When I was just beginning to use desktop applications everything had tooltips and nothing had guided demos. In my opinion it's a much more natural way of explor

When I was just beginning to use desktop applications everything had tooltips and nothing had guided demos. In my opinion it's a much more natural way of exploring features; you see what buttons do before committing an action, you get to start understanding the scope of features and capabilities of an application, and you get the opportunity to build a mental "map" of the application - but all at your own pace and available whenever you want. I might be in the minority but guided demos today seem to achieve very little of these desired effects: they usually start at inconvenient times (I might still be configuring my profile or registration settings), as bhauer mentioned they're hard to re-activate and re-visit, they're not comprehensive (usually only cover the top 5-10 actions or functions), and generally a little overwhelming when getting accustomed to a new interface. I will acknowledge today's user interfaces are different to late 1990's software where everything had an explicit button or menu action, particularly with touch screen interfaces now. But given how often I'm walking friends or family through common actions on popular interfaces I would say today's interfaces are doing a terrible job of teaching users about what feature are available and how to use them.