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Same complaint for those annoying "how to use our website or Electron app" tutorials the first time you sign in or after updates. Make help discoverable, don't

Same complaint for those annoying "how to use our website or Electron app" tutorials the first time you sign in or after updates. Make help discoverable, don't ram it down our throats, please.

DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
Sorry, but we have to :) We added loads of genuinely useful new features to our SaaS app over the past year, such as the ability to mute notifications, quick user-switching with a PIN, and non-exclusive user role membership, and more - despite mentioning this in our monthly user newsletter we still get peppered with support emails and feature-requests for things that already exist! Additionally our feature-usage data showed that users just weren’t using them. After we added a forced (but only 15 second long) new-feature-tour those support tickets evaporated and user-satisfaction went up. Gotta use tough-love, it seems. —————— Users are weird - we have a bog-standard “user menu” in the top-right corner that’s got the usual visual-affordances and opened by just hovering your name and avatars - with menu items like Logout, Switch User, Dark Mode, etc - but to our surprise the vast majority of our users simply never explore the software.
- dcow 5y ago
  Maybe it could be opt out at the end of the first onboard/tutorial.. "Thanks, but I'll explore the software on my own from now on [x]"?
  - DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
    We considered it, but (in this case) the application's use-case is on shared/communual "front-line" machines (hence why we added quick-user-switching), so even though ostensibly a single, human user is logged-in, we honestly don't know who is actually using the machine, and some other user who is just borrowing a machine could easily dismiss a tour/onboarding intended for the actual user who is logged-in. If you think that's bad, when we overhauled some incompetently written code (from a dodgy contractor before I joined) that stored passwords using reversible-encryption (ARGH!) - which was for a "feature" that allowed tenant-admins to reveal their own users' passwords (WTFBBQ!) - and switched to using correctly hashed+salted passwords we had dozens of support calls from angry/frustrated (and yet unsophisticated...) users who said they were no-longer able to login because they never bothered to remember their password, they'd just ask their tenant-admin to tell them their own password (aiaaiaiiaiaiia) and now they couldn't do it anymore. We asked why they couldn't use the forgot-password page or a magic-link to login and they said it doesn't work because they all used fake e-mail addresses for their users (*dies*) (these tenant accounts were all set-up before things were fixed, and accounts with invalid/unverified e-mail addresses were just grandfathered-in). We do also support OIDC (we are our own IdP, as well), so to try to make things easier for our users we'll be adding O365/AzAD soon, with sign-in-with-Google (and maybe sign-in with Facebook... excuse me while I take a cold shower) so at least some users can dispense with having a separate user-account they need to remember details for. ...so things were awful, now they're just bad, and they're getting better - but things could always be worse: Our main competitor is an on-prem VB6 app that pushes data to a "cloud" (i.e. Internet-exposed) SQL Server running off a business/residential IP address with a hardcoded SQL login userID and password shared by everyone (all of their tenants!). ------------------ ...this is what the LoB software world is like. There is so much room for improvement everywhere - but all the competent uni grads join some glamorous FAANGMA company after school (well, I'm guilty of that myself...) - but I wish they'd consider un-sexy LoB software: it pays much better than FAANGMA provided you're competent and know how to negotiate. I think the LoB area gets a bad rep just because it's generally where (for want of a better phrase) less-talented people end-up which brings down the average total-comp. I'm rambling at 3am again, ugh...
    - dcow 5y ago
      LoB is line of business? What are a few examples of LoB software companies and roles? Walmart secops?
      - DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
        Yeah. We’re not in any big company - far from it. If this was the last decade I guess we’d be called a Micro-ISV. I don’t know what the current trendy name is though.
raverbashing 5y ago
For real, VSCode is one of the "champions" of this. Yes, I'm sure the new Golang extension is very cool or that I need to setup this other module but for now I'm just worried about what I need to do
- WastingMyTime89 5y ago
  VSCode opens a page of content in an editor tab next to what you are doing. That’s pretty much as unobtrusive as it gets. You can just close it and move on. It’s just there if you want to and is a nice way to signal that it did indeed update as everything is pretty much automatic. Also it’s very easy to reopen later which was the OP complaint against popups. Now that I think about it, VSCode is pretty much best in class when it comes to update content notifications.
  - raverbashing 5y ago
    Yes but I'm talking about the bottom right pop-ups

Same complaint for those annoying "how to use our website or Electron app" tutorials the first time you sign in or after updates. Make help discoverable, don't ram it down our throats, please.

