[michaelt]

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 opened. Very rare someone opens the PDF reader because they're just having a look around to see if there are any interesting new features.

If someone opens my virtual whiteboard product, 95% chance they're in some sort of sprint review meeting and they want to write some virtual post-it notes right now. A tour isn't what they need.

If someone opens the ticket management product, or the expense report filing product, or the music playing product... you get the picture.

[faangguyindia]

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 "checklist" and "load sample data" approach better.

This is primary reason perhaps why my apps are growing fast.

[zerkten]

>> But they are so common, i don't know who designs them and makes me feel like 5yo.

Often these are the product managers building follow-on features that don't get the usage they want. Users aren't using them, but monthly usage is the currency of so much PM work that they have to try to draw attention to it.

[hirako2000]

It's a race to the bottom, for any tool out there the negative reviews boil down to complexity. If not: no instruction.

Some people don't know how to operate a TV remote controller, unless it has 1 or 2 buttons.

It's protection against the frustration that a few experience: ultimately unable to use a thing or jam it. At the expense of the majority bugged by mild distraction.

[ghaff]

I think if I'm honest, I don't deeply know everything about most of the products that I use. And if I were to dive deeply, I would spend all my time learning products than doing anything with them.

[PaulHoule]

For me it is not a mild distraction. If it was one product it would be easier to take it in stride but I literally close hundreds of modal dialogs that never should have opened in the first place every day.

[Groxx]

I don't like the focus-hijacking things because it tends to obscure the parts of the UI that you will have to deal with in the next experience. You are given an accelerated tour that does not match the muscle-memory that you will need when you actually use it.

Raising the visibility of something, or pointing an arrow at it is fine, but don't dim and block the rest of the UI immediately because I might need it for context to understand what the hell you want me to click next and why. If I can't do that, then it's just a forced speedrun of 20 steps that I will immediately forget.

It feels like many of these forgot that the point is to teach for the future, not to boost extremely short term interaction metrics. Showing (much less a single time) is not usually enough to teach, you need to establish context so they understand why instead of just what, and generally offer repetition.

[gtowey]

> But they are so common, i don't know who designs them and makes me feel like 5yo.

The great secret of the industry is that it's mostly run by clueless incompetents. And their only strategy is to copy from every other product because they don't have original ideas or enough conviction to lead in a new direction. They just want to show up, punch thier timecard and go home, so we get the laziest suite of product implementation possible.

[tardedmeme]

UI/UX design is a dead art. Probably because it costs money and requires actual thought.

It feels like vendors just tack on the first thing that pops into their head. How do we tell users about the new feature? Pop-up dialog! That should work.

[wodenokoto]

Final fantasy 7, released in 1997 had one. That’s the earliest I remember

[fugaziboutit]

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.

[chromacity]

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 privacy choices" (meaning we opted you into some invasive data-collection feature). I just want to browse the internet.

[josephg]

Yep. And ironically, the most complex software I use - IntelliJ and davinci resolve - don’t have any onboarding at all. They’re great! The makers of resolve have some excellent video tutorials on their website and a manual that is many hundreds of pages long. But it’s up to you to search that stuff out.

[Akronymus]

Yeah instead of making some crappy onboarding tour, the time is better spent improving usability/discoverability of features.

So many programs still don't have a feature where yoy can just search for the menu option you need rather than going through 10 menus.

[sixeyes]

agree with your points, but damn, resolve has some strange UI patterns / key combos etc compared to other software i've used.

maybe if you're a video editor coming from years within the field, the metaphors make sense? for me, having mostly done audio stuff, it was a bit of a journey.

i dont think an onboarding thing would be the solution, though

[josephg]

If you haven't done it, I really recommend the official resolve training:

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/tra...

The UI patterns make a lot more sense after watching the people who designed it explain how it works, how to use it and why it was designed that way.

[wunderlotus]

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.

[duskdozer]

Well, exactly. How are the KPIs on the new feature they shipped going to meet target unless they add a user nudge toward desirable behavior?

[RobotToaster]

Microsoft is terrible for this in general. Every windows setup involves microsoft accounts and asking you to setup multiple rubbish SaaS like onedrive.

[ralferoo]

> 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.

