with, and that are sufficiently complex that a tutorial is justified. These are also places were I can spend 2-5 minutes learning the basics of the tool, because whatever I am about to do with it is going to take the next few hours anyways.

* Videogames (i.e. the tutorial). For very similar reasons to the above ;)

Also, this is always on first install. Getting a tutorial on update for an authoring tool (and to a lesser extent a game) is far less likely to be welcome.

So the types of programs you usually bring time to exploratively use anyways.

> * Videogames (i.e. the tutorial). For very similar reasons to the above ;)

Oftentimes it's less jarring to have an invisible tutorial though (a level made to exploit the new gameplay element / feature). But it depends on what you want the user to learn and the type of videogame; I don't mind a guided tour in more strategic games (RTS, turn by turn RPG, ...).

Videogame tutorials also used to mostly suck. But in the last two decades they recognized the issues, and there's a lot of knowledge sharing in the industry

If you want to learn how to better teach new users about your product, GDC talks about video game tutorials are one of the best resource you can find

Just watched someone play Half-Life (the original). Its tutorial is better than a lot of tutorials today.

Onboarding is such a big thing in games. A lot of times I have a few minutes to play and I play a pickup game of Beat Saber or maybe a round of Dynasty Warriors because I can just pick up the controller in play. A lot of games stay in my backlog because I don't want to spend a few hours watching cutscenes and playing through tutorials just to know if I like the game or not.

Hard disagree - at least tutorials used to be skippable and/or short. Now you're more likely get an extended tutorial-like section at the start of the game that is just tediously boring if you have half a brain cell. Like Half-Life mentioned in the sibling, the tutorial is a separate mini-campaign you don't have to start before the main campaign - which doesn't actually need any tutorial if you have played an FPS before.

For most games I don't actually want a tutorial at all. If there is something not entirely obvious then I'd much prefer a reference sheet I can pull up when I actually want to do that thing.

That's a bit like saying all CGI is bad: the bad instances are the ones you remember most vividly, the best instances are the ones you never noticed.

In my opinion, the best tutorial in any game I've ever played was Portal (yes, also 19 years old, not a good case for "tutorials were terrible back then"). Portal has 19 levels of tutorial (the test chambers) which gradually introduce mechanics with Glados as your sarcastic guide, and five levels outside the tutorial (escape and destroying Glados) where you use what you learned

Meanwhile the colony sim genre has mostly arrived at the checklist style: you get a checklist of things that would be useful to do, and when you complete them you get a new checklist. But you are free to just ignore it and do something else. Captain of Industry or Timberborn come to mind

In the FPS genre Titanfall 2 had a pretty nice tutorial in the campaign that ended in a timed obstacle course

Please ignore my notif to onboard you on my misadventure of clicking the "555 Timer turns 55" frontpage news only to read through the end of your comment convinced I have to read it again to resolve this uncanny alt world where the 555 timer only works paired with its bt app like some anova sous vide pump

This is true but not always.

Sometimes people would have enough time for a product tour and still skip it because no one wants to be forced to do anything.

Wanna see what you can with this after the call - click [Take me to my Call- schedule a tour]. Tour only targets for power users and helping them. Shortcuts etc.

Actually, this reminds me of an anti-patten I often see on websites, after they've bombarded me with cookie banners and this that and the other, you get to read about 1 paragraph of whatever it is on the page and a few seconds later a "why don't you subscribe" dialog pops up. I don't think I've ever not once just immediately cancelled and decided then and there that I will never be subscribing to whatever it is. I've not even been given a chance to read the article yet, how am I supposed to know if the quality is worth me subscribing? All I've learned so far is that the website author doesn't value my time.

I get irritated by Zoom saying I need to update right when I open the app and want to join a call. Or even worse, sometimes I'll have had the app open (checking video and sound) and it won't notify about a required update until I actually go to join a call.

Never understood why they don't propose the update when the call has ended.