DaiPlusPlus 5y ago

Sorry, but we have to :) We added loads of genuinely useful new features to our SaaS app over the past year, such as the ability to mute notifications, quick user-switching with a PIN, and non-exclusive user role membership, and more - despite mentioning this in our monthly user newsletter we still get peppered with support emails and feature-requests for things that already exist! Additionally our feature-usage data showed that users just weren’t using them. After we added a forced (but only 15 second long) new-feature-tour those support tickets evaporated and user-satisfaction went up. Gotta use tough-love, it seems. —————— Users are weird - we have a bog-standard “user menu” in the top-right corner that’s got the usual visual-affordances and opened by just hovering your name and avatars - with menu items like Logout, Switch User, Dark Mode, etc - but to our surprise the vast majority of our users simply never explore the software.

dcow 5y ago
Maybe it could be opt out at the end of the first onboard/tutorial.. "Thanks, but I'll explore the software on my own from now on [x]"?
- DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
  We considered it, but (in this case) the application's use-case is on shared/communual "front-line" machines (hence why we added quick-user-switching), so even though ostensibly a single, human user is logged-in, we honestly don't know who is actually using the machine, and some other user who is just borrowing a machine could easily dismiss a tour/onboarding intended for the actual user who is logged-in. If you think that's bad, when we overhauled some incompetently written code (from a dodgy contractor before I joined) that stored passwords using reversible-encryption (ARGH!) - which was for a "feature" that allowed tenant-admins to reveal their own users' passwords (WTFBBQ!) - and switched to using correctly hashed+salted passwords we had dozens of support calls from angry/frustrated (and yet unsophisticated...) users who said they were no-longer able to login because they never bothered to remember their password, they'd just ask their tenant-admin to tell them their own password (aiaaiaiiaiaiia) and now they couldn't do it anymore. We asked why they couldn't use the forgot-password page or a magic-link to login and they said it doesn't work because they all used fake e-mail addresses for their users (*dies*) (these tenant accounts were all set-up before things were fixed, and accounts with invalid/unverified e-mail addresses were just grandfathered-in). We do also support OIDC (we are our own IdP, as well), so to try to make things easier for our users we'll be adding O365/AzAD soon, with sign-in-with-Google (and maybe sign-in with Facebook... excuse me while I take a cold shower) so at least some users can dispense with having a separate user-account they need to remember details for. ...so things were awful, now they're just bad, and they're getting better - but things could always be worse: Our main competitor is an on-prem VB6 app that pushes data to a "cloud" (i.e. Internet-exposed) SQL Server running off a business/residential IP address with a hardcoded SQL login userID and password shared by everyone (all of their tenants!). ------------------ ...this is what the LoB software world is like. There is so much room for improvement everywhere - but all the competent uni grads join some glamorous FAANGMA company after school (well, I'm guilty of that myself...) - but I wish they'd consider un-sexy LoB software: it pays much better than FAANGMA provided you're competent and know how to negotiate. I think the LoB area gets a bad rep just because it's generally where (for want of a better phrase) less-talented people end-up which brings down the average total-comp. I'm rambling at 3am again, ugh...
  - dcow 5y ago
    LoB is line of business? What are a few examples of LoB software companies and roles? Walmart secops?
    - DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
      Yeah. We’re not in any big company - far from it. If this was the last decade I guess we’d be called a Micro-ISV. I don’t know what the current trendy name is though.

raverbashing 5y ago

For real, VSCode is one of the "champions" of this. Yes, I'm sure the new Golang extension is very cool or that I need to setup this other module but for now I'm just worried about what I need to do

WastingMyTime89 5y ago
VSCode opens a page of content in an editor tab next to what you are doing. That’s pretty much as unobtrusive as it gets. You can just close it and move on. It’s just there if you want to and is a nice way to signal that it did indeed update as everything is pretty much automatic. Also it’s very easy to reopen later which was the OP complaint against popups. Now that I think about it, VSCode is pretty much best in class when it comes to update content notifications.
- raverbashing 5y ago
  Yes but I'm talking about the bottom right pop-ups