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Comment by chromacity | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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?

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

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