Bitwarden also does this, with a big modal popup - and I only use my password manager in the middle of a flow. I'm either in the middle of signing up for some thing to accomplish a goal (like checking out on a website), or logging in to something to do the same.

I'd much rather it prompt on app close (when I don't care how long the update will take), or just have a button in the UI that I can click at my leisure.

Alongside page 3 of the Google search results, 30 seconds in on a product tour is a great place to hide a body. Friend of mine has got rid of at least three annoying coworkers that way.

Go on…

> If someone opens my videoconferencing product 98% of the time it's they've got a scheduled call to join within the next 20 seconds. They're not going to be late for their meeting so they can read my release notes.

I'd go even further. If someone opens your product, they don't care about anything in your release notes as long as they are still able to join the call. Not only does nobody care about the new background effects etc. right then, they probably don't care about them at all. Maybe if someone discovers the feature and uses it, they might hunt around for it before the next meeting, but probably by the time that meeting comes around they'll be busy then as well.

More generally, most people don't care about 90% of the features of a product, just that it lets them do the one thing they need it to do, as soon as possible. If it isn't obvious how to do that one thing, making that obvious is more important than a product tour explaining it.

Even more likely: if someone's opens your product your last update probably broke their workflow. They don't need to read your release notes to know this

I think notifications after updates make more sense. You already know the software, and you are informed of some new feature that you may or may not care about. How else can a user be informed about a new feature else? Even if I do not care about the majority of features added, there is still occasionally one that I may want to use.

I often read such notes/product tours in software I already use/know, and in contrast I find it a bit stupid when they add some feature and they do not tell the users. It should not be obstructing, though. I would say the updating itself breaks the workflow more than a pop-up window or sth.

> It's pretty simple to understand - when a user opens a tool, it's because they want to do the thing that tool does, now.

Yes and this also applies to other things like videos.

I'd be curious what others think about this:

If you see a video on YouTube and choose to click it, you as the viewer already know the title of the video and have seen the thumbnail. Those things together gave you enough detail to be interested.

The first 15 seconds of the video probably doesn't need to repeat what you already know.

But on the other hand, outlining what you're about to see in the video doesn't seem like a bad idea so folks know what they're getting into.

As someone who has made hundreds of videos and have seen thousands, whenever I hear someone explain what I already know I'm immediately put into a state of "cool story, give me the information I clicked to see".

Does anyone else feel the same?

There's a workaround for this problem on PC, just in case you're not aware of it. Just press "2" or "3" to skip forward to 20 or 30 percent, which just usually long enough for the filler. And if not, you use "j" or "l" to skip forward or backwards in 10-second increments.

> The first 15 seconds of the video probably doesn't need to repeat what you already know.

Consider looking at how Mr. Beast does it. He explains in detail in https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6623b7720b009050313e701c/...

WRT to me: The first 15-45 seconds of a video need to convince me to keep watching. There's more videos on YouTube that I want to watch than I have time to watch, and that 15 second summary is how I decide to keep watching or move on to something else.

> The first 15 seconds of the video probably doesn't need to repeat what you already know.

Ah, the Wadsworth Constant: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-wadsworth-constant

People also don't like to hear to "like & subscribe" but it's just what YouTube incentivizes. At the end of the day these decisions and incentives are formed around what makes viewers do the most total viewing on the platform, which (perhaps unintuitively) is not the same as making the viewing experience ideal.

For the individual, consider the extension SponsorBlock. Despite the name, it can be hsed to block more than sponsored segments (and blocking sponsored segments is a configurable option if you like them for some reason. There are several "filler" categories you can choose from and it'll auto skip the exact e.g. intro length rather than needing to guess 100% of the time

I think that you underestimate the portion of people just letting Youtube play videos in a continuous flow. They are doing the dishes, sewing, folding clothes, watching the entrance of the building... Stating the subject of the video makes a lot of sense for them.

I use DeArrow to remove clickbait titles and thumbnails, so indeed, I don't need that information to be repeated. I don't mind a few seconds at the beginning, what I hate is the person rambling about why they didn't post the day before and what not. That time multiplied by the number of viewers makes me wanna cry.

