Why most product tours get skipped
This article dissects why the ubiquitous product tour is an ineffective, often skipped, onboarding pattern, attributing its failure to a fundamental misalignment with user intent. Hacker News readers enthusiastically agree, sharing their collective frustration with forced tours and praising the proposed alternative of embedded, action-oriented checklists. It's a validation of common user grievances against poor product design, offering a clear path towards more intuitive user activation.
The Lowdown
Product tours, those ubiquitous modal pop-ups greeting new users in SaaS apps, are overwhelmingly skipped within seconds. This piece argues that such tours fail because they interrupt the user's primary goal: to immediately use the product to solve a specific problem, not to passively learn its features.
- User Motivation: New users prioritize solving their immediate problem; the tour acts as an obstacle to this goal.
- Developer Rationale: Teams continue building tours due to a perceived sense of comprehensiveness, influence from onboarding tool demos, and a failure to measure actual efficacy beyond vanity metrics like completion rates.
- The Effective Alternative: The article champions an embedded checklist model with opt-in steps, allowing users agency, focusing on actionable tasks, and reacting to actual product events rather than relying on forced progression.
- Appropriate Use Cases: Tours are useful for existing users learning about product changes (e.g., redesigns, feature moves) but are detrimental for first-time onboarding.
- Future of Onboarding: The author suggests a shift towards an "assistant" model that provides help only when and where users genuinely need it, rather than upfront instruction.
The core takeaway is that users don't want to be taught; they want to do. Effective onboarding respects this, getting out of the way and offering guidance only when truly needed, empowering users to explore and accomplish tasks on their own terms.
The Gossip
User Urgency & Utility
Many commenters strongly echo the article's sentiment that users come to a product with an immediate task in mind and do not want to be interrupted by tours. They emphasize that forcing users through irrelevant introductions delays their ability to achieve their goal, leading to frustration and instant dismissal of the tour. Examples like joining a video call or viewing a PDF highlight the critical time-sensitive nature of many user interactions.
Productive Pushback
The discussion delves into why these ineffective product tours persist, often pointing fingers at product managers seeking to justify their roles or relying on incomplete metrics. Commenters express intense frustration with software that forces unnecessary tours, with Atlassian products frequently cited as egregious examples. The consensus is that resources would be better spent on creating intuitive user interfaces and maintaining comprehensive, current documentation, rather than implementing interruptive onboarding flows.