> 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)