I was looking for something to use for documentation recently.

Every dang tour wanted to show me their endless litany of features, often leaning into enterprise stuff. So much so that it didn't involve a chance to actually use the tool for what I wanted.

I just wanted to try documenting something and seeing how fast and easy it was but every form of a tour wanted to side track me.

Notably, this applies to the "product tour" a lot of products want to give you when they've added new features and I find this particularly obnoxious, especially with Adobe tools.

Like a lot of times when I am using Lightroom I just shot 3000 photos at a sports game and feel under the gun to select a few out and develop them or I am using Acrobat to handle some stressful paperwork which is late. I close 100s if not 1000s of modal dialogs that never should have been opened every day and just don't need another one.

It's bad from the viewpoint of Adobe because I wind up dismissing these messages out of hand.

Adobe wants me to see the value I am getting from my Creative Cloud subscription, like I am likely to keep paying for it if I enjoy more features in more of the products. Like lately I discovered Adobe Fonts is great: like I find looking for free fonts is the most depressing thing in web development and graphic design, I can spend hours looking at fonts and making comps and thinking "I can't stand that 'k'". Adobe Fonts on the other hand has quality fonts that are well organized and often I can put in 15 minutes and walk out with something that works so well with my brand that if I want to set stuff in that font with Pillow of course I am going to plunk down $90 and buy it -- I don't feel bad at all that the fonts are tied to Adobe tools and my CC subscription.

In terms of execution you just expect something like this to be crap. The integration of Adobe Fonts into Photoshop is broken: it can lock Photoshop hard and force you to kill the process. On the other hand it works great with Illustrator. Marketing-driven development always seems to have a lack of empathy and attention to quality that in the end is self-defeating.

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Lately I've gotten hooked on the mobile games Arknights which has extensive lore, too many game modes to count and very complex mechanics and hundreds of characters who have unique abilities (e.g. even the "trash" 3-star characters usually have something special about them and are designed to make teams that punch above their weight)

Arknights gamifies learning the game and engaging with the mechanics by offering daily, weekly, and campaign rewards for taking actions, completing levels, developing characters, etc. This is part of a number of mechanisms that gradually get you up to speed on the game mechanics, reveal the world, etc. These kind of mechanisms, used gently, could work for applications software.

But I think timing is everything. One of the most annoying people in downtown Ithaca is a panhandler who comes up from behind and starts demanding money or the bandanna off your head, he doesn't bother to make eye contact, he doesn't look to see if you're receptive or for a moment when you might be open, he just makes demands and gets angry when you deny or ignore him. I give money to panhandlers quite often if they engage me person-to-person and are agreeable but this guy is like so much application software today.

I never understood why there is no interactive Help program like there was in the "old days" when CHM files on Windows 95/98/XP were a thing. These CHM files and the interactiveness are heavily underrated, and they were some really good documentation, especially the ones from IDEs and compiler suites.

Today I wish there was something like this but made for tutorials and wizards. If someone presses "Help" they should not have to go online on your website just to literally never find any help for their problems.

We are in the golden age of LLMs, yet nobody uses LLMs to explore and discover locally hosted knowledge bases ... which are in my opinion the single most useful use case of them. You could build such a great UX with it.

For example, I'm selfhosting a lot of archived wikis via a kiwix server. Devdocs, wikipedia, dev and cyber related wikis. Having an LLM assistant running on those locally was probably the best improvement for my learning experience. And the workflow is integrated into my custom New Tab page, it's literally a search field on my homepage of the browser, so it's always accessible.

This is a bit of a tangent, but cookie consent dialogs have exhausted my will to navigate anything blocking the content I care about. If I go to a new website and encounter any sort of popup, modal, or large banner, I will reflexively feel an urge to close the page unless there is an obvious dismiss button. I often need to see the content on the page and resign myself to navigating the dialog, but just as often I decide the content wasn't important anyways and close the page in <1 second.

