Comment by chromacity

10 hours ago

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.

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.

  • 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.

  • 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

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?

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