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* The Business of Software

Just wondering if you as a customer find a "Tip of the Day" feature something that is useful to you?


BTW, I make a small $99 general product.

No. I hate them with a passion you can only dream of.

The ones in WarCraft II were moderately helpful.

I haven't found any other product where they're very helpful, though.  The problem is that they never come up when I'm doing something; they come up at the beginning, and then I'm supposed to remember them later on.

Ideally there'd be some way that you could link them to what the user was doing, but also without being too obnoxious about it.  Maybe a "Tips" button on various forms, for instance, that were sensitive to context.

They are never helpful to me.

The worst is when it's something like a programming language IDE, and the tip says "Click on View / Window / then Cascade to see many windows at once".

Ack.

Sometimes they are more insightful - I'm sure - but I turn them off instantly regardless.

The problems with Tips of the Day are:

-They slow you down when all you want to do is start the damn app,
-They add to information load some trival factoid.

Best one I've seen is in Snagit 8, but that said, I think this feature does a poor job of solving the problem.

Now, a weekly popup to a flash movie at your site where you walk through using X to do Y would be another kettle of fish!

The ones in Limewire (http://www.limewire.com) were useful but I turned them off after a while. If you're going to do this feature, then instead of displaying a typical "Next/Prev/Close" dialog box, show a little yellow line on top of the main work area which has a tip/other message. See this post on my blog to see an example screenshot of this sort of screen:

http://www.phplazy.com/blog/be-different.html

When I discovered that Tucows was REQUIRING a tip of the day splash screen to get the covetted five-cows, I realized why so many shareware apps still had this years after extensive research at the big software companies realized it was worse than useless.

Apparently at Tucows there was a lot of protests at the shoddy, ad-hoc, and inconsistent quality of their reviews, so they simply made their review process a moronic checklist that could be done by anyone without regards to the specific quality of the application. And that's when Tucows 5 cows award became completely devalued.

I think Microsoft Office 'invented' these. They removed them sooooo long ago.

The problem is that you get the tips at the least convinient time. You just started the app and wanted to do something with it, not read tips.

Additionally, people just don't put enough effort to make the tips interesting.

You can always put tips and video tutorials on your web site and put links in the help file, but definitely don't add 'tips-o-the-day'.

+1 for -1 on the tips.

Re Tucows - I recently read an interesting take on Tucows reviews from a security software perspective. The writer pointed out that Tucows visitors may think they're getting a "top rated" security product based on the performance, not just because it meet Tucows silly rating scheme.

I think that a "Tip of the Day" feature that can be selected from the help menu instead of popped up at startup would be nice.

I already created a tip of the day dialog for my next application because I want to put my "Buy Now" button there for my trial version.

A tip of the day works great if you have an application that does some time consuming processing and leaves the user watching a progress bar. Lots of installation programs support something similar.

Why not have it off by default and let those who desire it enable it?

Because the people who most need it are the ones least likely to even find it, yet alone be able to turn it on.

+1 to Adrian

If your app is doing processing that will take 7-8 seconds or more, why not plug in a tip along with the boring 'please wait' dialog?

Most games do this whenever they load levels, etc. Works like a charm. Also works great for installers. Why not in real apps?

"A tip of the day works great if you have an application that does some time consuming processing and leaves the user watching a progress bar."

Maybe you could even sell the advertising space in the progress bar box.

"Don't want to wait so long? Need a faster computer? Click here to buy online: www.hardware-vendor.com"

;)

It's gotta have a don't bother me again checkbox, and I don't think I'd base a buy/not buy decision on this feature, but they can be good for complex programs.

For instance, in most programs I generally ignore them.

But in, say, Paint Shop Pro, I used to deliberately click on Next Tip whenever I started the program, until I found a Tip I didn't know. This way I learnt something new and useful each time I ran the program - at the start its very helpful.

Later it can be a pain.

Here's my Tip of the Day:  Tip of the Day features suck.

When a dialog is displayed, uninvited, at an app's start-up, it's annoying.  Dialogs in shareware programmers that do this, are called "nag screens", and wanting to be rid of them is apparently enough incentive to get many users to pay money.

"If your app is doing processing that will take 7-8 seconds or more, why not plug in a tip along with the boring 'please wait' dialog? Most games do this whenever they load levels, etc. Works like a charm. Also works great for installers. Why not in real apps?"
Because in a "real app" I'm trying to get real work done. When that tip displays along with the progress bar, it's more text to read, understand and process for my mind. I have only a limited amount of room in my mind to focus my attention on things. And I have enough things to do as it is, so thanks, but no thanks.

I use a app that does this exact thing btw, and each time the tips shows up (in a non intrusive manner) it is distracting and frustrating. Each time I wish I could smack something against that developer's head.