I got around this by not using cookies.

cookies, newsletter popups, sign-in popups, product tours, soft paywalls, etc.

doesn't this affect auth on, like, every website you visit? (genuinely curious)

You don't need a cookie banner for auth cookies. You only need consent (aka the banner) for 3rd party cookies and tracking cookies.

Cookies that are strictly necessary for the functionality (auth, user preferences, shopping cart, etc...) of the site don't need user consent.

Yeah, cookie banners, newsletter signups, “please disable your adblocker”, etc are the ultimate “hmm maybe I’ll just do something else” reality check for me.

Not only do I close the page but I typically lose interest in whatever I may have wanted to do on that page in the first place, and generally just put my phone down or close my laptop and do something else.

The web basically died several years ago for me. It was fun while it lasted.

> “please disable your adblocker”

"We noticed you're using an ad blocker"

Well I noticed you're running 10+ different trackers.

The leftmost icon on my browser toolbar is the "kill sticky" bookmarklet (https://github.com/t-mart/kill-sticky). I grew tired of sites hiding the dismiss buttons or omitting them entirely, so anytime something pops up on the page, I instinctively click that. Works on the vast majority of sites.

UBO zapper mode works well

That requires deciding which element to zap, which takes more brainpower than I'm willing to invest into a webpage that doesn't want to show me its content. Ctrl+W works every time.

Are you in Europe? It's so prevalent here that would usually mean not using the web at all...?

I've also noticed blocking consent/informational banners of sorts when connected to a US VPN becoming more popular

It's worth noting that the "obvious dismiss button" that OP allows for is a legal requirement. By law rejecting cookies has to be just as easy as accepting them

Of course in reality enforcement of this is non-existent. Just yesterday I had an especially egregious popup where dismissing it required about 7 button presses (selecting "other options", then manually toggling on 5 categories of use before I was allowed to click "save settings")

> It's worth noting that the "obvious dismiss button" ... is a legal requirement

> Of course in reality enforcement of this is non-existent

Indeed that was of course worth noting

I feel the exact same way about tutorials in games that try and be comprehensive and show you everything.

Incremental games do an amazing job at this (things like Universal Paperclips, A Dark Room, etc); parts of the game are revealed to you as you need them and it's often a fun surprise. I don't think the same thing is directly applicable to productivity apps, but I wonder if something could be taken from the pattern.

This is timely -- I'm coding an app at the moment and had the fleeting thought that "hey I should do a new user onboarding tour thingy" and then remembered that in general I skip them, so I havne't made one :)

> I feel the exact same way about tutorials in games that try and be comprehensive and show you everything.

For those an ingame encyclopedia and/or external wiki is a much better solution.

Personally, I generally dislike product tours.

On the other hand, I think it's interesting to compare the dislike in these comments (and elsewhere) to "RTFM" culture. What's the primary difference? That you can read the manual or use the product at your discretion? e.g. `ls` doesn't forcefully open the man page when you run it for the first time?

(I'm aware of the goomba fallacy and that these are likely two different groups of people - I still think it's interesting!)

The difference is TFM doesn’t pop up in my face without me asking for it while I’m trying to do something basic.

Yeah product tour is like a popup or cookie banner you just wanna close that shit down. It is something that seems like a good idea and maybe even required for polish, like a 3 column pricing page and an oauth login, but think we are better off without it.

Instead add the killer feature: a feature search box ala Google Docs.

You nailed the primary difference. If I want to just use the tool I can do that; if I need to learn how to use a complex feature, I can consult the help or do a web search for a how to.

That works if you know the feature exists.

That's why UIs that don't bury everything behind inscrutable squiggles and modals are great.

First thing I do in a new app or new web service is click all the stuff, try and get a lay of the land and understand the UI metaphors. It's much harder to do if there is a twee, condescending guided tour "hyuck hey there champ didja know the gear icon that says Settings next to it is where you can change some settings?" stopping me from doing that, and names hidden behind hover popovers and crappy monochrome SVGs of....shapes to serve as icons.

