It's pretty simple to understand - when a user opens a tool, it's because they want to do the thing that tool does, now.

If someone opens my videoconferencing product 98% of the time it's they've got a scheduled call to join within the next 20 seconds. They're not going to be late for their meeting so they can read my release notes.

If someone opens my PDF viewer, 99.9% chance they want to view the PDF they just opened. Very rare someone opens the PDF reader because they're just having a look around to see if there are any interesting new features.

If someone opens my virtual whiteboard product, 95% chance they're in some sort of sprint review meeting and they want to write some virtual post-it notes right now. A tour isn't what they need.

If someone opens the ticket management product, or the expense report filing product, or the music playing product... you get the picture.

I've never liked those "focus hijacking guided tours" and never really followed through any such onboarding process.

But they are so common, i don't know who designs them and makes me feel like 5yo.

You gotta understand, people will use the product you made, in a way that makes sense to them, not according to your devised "one way". And that's fine because it allows user to own his workflow using your product.

I like the "checklist" and "load sample data" approach better.

This is primary reason perhaps why my apps are growing fast.

Thats true for point solutions. You often dont find a guided product tour there.

Guided tour does have its place where the product is a workflow, a platform offering, has bunch of features and you want to introduce the feature to them.

If you are paying 10-25k USD per year, you expect some onboarding specialist who gives instructions on integrating ACH and payroll systems etc. It is very common for non-technical folk to hop on a onboarding call.

People often try to automate that as it is expensive, but i think people prefer that human touch esp. when you are paying alot of money.

Too much of modern consumer-facing software think they're the ends, not the means.

Often I see that there's a new feature, and I'm interested in it, but my options are do the demo now, or hide it. But I want to do it later! I'm admittedly terrible at operating GUIs, so maybe it's just a me issue

100% - that's why it's so confusing why PMs/PMMs think they need to keep adding these to their products.

My kids’ school uses a web portal to add money to their lunch accounts. My only task when I open this website is to pick an amount and click submit and give them my money.

Whose idea was it to show me a “what’s new” popup of all the jira tickets they closed in the last sprint?

What’s new? Nothing is new. It works just like it used to. Just take my money and leave me alone, please.

New users are probably the only ones who really need guided product tours. If I'm a longtime existing user I'm far less likely to be interested in a guided tour.