Why most product tours get skipped • Hacker News Board

Re: Why most product tours get skipped

#181

Post by amatecha » Wed, May 06, 2026, 6:40 PM UTC

projektfu wrote: post #152

amatecha wrote: post #35

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 u…

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)...

Re: Why most product tours get skipped

#182

Post by Sohcahtoa82 » Wed, May 06, 2026, 8:23 PM UTC

ninkendo wrote: post #87

hatthew wrote: post #43

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 dec…

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…

> “please disable your adblocker”

"We noticed you're using an ad blocker"

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

Re: Why most product tours get skipped

#183

Post by fugaziboutit » Thu, May 07, 2026, 2:06 AM UTC

faangguyindia wrote: post #44

michaelt wrote: post #6

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 ope…

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 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.

Re: Why most product tours get skipped

#184

Post by cookiengineer » Thu, May 07, 2026, 5:12 AM UTC

michaelt wrote: post #6

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 ope…

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.

Re: Why most product tours get skipped

#185

Post by wunderlotus » Thu, May 07, 2026, 3:49 PM UTC

chromacity wrote: post #82

michaelt wrote: post #6

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 ope…

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 priva…

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.