I am very unlikely to need every part of every tool, app, or service I use. I need to do one thing with it right away, and I need to find my way there and experiment to see how it works. I don't give a shit if I can have it waft my farts if I'm trying to compress a gif or something, the fart-wafter button just needs to be clear so at a time when I go "huh what does this do" I can figure it out non-destructively to see if I'm interested. If you need a big popup saying "We just added the Fart-Wafter! Want to know how to find it?", you've failed, utterly.

The best software help used to have a complete list of all features, with comprehensive explanations of all of them.

There are actually two different sites to the best help. There's that list of features and a comprehensive explanation of how to use them, of course.

The other side though is sometimes even more important it's what this thing does as a high-level introduction so you can understand all the things you're supposed to be able to do depending on the software this is some sometimes not obvious and that explanation can be really helpful to understand all the things you're supposed to be able to do and thus plan to use all those features.

I actually went through the Word 97 menus at some point to see what features it had. Unfortunately these days things no longer come with comprehensive menu bars.

Having some basic curiosity about the capabilities of your tools helps.

The dislike stems from two (and a half) reasons:

1) Push vs pull. As you identified, ls doesn't stop you from doing the thing you wanted to push the man page on you when you don't need/want it. ls just does the thing you ask. man also just does the thing you ask. The product tour is a sign that the developer doesn't understand consent and is trying to get the user to do what the developer wants, not what the user wants.

2) It's infantilizing. The product tour assumes the user doesn't know what they want, and doesn't know how to RTFM to learn how to do the thing they want to do. It treats the user as having no agency.

2.5) It's a tacit admission that TFM sucks and R-ing it isn't a productive use of your time.

Yeah, I can read about the parts that I want right now. If I open a video editor to splice two clips together, I don't need to know about input devices. If I want to do that, I can go read the manual for that at that time.

Plus, there's no way I'm going to remember whatever the tour tells me by that time anyway. To actually learn the product you need experience to lock in what the manual says

It’s the difference between taking a shower and getting caught out in the rain.

> That you can read the manual or use the product at your discretion? e.g. `ls` doesn't forcefully open the man page when you run it for the first time?

Correct, yes.

If only there was AFM to read these days.

Half the people here have probably read AWS documentation, and also immediately closed the guided tour on the AWS console.

Any kind of tour/nag tooltip on any app/site I use stays up forever, until they hopefully finally realize I am never going to interact with their cognitive-energy-wasting noise that should never have been shown to begin with. I've had the "try out dark mode" tooltip showing on JIRA for months. Just don't show these. Don't waste people's time. There are sites I close and never come back to because they start with an unskippable tutorial.

Just a couple examples offhand..

Discord (constant tooltips covering the screen to harass me to try "Nitro", or some new AI BS I am never going to even remotely consider trying)

Miro ("Sign in with Google" modal in the top right, "CANVAS 26" conference signup site stripe covering the top of the screen, frequent "What's new" modal covering the entire app, "How likely are you to recommend this product or service to a friend or co-worker?" net promoter score survey covering the bottom of the screen, which makes zero sense whatsoever as an enterprise user)

JIRA ("Try dark theme" tooltip covering the top right of the page)

Figma ("Reconnect with Community" tooltip covering some content on the left)

The thing is, nobody is ever going to feel bad that you've ignored their little feature. It'll just keep nagging you into the future until you dump the product. In spite of many saas products collecting data on every mouse movement and keystroke, perpetually, they seem to do nothing with that data.

Yeah, it depends. Some webapp vendors will actually look at metrics of interaction with those tooltips/tutorials, though I'm sure most don't. But yes, there are things I've had showing on the screen for months and months (like the "Try dark theme" which has been showing at the top right of JIRA since whenever they added that)...

If your product needs a tour your product is badly designed.

Imagine you walked into a convenience store and the owner was like "Hey you need to take the tour first!"

The best UI is no UI at all.

I can't think of a single time I've looked at a product tour and thought "well, I'm really glad they told me that, I never would have figured that out.

