I agree. I hate these walk-throughs. I always skip them because they tend to be exceedingly basic and frustratingly slow. E.g. "Click on your avatar to view your personal profile". Like every other site on the internet? Thanks for that curated pro tip.

The knowledge gained by sitting through the demo (and more) could be had in less time by simply using the software. I prefer to learn by doing, not watching.

What if there's some learning curve in the product. How would you prefer to receive this information?

We iterate on onboarding constantly. There's a few concepts that users need to understand to get to grips with using Trevor. E.g. that queries are made up of steps.

The reason that I hate the guided tour is that it's restrictive. It's not at my pace and it gives me the feeling of being obstructed in my goal of learning the software; which is actually my secondary goal. My first goal is using the software. Learn by using. In the beginning just using is good enough; learning should follow naturally through use.

I'd prefer to use my time clicking around the site than clicking to close tooltips and modals.

I think introductory tutorials are better served by:

1. Scrollable documentation w/ images and an easily navigable sidebar that allows you to jump to specific topics that draw your attention.

2. In the case of something truly complex I like to watch videos for a more holistic perspective. Note that this is the slow and "relaxing" way of getting information. I do this primarily at night and never if I plan on using a product that same day.

I'd probably recommend a video for conveying a workflow (is the fact that queries are made up of steps best categorized as a workflow?), but make it short and focused; and support it with text so that I can quickly decide whether that video is worth clicking or not. Most of what's in the video should be readable in text on the same page as the video.

Regarding the "Learn by using." comment -- this is how I am when it comes to interfaces. Actually exploring them and seeing what things are. Unfortunately, a larger number of users seem to be the opposite of that anymore (at least in my field). More and more users expect everything to be pointed out to them and they don't exhibit that same desire to explore. It's sad, really.

Thanks for the detailed response. Super helpful!

Will run this by the team tomorrow.

Glad to help.

I looked at the repo again in more detail; and I must admit that I got distracted by the comments and missed out on the intent behind your demo.

While I am not a fan of the interactive demo before you can start using an app, I think that what you've shared is: 1. not that and 2. looks excellent for presentations and landing pages.

My feedback still stands, but I was imagining a much different use case which may not align closely with your product.

Random thought: it may be cool to see this implemented in a "picture-in-picture" fashion on a documentation site where the documentation scrolls to the relevant area as you navigate the app in the pip window.

Yes but this would make much more sense if used as help topics, i.e.

"confused about how to upload your portfolio? click here for an interactive demo"

There are a few products on the market for it (I work for one, and no, it's not WalkMe).

There are free solutions too (e.g. http://bootstraptour.com/ )

I suppose that seems reasonable, although text-based documentation should probably be made available too.

This is a really nice suggestion! We could totally do that. Will run that by the team. Thanks

No. Show me an animated gif instead.

Huge file size, poor color support, no video controls. Gifs have no place on the web.

It is potentially possible for the browser (or an extension) to support the user using play/pause/rewind/fast-forward with animated pictures. However, I do not recommend GIF; animated PNG is better.

(But, I would prefer text-based documentation. You can still have videos or animations too if wanted, though.)

Actually, animated PNG has some benefits and some drawbacks compared to animated GIF. (You could try both and see which works better for the animation you are making, I suppose.)

But animated GIFs don't go at your own pace. Doesn't that annoy you sometimes?

I guess a video would do the trick though

Something taking over my interface and locking me into its narrative, explaining instead of showing annoys me 10x more. An animated gif can loop so I can watch it twice.

Problem with animated gifs is that they are not very efficient in terms of bandwidth, especially if you need them to show UI interactions (which means you need a high frame rate).

The word "gif" now means both the format GIF, and also any generic short, looping video on the Internet. As a result, you can just use a webm or other format, as Gfycat does, since it's highly compressible and no viewer actually cares about the underlying format, only the content.

hey speedgoose. Totally agree. You mean the ones in-platform, before you can use the product, right? Yeah, we don't like those either.

This is an optional walk-through on the landing page, for those who prefer that over signing up and trying it themselves.

> You mean the ones in-platform, before you can use the product, right?

Not the op, but I didn't interpret the comment as being restricted to certain types.

I particularly dislike any walkthrough. An optional one still needs user-interaction to dismiss. Sometimes multiple interactions.

A few specifics:

- As a first-time visitor to a product, I have usually joined the product with an initial particular motivating intent. Walkthroughs can't typically know this intent (and optimising multiple walkthroughs for many intents would be a challenge), so you're just putting extra clicks in the way of me getting to the thing I joined for.

- If walkthrough experiences were genuinely of use, they'd be integrated as a permanent product feature. Examples of things like this are Instagram / Facebook / Twitter's "discover" features. These are slightly different as they're about discovering users, not features, but the general idea is the same: a user wants guidance.

> An optional one still needs user-interaction to dismiss.

If it's "click here to dismiss this walkthrough we just started", yes. If it's "click here to view a walkthrough", then... no? User interaction is required to start. That would be optional.

If you're thinking it's the "we auto started something and you can optionally stop it" then yeah, I agree, those are often annoying.

It's neither. It's "click here to dismiss this annoying message asking you about something you don't want"

It's essentially the ux equivalent of an ad or newsletter popup.

There are poor implementations of this, certainly. Is that the only way this feature could be used? Would it still be obtrusive if it were on the help/knowledgebase page?

Imagine that these exist _alongside_ step-by-step documentation reachable by specific searches "How do I download in CSV?".

It's definitely not equivalent to an advertisement.

A good product walkthrough is just part of user onboarding. By the time I’m done creating an account I should already know what to do and how to get Main Benefit

It's true. The problem we have though, is that there's a bit of setup involved to connect Trevor to your database, so we want to show the users the value add early as possible (even before sign up if we can)

A good user interface is only good for people that like it, you cannot please all "populations", just try to make an interface that will be both liked by techs and HR / managers. Good luck with that.

Speaking of good UIs, I recently used not one, but two task management websites that had no tutorial (OK, no problem there) and... no tooltips for any of the textless icons.

How in the world am I supposed to know what does what without clicking on them? Even then I'd forget. They were pretty unique icons, too :/

Please don't do that. Tooltips save lives :)

I agree. I don't want a walk-through. I want documentation.