4 reasons why onboarding tours and coach marks don’t work

App tours and coach marks hurt your onboarding customer experience.

Cringe.

You know that feeling when you download an app or log in to a SaaS product, and you see that tour or the stupid overlay with instructions on how to use it?

That feeling you get because you have to click through a bunch of $h!@ just to get to do what you want to do?

It’s 2021 and we’ve been through enough over the last year. At the very least, let’s not put people through clearly bad user experiences anymore.

Here are four reasons why that kind of onboarding experience blows. And how to make it better.

1. People don’t read instructions.

Onboarding coach marks, tours, and tutorials are a nuisance to click past, interrupting your customer’s mental state and use flow.

Short-term memory really is short-term.

Users typically forget everything as soon as they close the tutorial because our short-term memory doesn’t retain very much information.