What the product tour I think often misses is that people don't want to learn your entire tool at one time.

They came to do one thing, that one thing needs to be brain dead simple.

Over time, you can show people what else they can do. But a product tour isn't the way to do that.

I think progressive UIs where you expose more and more to the user over time is the way to go.

If you're thinking "but I have so many features and capabilities this person needs" you probably haven't identified what the one thing people are paying you for is.

UI is like a joke. If it needs explaining, it's bad.

I don't know how you make even the simplest UI, unless it's a carbon copy of an existing one, then.

I chuckled cause the convenience/grocery store is laid out to make us find the high margin items and not what we need. They can't explain it to us otherwise we'd shop less.

That's why I like startup tips.

"Did you know that in California all gas stations are required to provide you with free air and water for your car?"

Isn't that exactly what IKEA does?

That sucks too

Imagine you'd never visited a convenience store. You might ask the clerk for something, or you might just pick up something and walk out.

I'd argue this is only true for B2C

My instinctive and immediate response to any popup is to hit "Esc" and if that doesn't make it go away I look for the "X" in the corner and failing that I'll nuke it with browser tools.

Popups are a great way to get your content ignored.

Instead of product tours I like how AWS has little info/help buttons that are placed right next to every informational/actionable element on their dashboard. Totally unobtrusive. If you want to understand something on the dashboard that is not obvious at first, you can click on the info/help button that opens a side panel with a lot more information about that particular element (and any associated topics). Most of the time, you just know what you are dealing with (or can guess what that particular topic might mean and you will probably be right).

Incredible that tooltips were killed because braindead """designers""" couldn't figure out how to make them work on mobile.

They'll be reintroduced under a new name in a decade or two with endless self-congratulation. Same as physical car controls.

Here's a solution off the top of my head: have a dedicate "info" button at the OS level. Holding the button disables normal interaction, highlights all inspectable elements, and allows you to click on each one for a description. Like "inspect element" in the browser.

> Here's a solution off the top of my head: have a dedicate "info" button at the OS level. Holding the button disables normal interaction, highlights all inspectable elements, and allows you to click on each one for a description. Like "inspect element" in the browser.

This is a really cool idea. Agreed! Wish something like this actually existed.

I'm fairly certain that exact thing existed on Windows XP and earlier. It was a question mark in the top right of the window, added a "?" next to your cursor. You could then click elements to see if there happened to be an explanation embedded in the program for that particular button/box/whatever. Didn't always work, but was useful when it was needed.

Wait, isn't that what Windows 3.1/95 did with the "What's this" button?

In the future they'll track your eyes and when you've been staring blankly for a second at something, it'll pop up a tooltip that you'll have to dismiss.

The other huge problem is you never tell the user what they'll get out of the tour. People will invest in a tour if they understand the reward (and "learning" can't be the reward).

I very much prefer a well-written product guide compared to a product tour. A guide does not interrupt me when I am trying to get work done. I can read it at a time that is convenient to me. I can bookmark it, revisit it and share it with others as well.

Every time some software tool displays one of those "helpful" messages - "We've reshuffled these features, so now they're hidden over here!" I get angry and dismiss the popups as quickly as possible.

I've got a task to accomplish, I wasn't just sitting around with nothing to do.

Imagine you get in your car to drive to work, and the dashboard displays a pop-up that tries to show you the latest feature. No!

Yeah plus 99% of the time those reshuffled features are extraneous shit I never cared about for a millisecond in the first place. "We moved Stickers over here!" ... that's nice, I'm here to make some software and had to open this horrible web app to look at a flow chart someone made.

I had the great fortune for a major steel company. They had regular "training day"s where basically there is an hour long session where the team showed what new capabilities and fixes the software got and perhaps more importantly collect real user feedback on what they thought.

Too bad I didn't get to work there for long but I loved their stance that everybody should personally make safety the first priority, not just because the company requires you to do so but because your safety really is your priority.

