Comment by faangguyindia
11 hours ago
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.
>> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Final fantasy 7, released in 1997 had one. That’s the earliest I remember