4 Reasons why onboarding tours and coach marks don’t work.
App tours and coach marks hurt your onboarding customer experience. Find and fix Usability and User Experience problems like this, before they become customer problems.
Posted on Jun 5, 2021
This article was originally published a while back as a Usability Insights content piece on LinkedIn. Download the PDF to share with your friends and colleagues.
People don’t read the instructions.
Onboarding coach marks, tours, and tutorials become a nuisance to click past, interrupting your customer’s mental state and use flow.
Short-term memory is really short-term.
Users typically forget everything as soon as they close the tutorial because our short-term memory doesn’t retain very much information.
The point.
Even if users would save time in the long-term by reading coach marks and tutorials, that’s not how people behave in the real world.
This is called “The Paradox of the Active User”.
Context is everything.
Onboarding coach marks and tutorials present information completely out of context for your customers.
One thing at a time.
Your users can’t read coach marks and use the app at the same time. So they’re forced to memorize instructions at launch and try to apply them later.
People want solutions. Not puzzles.
We don't open an app to learn how to use the interface. We want to jump in and complete tasks as quickly as possible.
The point.
Skip the onboarding overlays and support your customers through contextual helpability by displaying tips only when necessary, as they use your product.
Perceived complexity creates real complexity.
Coach marks and onboarding tutorials imply that your product is difficult to use.
If you say “it’s complicated” then it’s complicated. Even the most intuitive interfaces can be perceived as complex by adding unnecessary coach marks, tours, or tutorial overlays.
The point.
It’s better to find and fix usability and UX issues rather than add disruptive barriers like coach marks and tutorials.
Make users happy with early wins.
Focus on the core purpose of your product and help new customers succeed at that.
Progressive disclosure.
As users engage with your product introduce them to new actions and features seamlessly through contextual discovery.
The point.
Helping customers succeed early on will make them happy and encourage them to explore other features.
