The problems you'll face developing product onboarding in-house
blog.dopt.comThe main problem with product onboarding tours is that statefull UIs are necessarilly challenging for the user. Using a modal editor like VIM requires training. Adding statefull elements such as an onboarding tour makes your product harder to use. Sure, it can add important information, but there are other ways of doing this. The best way to manage state in the user journey is to do so in a way that you can provide info to the customer success agents without exposing that state to the user. You can use off the shelf analytics for this. now the question is how best to teach your users to use your product. In my experience products are best taught via gifs showing snippets of example usage, engaging advertisements showing example usage, and blog posts that are well SEOd when the user inevitably asks google how to use your product. And well placed reddit threads where people ask how to use your product. For enterprise, the best way is to personally teach via videocall that one person whom everyone's gonna ask anyways...
Author here
I think it really depends. I agree that the prototypical pop something up in your face that forces you to interact with it and blocks your usage of the product make your product harder to use.
But stateful experiences don't inherently suffer from this problem. Checklists, embedded cards, context specific empty states, e.g. can all make products easier to use, and don't get in users' ways. And what someone should be shown should look different if they're in an empty product they need to setup, vs an experienced user that's very familiar with the product. Not treating these distinctly means you're compromising the experience for someone.
I do agree that keeping track of journey state in analytics tools, and getting that data to go to market teams are crucial too, but they won't make your product easier to use.