Part Two: The product · The first days
Makers want to explain the product before anyone gets lost. People do not take in explanations until they have a reason to care.
A product tour is what nervous makers give a newcomer. Five tooltips, a welcome video, a checklist of features to visit. All of it arrives before the person has tried to do anything, so none of it has anything to attach to. They press Next until it stops, and remember nothing.
The tour also grows. Every team that ships a feature wants it included, because being in the tour is how a feature gets seen. Nobody asks to be taken out.
An explanation lands when it answers a question the person has just asked. A shop owner halfway through a first customer survey, who cannot see how to skip a question for people who answered no, will read one sentence about skipping with full attention. The same sentence in a tour ten minutes earlier was noise.
The deeper mistake is about what is being taught. People did not come to learn an interface. They came to send the survey, publish the page, find the answer. Teach them to do that, and the interface gets learned on the way.
One version of that survey tool opens with a tour of the toolbar. The other opens on her empty first question with one sentence: "People finish a short survey and abandon a long one. Ask the five things you would act on." The sentence is about her work, and it arrives when she needs it. Ten minutes later she has a survey worth sending, and has learned question types, ordering and sharing without being told their names.
Therefore:
Skip the tour. Put the newcomer straight into a small real task of their own, and give each piece of guidance at the moment and in the place it is needed. Teach the work.
In practice. Switch the tour off and watch three newcomers try their first task. Note where each one stops. Put one sentence of help at each of those places, and make it about the work, not the button.
Goes with. The small real task leads to FIRST USEFUL RESULT IN MINUTES (34). The places people stop are found through WATCH SOMEONE USE IT (59). Where the work has a standard, SHOW WHAT GOOD LOOKS LIKE (41).