[cosmotic]

Documentation locked up in walkthroughs is very frustrating to access. You can't search for it or reference it easily.

Mini-tutorials upon open are so annoying that my brain immediately enters "get out of the tutorial at any cost" fight-or-flight mode and I start scrambling for a hide, skip, or close button. If I don't find one I close the app and give it a 1-star rating that it has unskippable tutorials.

As far as I can tell, this is a really well executed version of something that drives at least some subset of users (and possibly more) totally nuts.

[chitowneats]

You are likely not the target audience. This cohort of "some subset of users" that prefer things to be textually rather than visually based is quite small outside of software developers.

[cosmotic]

I'd love to see some user testing data on the subject. I feel like investing in tooling around the tutorials would be predicated on evidence that more than 50% of users benefit from them.

[alonmower]

Here's the thing: if done right it can have a _massive_ impact. One onboarding experiment I ran in a past life doubled trial activation.

Trouble is that lot's of people do onboarding poorly. What you and the parent comment call out is a failure mode: to build effective onboarding you need to understand who you're building it for and what they're trying to accomplish. A tooltip tour approach might be effective for certain kinds of products/users/use cases, and extremely ineffective for others.

What I've seen be most effective (at least for B2B SaaS products):

1) tailoring the experience so people are being onboarded in ways that are relevant (e.g. their role, are they the first user or nth user, their use case/job to be done, how familiar they are with the domain/similar products, etc...) and

2) do>show>tell: get people to use the product to learn how it works vs plastering signs all over it. Which modalities are most effective is product/user/context dependent.

Source: I've been responsible for onboarding at a few SaaS companies now (and am now building a platform in the space)

[OJFord]

But would it hurt anyone to have them only optionally launched? A little clippy-like thing saying Hey there's a walkthrough here if you want it; not in your face if you don't.

[chitowneats]

Requires a bit more code, but I do find this compromise attractive. Let's try to make this the default.