
The Slippery Slope of In-Product Messaging - skilled
https://matthewstrom.com/writing/wayfinding.html
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snlacks
I agree with the idea that there's too much reliance on in-app education, but
this post quickly starts snowballing false metaphors into an extreme of a
label is bad design.

There is nothing inherently wrong with the link to the inbox saying "inbox"

Users don't know what all your iconography means.

App design isn't just graphic design or industrial design. It's not airport or
device design either.

The app has two purposes, the user wants and what the app provider wants. The
problems become more challenging when those two parties desires don't match.
Making an app that makes it easy to buy something, take a note, edit an image,
or share something with people isn't rocket science with modern OSes and
Libraries. These choices are central to discussion because metrics started
becoming more important than the core use.

Sometimes this makes business sense, like in a social media app where they
want you to stay longer after you share. But this isn't only true because it's
a crowded market. Sometimes it doesn't, where a sales app loses sales because
they try too hard to move people from what people came to buy to another thing
(another product, a membership, a extended warranty, a social media share).

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evrydayhustling
I agree that the industrial design metaphors are iffy, for a different reason.
SaaS and apps are WAY easier to redistribute than physical goods and
structures. In-app education works well as a way to confirm problems and
iterate on solutions while en route to "fixing the underlying problem".

The choice between lengthy design cycles to fix core problems and quick fixes
via in app education is a false dichotomy. Use both!

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winslett
Yes! I spent 36 months at a company, which had organizational walls between
product, engineering, marketing, and "growth".

With these tools, "growth" learned they could inject messaging using
javascript to nudge users along instead of working to improve the underlying
product. Other teams had NPS scores asking for ratings before the product was
even used. Marketing put messaging on their pages to high-jack conversations
and push lead-gen for sales. The customer experience and the budget was being
pulled in 10 directions.

Unlike the article's issue being a product issue, this issue was an
organizational issue. The messaging and tools meant that teams could actively
pursue their own goals without working together.

~~~
dkuebric
In my experience this is the real issue, and what I expected to read about in
the post. The democratization of adding in-page content is both powerful and
easily abused. There's little measurement of what the impact of these types of
prompts is, save for what engagement they drive directly through the widget.
They can clutter the UI and deteriorate the brand. In many cases they look out
of place and are tone deaf to the customer. In the worst case, they're
basically in-app advertisements.

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pedalpete
Absolutely!

We been conscious to not add any messaging or "hints" in our app because it is
a crutch.

We have a group of select users who get to see early new features so we can
get feedback on usability. We thought we had the right design, but one of
users couldn't figure it out. I asked him a few questions which lead him to
the solution (I didn't just want to tell him how to do it, but see what his
discovery experience would be like), and the users suggestion was to add a "?"
icon which would tell people how to use it.

We knew we didn't want to do this and went back to the drawing board to find a
new design solution. We found it, and everyone is SO much happier with the new
design.

Feel the pain of bad design, and embrace it. It forces you to come up with
better solutions.

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bonyt
> The Auvi-Q is designed with the cap and needle on the same end – and had a
> success rate of over 90 percent.

Not the best example. The Auvi-Q is different in more ways than that - it
actually speaks its instructions aloud to the user. I would say that it has
much more “in-product messaging.”

[https://youtu.be/d3PntHvNiTY](https://youtu.be/d3PntHvNiTY)

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kiwee
[https://agilemanifesto.org/](https://agilemanifesto.org/) > Working software
over comprehensive documentation

In-app education = documentation

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NewsAware
An interesting situation is when the app has cues to a user's current intent.
In such cases it wouldn't want to totally rearrange the UI on the fly (move
the food court) for the user as the user expects consistency (and the cue
might be wrong). Maybe this is a case where contextual messaging makes sense.

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vicpara
In app messages, guidance can be helpful, sometimes, when applied in a
conscious manner. Great apps don't come with an user guide. Neither should
your app.

When to navigate your app requires upfront manual reading you're doing
something wrong.