I'd go even further. If someone opens your product, they don't care about anything in your release notes as long as they are still able to join the call. Not only does nobody care about the new background effects etc. right then, they probably don't care about them at all. Maybe if someone discovers the feature and uses it, they might hunt around for it before the next meeting, but probably by the time that meeting comes around they'll be busy then as well.

More generally, most people don't care about 90% of the features of a product, just that it lets them do the one thing they need it to do, as soon as possible. If it isn't obvious how to do that one thing, making that obvious is more important than a product tour explaining it.

[sidewndr46]

Even more likely: if someone's opens your product your last update probably broke their workflow. They don't need to read your release notes to know this

[freehorse]

I think notifications after updates make more sense. You already know the software, and you are informed of some new feature that you may or may not care about. How else can a user be informed about a new feature else? Even if I do not care about the majority of features added, there is still occasionally one that I may want to use.

I often read such notes/product tours in software I already use/know, and in contrast I find it a bit stupid when they add some feature and they do not tell the users. It should not be obstructing, though. I would say the updating itself breaks the workflow more than a pop-up window or sth.

[lazaroclapp]

Interestingly, there are basically two kinds of programs I am sometimes happy to see guided tours embedded in:

* Creation programs (image/video editors, 3D rendering... hell, even a slides program or an IDE). Doesn't mean I won't dismiss them sometimes anyways, but these are tools that often I do want to get an initial idea how to use, that I have allotted some time to play around with, and that are sufficiently complex that a tutorial is justified. These are also places were I can spend 2-5 minutes learning the basics of the tool, because whatever I am about to do with it is going to take the next few hours anyways.

* Videogames (i.e. the tutorial). For very similar reasons to the above ;)

Also, this is always on first install. Getting a tutorial on update for an authoring tool (and to a lesser extent a game) is far less likely to be welcome.

[atoav]

So the types of programs you usually bring time to exploratively use anyways.

[wongarsu]

Videogame tutorials also used to mostly suck. But in the last two decades they recognized the issues, and there's a lot of knowledge sharing in the industry

If you want to learn how to better teach new users about your product, GDC talks about video game tutorials are one of the best resource you can find

[account42]

Hard disagree - at least tutorials used to be skippable and/or short. Now you're more likely get an extended tutorial-like section at the start of the game that is just tediously boring if you have half a brain cell. Like Half-Life mentioned in the sibling, the tutorial is a separate mini-campaign you don't have to start before the main campaign - which doesn't actually need any tutorial if you have played an FPS before.

For most games I don't actually want a tutorial at all. If there is something not entirely obvious then I'd much prefer a reference sheet I can pull up when I actually want to do that thing.

[wongarsu]

That's a bit like saying all CGI is bad: the bad instances are the ones you remember most vividly, the best instances are the ones you never noticed.

In my opinion, the best tutorial in any game I've ever played was Portal (yes, also 19 years old, not a good case for "tutorials were terrible back then"). Portal has 19 levels of tutorial (the test chambers) which gradually introduce mechanics with Glados as your sarcastic guide, and five levels outside the tutorial (escape and destroying Glados) where you use what you learned

Meanwhile the colony sim genre has mostly arrived at the checklist style: you get a checklist of things that would be useful to do, and when you complete them you get a new checklist. But you are free to just ignore it and do something else. Captain of Industry or Timberborn come to mind

In the FPS genre Titanfall 2 had a pretty nice tutorial in the campaign that ended in a timed obstacle course

[tardedmeme]

Just watched someone play Half-Life (the original). Its tutorial is better than a lot of tutorials today.

[PaulHoule]

Onboarding is such a big thing in games. A lot of times I have a few minutes to play and I play a pickup game of Beat Saber or maybe a round of Dynasty Warriors because I can just pick up the controller in play. A lot of games stay in my backlog because I don't want to spend a few hours watching cutscenes and playing through tutorials just to know if I like the game or not.

[PetitPrince]

> * Videogames (i.e. the tutorial). For very similar reasons to the above ;)

Oftentimes it's less jarring to have an invisible tutorial though (a level made to exploit the new gameplay element / feature). But it depends on what you want the user to learn and the type of videogame; I don't mind a guided tour in more strategic games (RTS, turn by turn RPG, ...).

