Live data from Hacker News

Driver.js: Product tours, highlights, contextual help and more

driverjs.com

21–30 of 108 posts

Re: Driver.js: Product tours, highlights, contextual help and more

#21

No no no no no. Design your product to be understandable at first pass. Apple famously doesn't do any of this with your iPhone, while Sony forces you to do it on every new device. Let the onboarding be a forcing function for usability. This isn't a crutch, it's something worse and damaging.

I think this is broadly accurate for consumer apps.

However, a B2B app ,which is where most product demo tutorials are used, isn't like this. Good product tutorials are great for salespeople to walk the customer through the app and sell properly to prospective clients.

When the contract sizes are in the 10,000s or 100,000s and the product is pretty complex then this is a good solution vs having your sales and support staff having to firefight issues.

Re: Driver.js: Product tours, highlights, contextual help and more

#22

No no no no no. Design your product to be understandable at first pass. Apple famously doesn't do any of this with your iPhone, while Sony forces you to do it on every new device. Let the onboarding be a forcing function for usability. This isn't a crutch, it's something worse and damaging.

> Apple famously doesn't do any of this with your iPhone

Maybe that's why 50% of iPhone users still don't know that they can use long press on they keyboard (or space bar) to gain cursor control - and this is just one example.

Re: Driver.js: Product tours, highlights, contextual help and more

#23

No no no no no. Design your product to be understandable at first pass. Apple famously doesn't do any of this with your iPhone, while Sony forces you to do it on every new device. Let the onboarding be a forcing function for usability. This isn't a crutch, it's something worse and damaging.

Hm.. I find that Apple products have tons of hidden features that I discover after years of usage. I appreciate the clean lines, I really do, but it does have a tradeoff when it comes to discoverability, so this policy is debatable IMO.

Re: Driver.js: Product tours, highlights, contextual help and more

#25

No no no no no. Design your product to be understandable at first pass. Apple famously doesn't do any of this with your iPhone, while Sony forces you to do it on every new device. Let the onboarding be a forcing function for usability. This isn't a crutch, it's something worse and damaging.

Hm.. I find that Apple products have tons of hidden features that I discover after years of usage. I appreciate the clean lines, I really do, but it does have a tradeoff when it comes to discoverability, so this policy is debatable IMO.

The difference is it's intuitive to discover. Once you discover this does something here, you start wondering where else could this happen? You might wonder if you can adjust the iPhone flashlight brightness. For me it was intuitive to long-press the icon in control center to find more options and I was delighted to discover that's exactly how it works.

Those little moments of delight and synergy are why I choose the apple ecosystem.

Re: Driver.js: Product tours, highlights, contextual help and more

#27

No no no no no. Design your product to be understandable at first pass. Apple famously doesn't do any of this with your iPhone, while Sony forces you to do it on every new device. Let the onboarding be a forcing function for usability. This isn't a crutch, it's something worse and damaging.

Sorry, this isn't practical for everything. Sure, a phone should be intuitive. And more importantly, you don't have to know how everything works at first pass. You can build it over time.

But, for example, I recently signed up for HubSpot as a CRM and while I think that overall, the product is well organized and intuitive, it's just difficult if not impossible to make it as intuitive as a smartphone. The product tours really help.

Re: Driver.js: Product tours, highlights, contextual help and more

#28
post #22

No no no no no. Design your product to be understandable at first pass. Apple famously doesn't do any of this with your iPhone, while Sony forces you to do it on every new device. Let the onboarding be a forcing function for usability. This isn't a crutch, it's something worse and damaging.

> Apple famously doesn't do any of this with your iPhone Maybe that's why 50% of iPhone users still don't know that they can use long press on they keyboard (or space bar) to gain cursor control - and this is just one example.

iPhone user since switching from a Droid X. You just taught me something that I have been dying for… thank you and way to make your point.

Re: Driver.js: Product tours, highlights, contextual help and more

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm.. I find that Apple products have tons of hidden features that I discover after years of usage. I appreciate the clean lines, I really do, but it does have a tradeoff when it comes to discoverability, so this policy is debatable IMO.

The difference is it's intuitive to discover. Once you discover this does something here, you start wondering where else could this happen? You might wonder if you can adjust the iPhone flashlight brightness. For me it was intuitive to long-press the icon in control center to find more options and I was delighted to discover that's exactly how it works. Those little moments of delight and synergy are why I choose the…

Half the time it does something, I don't know what I did, and I'm in a rush and so instead of sitting down and having a happy little moment I'm annoyed at having it do some unexpected, unrepeatable thing.
Post reply on HN