So yes, this was before 2014 but I still think these kind of "training" and feedback should be a two way street, not a series of next I have to press to get the software to shut up.

An alternative take on the section: “Why teams keep building tours anyway”.

Teams keep building product tours because the other option is to invest heavily in trial-and-error user research to optimize the onboarding experience. That is not only more expensive in terms of time and resources, but also requires greater alignment of priorities.

In my experience (I work in product design), introducing product tours is usually a band-aid for deeper UX problems.

Products with an excellent onboarding experience that goes beyond the “click next” pop-up tend to have an excellent user experience too, because they take the time to think about the usage story.

Yeah, as a former dev turned into PdM, if you need to do a tour, your are doing the UX wrong.

I just created (yesterday) a product tour I'm pretty proud of:

https://www.writelucid.cc

It's a writing reviewer app, and the landing page is the product. It's literally a document with a critique. You can write in it, use the editor, even delete the whole page.

I always skip tours, but I think this kind of thing (if your product can support it) is much better. Then again, this isn't so much a "you've logged in, now let us teach you how to use this product" as a "welcome, here's what this product does".

The sticky notes are a nice idea, but they should be aligned to the highlighted text they refer to.

Yeah but how, when there are other notes around?

Every moment (token?) spent interrupting a user to introduce a feature should instead be spent making the feature more intuitive instead.

This isn't that hard. Most of the time, the "changes" are useless UI Slop: "we've moved notifications to this TOTALLY BETTER OTHER SPOT IN THE SCREEN that one of our designers snuck a commit in with and nobody wanted to argue about it, because the last time it just came down to differing opinions. Its not really better but it's different!"

And the other reason is because most users probably have day jobs and need to get something done.

couldn't agree more - they always pop up at the right time. I don't know why every PM thinks they can save retention by spamming users :(

This has been in Apple's Human Interface Guidelines for *decades*. I believe only recently it became more open towards "onboarding", but not much further beyond "if you really must...".

Yet onboarding is the holy grail of corporate products (maybe coz it feels like powerpoint presentation of the whole product?) and the holy grail of marketing brainwashing - carefully composed sequences of known psychological tricks and manipulations to "convert" people.

P.S. I'm not sure these floating tasks lists are much better. They always feel like unnatural pressure into something you don't need to do, aka. hardsell again. I came to the product to solve my tasks, not yours.

i don't think it's an either/or or "best". highly dependent on industry and application. if you're application is complex no amount of "good ux" can replace a good overview/tour (watch people, they will go in click around to get the lay of the land then be confused usually).

after that its determining how people to digest info, some like docs (me), others want to sit thru a video, others NEED a person to guide them in person, some like tooltips, checklists, etc.

i'm not saying you need to litter your app with this stuff, but i don't think there is some magical UX pattern that always works.

The Product Manager needs to justify their job.

A good PM knows rejecting bad ideas is a big part of their job.

Your real job is making your manager's manager thinks you do something useful. This has no bearing on whether you actually do something useful.

I don't know if it's an Android thing or only a Samsung thing, but my phone displays colored dots over the buttons that led to some new functionality. The dots go away when I eventually push those buttons. If I follow the trail of dots I can discover what's new. It's quite unobtrusive but pushes me to look at those functionality and get rid of the dots. Sometimes I do it in 5 seconds, sometimes in 5 months, but it happens.

I've never in my life seen a useful product tour. They're always blatantly obvious like "THIS IS THE SEARCH BAR. USE IT TO FIND CONTENT ACROSS OUR PRODUCTS AND SERVICES."

The best UX is using obvious and standard design, plus a searchable menu / command palette.

Ime, the only useful product tours where in games, I. E., tutorials. This usually extends up to in-game hints at certain features like a characters ability. A lot of software can probably pull inspiration from there in regards to including hints with minimal interruption during usage (tooltips that are shown longer the first time you use something etc).

GTFO of my face with product tours.

