This isn't that hard. Most of the time, the "changes" are useless UI Slop: "we've moved notifications to this TOTALLY BETTER OTHER SPOT IN THE SCREEN that one of our designers snuck a commit in with and nobody wanted to argue about it, because the last time it just came down to differing opinions. Its not really better but it's different!"
And the other reason is because most users probably have day jobs and need to get something done.
Atlassian is particularly enraging, especially if you're dealing with setting up "new" accounts. I've worked with your shitware for a decade now, I know how it works, DO NOT FORCE ME TO MAKE TEN CLICKS TO GET RID OF A FUCKING INTRO.
Rather, invest your time into a good, logical UI and, most importantly, good AND CURRENT documentation.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
On the other hand, I think it's interesting to compare the dislike in these comments (and elsewhere) to "RTFM" culture. What's the primary difference? That you can read the manual or use the product at your discretion? e.g. `ls` doesn't forcefully open the man page when you run it for the first time?
(I'm aware of the goomba fallacy and that these are likely two different groups of people - I still think it's interesting!)
> That you can read the manual or use the product at your discretion? e.g. `ls` doesn't forcefully open the man page when you run it for the first time?
Instead of product tours I like how AWS has little info/help buttons that are placed right next to every informational/actionable element on their dashboard. Totally unobtrusive. If you want to understand something on the dashboard that is not obvious at first, you can click on the info/help button that opens a side panel with a lot more information about that particular element (and any associated topics). Most of the time, you just know what you are dealing with (or can guess what that particular topic might mean and you will probably be right).
The other huge problem is you never tell the user what they'll get out of the tour. People will invest in a tour if they understand the reward (and "learning" can't be the reward).
I've never in my life seen a useful product tour. They're always blatantly obvious like "THIS IS THE SEARCH BAR. USE IT TO FIND CONTENT ACROSS OUR PRODUCTS AND SERVICES."
The best UX is using obvious and standard design, plus a searchable menu / command palette.
My instinctive and immediate response to any popup is to hit "Esc" and if that doesn't make it go away I look for the "X" in the corner and failing that I'll nuke it with browser tools.
Popups are a great way to get your content ignored.
I feel the exact same way about tutorials in games that try and be comprehensive and show you everything.
Incremental games do an amazing job at this (things like Universal Paperclips, A Dark Room, etc); parts of the game are revealed to you as you need them and it's often a fun surprise. I don't think the same thing is directly applicable to productivity apps, but I wonder if something could be taken from the pattern.
This is timely -- I'm coding an app at the moment and had the fleeting thought that "hey I should do a new user onboarding tour thingy" and then remembered that in general I skip them, so I havne't made one :)
Every time some software tool displays one of those "helpful" messages - "We've reshuffled these features, so now they're hidden over here!" I get angry and dismiss the popups as quickly as possible.
I've got a task to accomplish, I wasn't just sitting around with nothing to do.
Imagine you get in your car to drive to work, and the dashboard displays a pop-up that tries to show you the latest feature. No!
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 unskippable tutorial.
Just a couple examples offhand..
Discord (constant tooltips covering the screen to harass me to try "Nitro", or some new AI BS I am never going to even remotely consider trying)
Miro ("Sign in with Google" modal in the top right, "CANVAS 26" conference signup site stripe covering the top of the screen, frequent "What's new" modal covering the entire app, "How likely are you to recommend this product or service to a friend or co-worker?" net promoter score survey covering the bottom of the screen, which makes zero sense whatsoever as an enterprise user)
JIRA ("Try dark theme" tooltip covering the top right of the page)
Figma ("Reconnect with Community" tooltip covering some content on the left)
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.
All of the comments & discussions about this kind of stuff makes me wonder if computer keyboards should bring back the "F1: Help" button, for absolute newbies or obtuse software.
but this time, make apps actually respect it :)
Or better: tie it to an OS-level screen-reader AI that explains what's what's on the spot.
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 decide the content wasn't important anyways and close the page in <1 second.
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 fun while it lasted.
The leftmost icon on my browser toolbar is the "kill sticky" bookmarklet (https://github.com/t-mart/kill-sticky). I grew tired of sites hiding the dismiss buttons or omitting them entirely, so anytime something pops up on the page, I instinctively click that. Works on the vast majority of sites.
i don't think it's an either/or or "best". highly dependent on industry and application. if you're application is complex no amount of "good ux" can replace a good overview/tour (watch people, they will go in click around to get the lay of the land then be confused usually).
after that its determining how people to digest info, some like docs (me), others want to sit thru a video, others NEED a person to guide them in person, some like tooltips, checklists, etc.
i'm not saying you need to litter your app with this stuff, but i don't think there is some magical UX pattern that always works.
