One week back while i was browsing the Internet i read this comment by some one which said that in-app tours are nothing more than band aids to bad design. It infuriated me! the part that got me worked up the most was not the band-aid bit but the two terms "nothing more". The past few years i have been observing this trend of people over-stressing on UX and usability telling that it is the solution to make your app popular. The movement has become so blind that people now-a-days assume that getting a usability expert and getting him to come and redo your app, would make the app a super success over night and would make your users love it the second they start clicking away. Because of this blind belief people have come to a more deadlier conclusion, that UX alone will make your app usable and an app without UX would become unusable. Thus to people like these, in app tours and other aides are nothing more than patches, Band-aids, that try to cover up poor UX design underneath. I never ever could understand this logic. Coming from a background of mechanical engineering, I always try to draw parlance to Ergonomics and I am going to try explaining to these people why they are so wrong. While designing a physical product, engineers consider ergonomics of the design. Simply put it is a process to make it easy for the user to use the object based on his physical, cognitive and environmental limitations. That is why your microwave has a instant heat button, and your photo copier's instant copy button is made large. Usability in web app development is something similar, it is about making it easy for the user to "use" the app without having to put a thought into it. Usability starts and ends there, and using it as a tool for on-boarding your customers is like giving an ergonomically designed food processor to a person who has never entered the kitchen. Simple and important steps like:

• Developing the desire in the person to cook.
• Helping him out with recipes on how to cook,

etc are forgotten. Assuming that a "usable" web app will get your new user productive is like assuming that giving an ergonomically designed food processor would make a kitchen novice a chef de cordon bleu. What we web app developers keep forgetting constantly is this tiny little booklet that comes along with the ergonomically designed food processor. The Instruction Manual. A lot of us have no documentation, and a lot more of us have crappy documentation that goes no where near helping the end user. We have a habit of giving circuit diagrams of the food processor when all the person wants to know is how to whip cream quickly. This is exactly where in-app tours and other such aides come in. It aims to help your user quickly overcome the learning curve associated with a new app and hence get your user to become productive. If properly used, its not a superficial plastic surgery on top of your app, but a genuine effort to get your users to appreciate whatever usability you have built into your system. In short its the missing instruction manual, which is to the point and which is just a click away!