[anitil]

Often I see that there's a new feature, and I'm interested in it, but my options are do the demo now, or hide it. But I want to do it later! I'm admittedly terrible at operating GUIs, so maybe it's just a me issue

[edoceo]

I want that too. Most of these tours interfere. A pattern I like is just a little dot indicator where the new thing is. It's not in the way. But if I click the dot, or it's menu item, then I see the tour.

Don't get in my face when I'm trying to get task done. Ain't nobody got time for that!

[plorg]

Perhaps I can interest you in the Firefox Mobile option: put a blue pip on the three dot menu and the "What's New" item that will never go away until you click on it.

[arthens]

I agree this is the silliest part! Even if you are interested in them, the only option is often now or never again. Even worse sometimes you open an app/site and the onboarding/what's new pops up with a delay and you end up accidentally dismissing it without even seeing what it was

[the_snooze]

Too much of modern consumer-facing software think they're the ends, not the means.

[Gigachad]

It’s the hyper focusing on metrics. When a new feature comes out, the product people and managers are obsessing over the usage metrics for that one feature.

It’s why Windows feels like multiple different companies desperate for your attention, with internal adverts begging you to look at their new feature. Because that team needs people using it to look good on the analytics.

Vs a company like Apple which seems to operate at a higher level, they don’t care if you use iMovie or not, it’s there if you want it but they aren’t going to push every individual feature on you.

[pjmlp]

Yes, Microsoft suffers from schizophrenic management, it is easier for externals to talk between teams than internal teams themselves, there are quite a few stories on the matter.

Apple really doesn't care how apps are used, Radar issues go untouched for several releases.

EDIT: missing "management".

[mschild]

Apple has plenty examples of that behaviour as well.

To name one: if you ever connect any headphones with media controls and you accidentally press one of them while no media is playing, it will open up Apple Music. Its convoluted to stop that behaviour.

Its not as bad as Microslop but it does exist.

[jorisw]

That, and they forget they’re just one single experience in a person’s day of hundreds. The trivial part of the user’s day that the app represents, in no way warrants interruption.

[tardedmeme]

Most of their managers want to be a bigger percentage of your day though.

[davnicwil]

this is so true and I think it's very instructive to have a regular look through this lens when thinking about building something.

You've got to think and care deeply about what you're creating while at the same time understanding it's of approximately zero interest to those who you're building for outside certain key moments of interaction. Try to just nail those as much as possible and beyond that, get out of the way.

I think this is the core of good design, that things make sense, are nice, and well explained to the point they are even fun to discover and explore when you care to go looking for them. If you don't care to, they're invisible and out of your way.

[zbentley]

But but but … how else will we turn a minor value add into a sticky source of recurring revenue? After all, there are no other profitable business models.

[nickjj]

> 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.

Yes and this also applies to other things like videos.

I'd be curious what others think about this:

If you see a video on YouTube and choose to click it, you as the viewer already know the title of the video and have seen the thumbnail. Those things together gave you enough detail to be interested.

The first 15 seconds of the video probably doesn't need to repeat what you already know.

But on the other hand, outlining what you're about to see in the video doesn't seem like a bad idea so folks know what they're getting into.

As someone who has made hundreds of videos and have seen thousands, whenever I hear someone explain what I already know I'm immediately put into a state of "cool story, give me the information I clicked to see".

Does anyone else feel the same?

[edarchis]

I think that you underestimate the portion of people just letting Youtube play videos in a continuous flow. They are doing the dishes, sewing, folding clothes, watching the entrance of the building... Stating the subject of the video makes a lot of sense for them.

I use DeArrow to remove clickbait titles and thumbnails, so indeed, I don't need that information to be repeated. I don't mind a few seconds at the beginning, what I hate is the person rambling about why they didn't post the day before and what not. That time multiplied by the number of viewers makes me wanna cry.

[fnordian_slip]

There's a workaround for this problem on PC, just in case you're not aware of it. Just press "2" or "3" to skip forward to 20 or 30 percent, which just usually long enough for the filler. And if not, you use "j" or "l" to skip forward or backwards in 10-second increments.

[something765478]

> The first 15 seconds of the video probably doesn't need to repeat what you already know.

Ah, the Wadsworth Constant: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-wadsworth-constant

[gwbas1c]

> The first 15 seconds of the video probably doesn't need to repeat what you already know.

Consider looking at how Mr. Beast does it. He explains in detail in https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6623b7720b009050313e701c/...