Atlassian is particularly enraging, especially if you're dealing with setting up "new" accounts. I've worked with your shitware for a decade now, I know how it works, DO NOT FORCE ME TO MAKE TEN CLICKS TO GET RID OF A FUCKING INTRO.

Rather, invest your time into a good, logical UI and, most importantly, good AND CURRENT documentation.

tbh adblockers should just filter these out. I guess the reason they don't is it's "technically" the product ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

you can find filter lists that do for some sites

I have at least two different saas packages that I use regularly that fall into product tour mode frequently even though I have completed the tour and have been using the product for some time, logged in as the same user. The tour was usually not helpful in the beginning, especially when I was onboarded by a trainer. It's more frustrating that I can't make them go away for good.

I would expand this to "why most software notifications get skipped". Because they are in the interest of the vendor and get in my way! The amount of interruptions on a given day, be it in desktop software or saas products, is absolutely ridiculous. "What did you think about this feature ?". "Did you know you can use our AI agent ?".

Instead of spending time making product tour, add a info to each button or show the detail when user hover for 2 seconds. Most product miss that and I don't know what exactly the button does until I click on it. I don't know what "hide" and "past" does in HN even after being here for years.

All of the comments & discussions about this kind of stuff makes me wonder if computer keyboards should bring back the "F1: Help" button, for absolute newbies or obtuse software.

but this time, make apps actually respect it :)

Or better: tie it to an OS-level screen-reader AI that explains what's what's on the spot.

In some countries engineers wear a ring on their pinky to remind them of their obligation to ethics, safety and humility in engineering practice.

In the US engineers don't get that ring and they implement product tours.

Sure it may be the engineers implementing product tours, but I don't think they're the ones pushing for them.

I'm only familiar with 2 countries where this is a thing, and the US is one of them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineer%27s_Ring

(FWIW, I'm not aware of any country where it's common for software folks to wear one)

I think it can be summarized: Don’t push a map on an explorer, they wanted to explorer, a map is not what they are looking for.

It’s a great article, thanks!

Something similar that annoys me for the same reason is the "there is an update! update now?" popups you get on launch. I want to use the product right now, not wait for it to update before I use it. I wonder if it would be better to get those popups when you try to close the product, it'll say "there's an update available. Do you want to update, or just close right now?". Then it's not getting in your way when you're trying to use it. Or the steam method of just updating things when you're not using them, though that does require a separate launcher program

I swear, if you haven't opened an app for a week there will be some such popup you have to close.

Because most often their real purpose is to stand out in a powerpoint presentation.

For those who think this is something new: TeachEmacsTutorial.

These tours are like the tutorial bit in a video game where the game wants to show you a new mechanic so it comes to a dead stop, and then your character is whisked off to an alternate dimension consisting of a bare room covered in Holodeck grid lines, completely empty except for a few tomato-can enemies. A dialog pops up explaining the mechanic, optionally with a video demonstrating it, which you must then dismiss; and the game will not continue until you take out the enemies using the technique shown in the dialog.

I HATE that. Let me play with the toolset you give me "in the field". Don't interrupt my fucking game/workflow to show me the feature of the moment YOU want me to use right now. (For applications software in 2026, this is likely to be some stupid AI integration.)

Don't build a product tour. It is useless friction. Instead, build your UI to be good,simple, obvious. That's it. That's the tweet.

Good UIs are self explaining.

Honestly makes sense. For our app there are different actions a user might want to take first so having a checklist instead of forcing an order is better.

Why most GDPR cookie consents get randomly clicked away

Why most ads on Youtube gets get skipped

etc etc

> If they cannot find it in about thirty seconds, they leave.

Sorry but in many startup cases it's by design. See: got a KPI increase (email is collected), but as the user left there's no AWS resource usage! Profit!

The kind of product tour that the article says it works seems very similar to most video game tutorials.

... which incidentally always have a skip button.

Hell yeah, fuck does anyone do those tours? Feels like an emperors new clothes.

> Why most product tours get skipped

Because I want you to leave me the fuck alone.

Yes, I always skip those lol

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