The other huge problem is you never tell the user what they'll get out of the tour. People will invest in a tour if they understand the reward (and "learning" can't be the reward).

Instead of product tours I like how AWS has little info/help buttons that are placed right next to every informational/actionable element on their dashboard. Totally unobtrusive. If you want to understand something on the dashboard that is not obvious at first, you can click on the info/help button that opens a side panel with a lot more information about that particular element (and any associated topics). Most of the time, you just know what you are dealing with (or can guess what that particular topic might mean and you will probably be right).

Every time some software tool displays one of those "helpful" messages - "We've reshuffled these features, so now they're hidden over here!" I get angry and dismiss the popups as quickly as possible.

I've got a task to accomplish, I wasn't just sitting around with nothing to do.

Imagine you get in your car to drive to work, and the dashboard displays a pop-up that tries to show you the latest feature. No!

I had the great fortune for a major steel company. They had regular "training day"s where basically there is an hour long session where the team showed what new capabilities and fixes the software got and perhaps more importantly collect real user feedback on what they thought.

Too bad I didn't get to work there for long but I loved their stance that everybody should personally make safety the first priority, not just because the company requires you to do so but because your safety really is your priority.

So yes, this was before 2014 but I still think these kind of "training" and feedback should be a two way street, not a series of next I have to press to get the software to shut up.

In some countries engineers wear a ring on their pinky to remind them of their obligation to ethics, safety and humility in engineering practice.

In the US engineers don't get that ring and they implement product tours.

Every moment (token?) spent interrupting a user to introduce a feature should instead be spent making the feature more intuitive instead.

I would expand this to "why most software notifications get skipped". Because they are in the interest of the vendor and get in my way! The amount of interruptions on a given day, be it in desktop software or saas products, is absolutely ridiculous. "What did you think about this feature ?". "Did you know you can use our AI agent ?".

The Product Manager needs to justify their job.

Something similar that annoys me for the same reason is the "there is an update! update now?" popups you get on launch. I want to use the product right now, not wait for it to update before I use it. I wonder if it would be better to get those popups when you try to close the product, it'll say "there's an update available. Do you want to update, or just close right now?". Then it's not getting in your way when you're trying to use it. Or the steam method of just updating things when you're not using them, though that does require a separate launcher program

This isn't that hard. Most of the time, the "changes" are useless UI Slop: "we've moved notifications to this TOTALLY BETTER OTHER SPOT IN THE SCREEN that one of our designers snuck a commit in with and nobody wanted to argue about it, because the last time it just came down to differing opinions. Its not really better but it's different!"

And the other reason is because most users probably have day jobs and need to get something done.