WRT to me: The first 15-45 seconds of a video need to convince me to keep watching. There's more videos on YouTube that I want to watch than I have time to watch, and that 15 second summary is how I decide to keep watching or move on to something else.

[zamadatix]

People also don't like to hear to "like & subscribe" but it's just what YouTube incentivizes. At the end of the day these decisions and incentives are formed around what makes viewers do the most total viewing on the platform, which (perhaps unintuitively) is not the same as making the viewing experience ideal.

For the individual, consider the extension SponsorBlock. Despite the name, it can be hsed to block more than sponsored segments (and blocking sponsored segments is a configurable option if you like them for some reason. There are several "filler" categories you can choose from and it'll auto skip the exact e.g. intro length rather than needing to guess 100% of the time

[debarshri]

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 to hop on a onboarding call.

People often try to automate that as it is expensive, but i think people prefer that human touch esp. when you are paying alot of money.

[rcxdude]

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).

[bluGill]

Or at the very least, at the price we're talking here, companies should be hiring a trainer who knows the product well, who can actually teach people and answer questions. not go through this, go through that, clicking that: half the things are not useful to their particular problems and shouldn't be taught at all to this group.

[wffurr]

Actually I get interrupted by a tour or popup when using a "point solution" all the time.

[tomwheeler]

Right. It's self-indulgence by product managers and/or designers who think users are as interested in the software as they are.

Worse yet, sometimes these tours seem to be a band-aid for an unintuitive UX. If usability was the priority, I'd discover new features on my own.

[viceconsole]

I get irritated by Zoom saying I need to update right when I open the app and want to join a call. Or even worse, sometimes I'll have had the app open (checking video and sound) and it won't notify about a required update until I actually go to join a call.

Never understood why they don't propose the update when the call has ended.

[fwip]

Bitwarden also does this, with a big modal popup - and I only use my password manager in the middle of a flow. I'm either in the middle of signing up for some thing to accomplish a goal (like checking out on a website), or logging in to something to do the same.

I'd much rather it prompt on app close (when I don't care how long the update will take), or just have a button in the UI that I can click at my leisure.

[pancomplex]

100% - that's why it's so confusing why PMs/PMMs think they need to keep adding these to their products.

[drdaeman]

> so confusing why PMs/PMMs

Because their goal metric is number of tasks closed/features delivered (and this counts as one), not customers satisfied.

Plus, social parroting - a misconception that if it's popular and everyone does it it "can't be wrong".

[kccqzy]

Exactly. These guided tours should be triggered by users, and never automatically. For example old school Windows apps have a question mark button on their title bar that the user can click to activate help for any UI element.

[bluGill]

Unfortunately, even by the time old school, Windows was doing help, documentation was afterthought and usually worthless.

[Groxx]

100% this.

If you want to offer a product tour, then offer it as a small dismissible notification-thing in the corner of the normal UI. Otherwise you run into this situation while also constantly being annoying to everyone who has used your product before.

Product tours and tutorial wizards and all those educational experiences can be excellent, but they must not get in the way. Visible is fine, interruptive is not.

[monkpit]

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.

[AnimalMuppet]

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.

[zbentley]

99% won’t care, and 59% will find the what’s-new popup actively confusing, distracting, and hostile. Bad trade.

[bluGill]

No it won't because you're either going to already be using some other browser and you won't care or you'll be once again trying Firefox X.Y and you'll discover it does work.

[cookiengineer]

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.

[mrsvanwinkle]

Please ignore my notif to onboard you on my misadventure of clicking the "555 Timer turns 55" frontpage news only to read through the end of your comment convinced I have to read it again to resolve this uncanny alt world where the 555 timer only works paired with its bt app like some anova sous vide pump

[pseudohadamard]

Alongside page 3 of the Google search results, 30 seconds in on a product tour is a great place to hide a body. Friend of mine has got rid of at least three annoying coworkers that way.

[fragmede]

Go on…

[baxtr]

This is true but not always.

Sometimes people would have enough time for a product tour and still skip it because no one wants to be forced to do anything.

[duxup]

I was looking for something to use for documentation recently.

Every dang tour wanted to show me their endless litany of features, often leaning into enterprise stuff. So much so that it didn't involve a chance to actually use the tool for what I wanted.

