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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
* 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.
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
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, ...).
Don't get in my face when I'm trying to get task done. Ain't nobody got time for that!
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.
Apple really doesn't care how apps are used, Radar issues go untouched for several releases.
EDIT: missing "management".
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.
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.
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.
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.
Never understood why they don't propose the update when the call has ended.
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.
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.
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".
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.
Sometimes people would have enough time for a product tour and still skip it because no one wants to be forced to do anything.
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
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