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by projektfu 859 days ago
My thoughts as a SaaS user/purchaser:

Can I opt out quickly so I can see how the difficult things work?

Will I get this flow every time I change computers, delete cookies, etc?

How much will it bloat the experience once I'm an expert? These things always have telemetry ... will it still be collecting telemetry forever?

As someone who buys line-of-business software, I know these concerns are rarely considered by the SaaS developer, but they are important.

Unrelated : Why does every product page do the fading in thing? When I return to your site to see things I scroll down to a bunch of blank stuff waiting for your animations to catch up. Is this how you prefer the rest of the web?

3 comments

Can I opt out quickly so I can see how the difficult things work? -> Yes, you can just turn off "Simple Mode": https://share.cleanshot.com/JmkgmflH

Will I get this flow every time I change computers, delete cookies, etc? -> No, settings are saved per user in the database. So it is synched across all devices and you won't have that problem.

How much will it bloat the experience once I'm an expert? -> Depends on the SaaS but ideally once you're an expert you just see all available features (as you normally would).

Thanks for the answers!

I like the options of muting or turning off simple mode, good job.

Fwiw, I have used products where the tour comes up every time you change to a new machine/browser. I assume this is because it's only loosely integrated to the application and doesn't know about users. Good on you to put the setting where it belongs.

Have you turned on your operating systems "reduce motion" accessibility settings? Almost all CSs frameworks and many authors respect this setting and will disable / tone down all animations. It's handled as a media query.
The text still starts out invisible, and the delays are still there, but the fade-in is now instant.
> Why does every product page do the fading in thing?

This is probably going a bit off-topic but I recently switched from Android to iOS and god damn those slow animations are killing me. They seem like an industry standard nowadays. I really don't get it either.

I remember Apple changed up the iOS calculator a while back and the slow animations were causing people to enter the wrong numbers.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/why-you-should-avoid-your-i...