I just wanted to try documenting something and seeing how fast and easy it was but every form of a tour wanted to side track me.

[zacharybk]

I 100% agree that no one uses your product to watch a walk-through, they’re there to do a job. The author primarily talks about new user onboarding.

While they do make the point about introducing new features, they don’t address how to make an interrupt-driven announcement successful with existing users.

Has anyone seen a good way to make ongoing update announcements

[badestrand]

You can just have a bell icon that displays a little red (1) so the users know that they have a message/notification that they can, but don't have to, read.

[gfat]

Linear has an in-app changelog in the bottom right that doesn’t get in the way of work. It’s synced with their changelog on the website and can be revisited anytime clicking the help menu icon. Pretty elegant.

[21asdffdsa12]

Wanna see what you can with this after the call - click [Take me to my Call- schedule a tour]. Tour only targets for power users and helping them. Shortcuts etc.

[ralferoo]

Actually, this reminds me of an anti-patten I often see on websites, after they've bombarded me with cookie banners and this that and the other, you get to read about 1 paragraph of whatever it is on the page and a few seconds later a "why don't you subscribe" dialog pops up. I don't think I've ever not once just immediately cancelled and decided then and there that I will never be subscribing to whatever it is. I've not even been given a chance to read the article yet, how am I supposed to know if the quality is worth me subscribing? All I've learned so far is that the website author doesn't value my time.

[iqp]

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.

[asalahli]

Even then, a new user account doesn't necessarily mean a new user.

Every time I start on a new job, I have to click through Slack's, Github's and many other dev tools' stupid guided tours for the hundredth time

[bluGill]

If your usability is good, you don't need a guided tour even as a new user because you can just figure out as a new user how it's supposed to work and get your job done. Guided tours and documentation should be limited to expert features that only a very rare subset of people need. The things everyone does should be obviously easy to use right away and so no helping or tour is needed.

[PaulHoule]

Notably, this applies to the "product tour" a lot of products want to give you when they've added new features and I find this particularly obnoxious, especially with Adobe tools.

Like a lot of times when I am using Lightroom I just shot 3000 photos at a sports game and feel under the gun to select a few out and develop them or I am using Acrobat to handle some stressful paperwork which is late. I close 100s if not 1000s of modal dialogs that never should have been opened every day and just don't need another one.

It's bad from the viewpoint of Adobe because I wind up dismissing these messages out of hand.

Adobe wants me to see the value I am getting from my Creative Cloud subscription, like I am likely to keep paying for it if I enjoy more features in more of the products. Like lately I discovered Adobe Fonts is great: like I find looking for free fonts is the most depressing thing in web development and graphic design, I can spend hours looking at fonts and making comps and thinking "I can't stand that 'k'". Adobe Fonts on the other hand has quality fonts that are well organized and often I can put in 15 minutes and walk out with something that works so well with my brand that if I want to set stuff in that font with Pillow of course I am going to plunk down $90 and buy it -- I don't feel bad at all that the fonts are tied to Adobe tools and my CC subscription.

In terms of execution you just expect something like this to be crap. The integration of Adobe Fonts into Photoshop is broken: it can lock Photoshop hard and force you to kill the process. On the other hand it works great with Illustrator. Marketing-driven development always seems to have a lack of empathy and attention to quality that in the end is self-defeating.

---

Lately I've gotten hooked on the mobile games Arknights which has extensive lore, too many game modes to count and very complex mechanics and hundreds of characters who have unique abilities (e.g. even the "trash" 3-star characters usually have something special about them and are designed to make teams that punch above their weight)

Arknights gamifies learning the game and engaging with the mechanics by offering daily, weekly, and campaign rewards for taking actions, completing levels, developing characters, etc. This is part of a number of mechanisms that gradually get you up to speed on the game mechanics, reveal the world, etc. These kind of mechanisms, used gently, could work for applications software.

But I think timing is everything. One of the most annoying people in downtown Ithaca is a panhandler who comes up from behind and starts demanding money or the bandanna off your head, he doesn't bother to make eye contact, he doesn't look to see if you're receptive or for a moment when you might be open, he just makes demands and gets angry when you deny or ignore him. I give money to panhandlers quite often if they engage me person-to-person and are agreeable but this guy is like so much application software today.