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!"
UI is like a joke. If it needs explaining, it's bad.
Why most product tours get skipped
31–40 of 185 posts
Re: Why most product tours get skipped
#32Every 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!
Re: Why most product tours get skipped
#33Personally, 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 differen…
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.
Re: Why most product tours get skipped
#34If 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!"
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.
Re: Why most product tours get skipped
#35Any 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)
Re: Why most product tours get skipped
#36Every 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.
Re: Why most product tours get skipped
#37It'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 ope…
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.
Re: Why most product tours get skipped
#38For those who think this is something new: TeachEmacsTutorial.
Re: Why most product tours get skipped
#39It'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 ope…
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.
Re: Why most product tours get skipped
#40It'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 ope…
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…
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).