These screenshots show my first time experience with Tidy, an iPhone app that helps organize photos stored in a phone’s camera reel.
The good bits:
- Although Tidy’s product tour is optional, it leverages it as a bit of a diversionary tactic to help educate new users while their photos are being indexed. The status of photo indexing is represented as a loading bar at the bottom of the screen throughout the tour.
- Upon reaching the primary UI of the app, Tidy uses just-in-time tooltips that highlight actions and UI elements as the user progresses to various areas of the interface. This approach is more helpful than coachmarks since the app needs to teach users about new interactions, and actions available on different screens. Additionally, the tooltips are well designed: they use a highlight to focus on a small area of the screen; they are stylistically consistent; and they’re kept short and sweet.
- There is appropriate use of inline cues on screens where the goal is to inform the user about secondary interactions or provide blank slate information. In these cases, tooltips would be heavy-handed and too temporal.
- And this may go without saying for an app like this, but, no account required! Huzzah!
To be improved:
- The required product tour goes for much longer than the photo indexing time–iOS handles this rather quickly. By the second screen of the tutorial the loading bar showed that my photos were ready, but I had to get all the way to the end of the tour to see them.
- Many of the product tour screens have embedded video clips, which hinders a new user from quickly skimming the tour so they can get started with the app.
- There doesn’t appear to be a way to repeat the just-in-time tooltips. Because some of the tooltips introduce gestures that are contrary to normal iPhone interactions (for example, long tap on a photo thumbnail to view a photo, where in other apps it would just be a regular tap), it is likely users will stumble and need a reminder. Or, the app to use more well-recognized gestures…