I had the great fortune for a major steel company. They had regular "training day"s where basically there is an hour long session where the team showed what new capabilities and fixes the software got and perhaps more importantly collect real user feedback on what they thought.
Too bad I didn't get to work there for long but I loved their stance that everybody should personally make safety the first priority, not just because the company requires you to do so but because your safety really is your priority.
So yes, this was before 2014 but I still think these kind of "training" and feedback should be a two way street, not a series of next I have to press to get the software to shut up.
It's a writing reviewer app, and the landing page is the product. It's literally a document with a critique. You can write in it, use the editor, even delete the whole page.
I always skip tours, but I think this kind of thing (if your product can support it) is much better. Then again, this isn't so much a "you've logged in, now let us teach you how to use this product" as a "welcome, here's what this product does".
I very much prefer a well-written product guide compared to a product tour. A guide does not interrupt me when I am trying to get work done. I can read it at a time that is convenient to me. I can bookmark it, revisit it and share it with others as well.
81 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 63.0 ms ] threadAnd the other reason is because most users probably have day jobs and need to get something done.
Atlassian is particularly enraging, especially if you're dealing with setting up "new" accounts. I've worked with your shitware for a decade now, I know how it works, DO NOT FORCE ME TO MAKE TEN CLICKS TO GET RID OF A FUCKING INTRO.
Rather, invest your time into a good, logical UI and, most importantly, good AND CURRENT documentation.
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.
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
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.
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.
* 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.
Sometimes people would have enough time for a product tour and still skip it because no one wants to be forced to do anything.
Never understood why they don't propose the update when the call has ended.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
On the other hand, I think it's interesting to compare the dislike in these comments (and elsewhere) to "RTFM" culture. What's the primary difference? That you can read the manual or use the product at your discretion? e.g. `ls` doesn't forcefully open the man page when you run it for the first time?
(I'm aware of the goomba fallacy and that these are likely two different groups of people - I still think it's interesting!)
Correct, yes.
Imagine you walked into a convenience store and the owner was like "Hey you need to take the tour first!"
"Did you know that in California all gas stations are required to provide you with free air and water for your car?"
The best UX is using obvious and standard design, plus a searchable menu / command palette.
Popups are a great way to get your content ignored.
Why most ads on Youtube gets get skipped
etc etc
Incremental games do an amazing job at this (things like Universal Paperclips, A Dark Room, etc); parts of the game are revealed to you as you need them and it's often a fun surprise. I don't think the same thing is directly applicable to productivity apps, but I wonder if something could be taken from the pattern.
This is timely -- I'm coding an app at the moment and had the fleeting thought that "hey I should do a new user onboarding tour thingy" and then remembered that in general I skip them, so I havne't made one :)
For those an ingame encyclopedia and/or external wiki is a much better solution.
I've got a task to accomplish, I wasn't just sitting around with nothing to do.
Imagine you get in your car to drive to work, and the dashboard displays a pop-up that tries to show you the latest feature. No!
Just a couple examples offhand..
Discord (constant tooltips covering the screen to harass me to try "Nitro", or some new AI BS I am never going to even remotely consider trying)
Miro ("Sign in with Google" modal in the top right, "CANVAS 26" conference signup site stripe covering the top of the screen, frequent "What's new" modal covering the entire app, "How likely are you to recommend this product or service to a friend or co-worker?" net promoter score survey covering the bottom of the screen, which makes zero sense whatsoever as an enterprise user)
JIRA ("Try dark theme" tooltip covering the top right of the page)
Figma ("Reconnect with Community" tooltip covering some content on the left)
but this time, make apps actually respect it :)
Or better: tie it to an OS-level screen-reader AI that explains what's what's on the spot.
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 fun while it lasted.
"We noticed you're using an ad blocker"
Well I noticed you're running 10+ different trackers.
I've also noticed blocking consent/informational banners of sorts when connected to a US VPN becoming more popular
after that its determining how people to digest info, some like docs (me), others want to sit thru a video, others NEED a person to guide them in person, some like tooltips, checklists, etc.
i'm not saying you need to litter your app with this stuff, but i don't think there is some magical UX pattern that always works.
Too bad I didn't get to work there for long but I loved their stance that everybody should personally make safety the first priority, not just because the company requires you to do so but because your safety really is your priority.
So yes, this was before 2014 but I still think these kind of "training" and feedback should be a two way street, not a series of next I have to press to get the software to shut up.
In the US engineers don't get that ring and they implement product tours.
https://www.writelucid.cc
It's a writing reviewer app, and the landing page is the product. It's literally a document with a critique. You can write in it, use the editor, even delete the whole page.
I always skip tours, but I think this kind of thing (if your product can support it) is much better. Then again, this isn't so much a "you've logged in, now let us teach you how to use this product" as a "welcome, here's what this product does".