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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.