Is "tip-of-the-day" good? [closed]

Question

Many programs (often large ones, like MS Office, The GIMP, Maxthon) have a feature called "tip-of-the-day". It explains a small part of the program, like this one in Maxthon:

"You can hide/show the main menu bar by pressing Ctrl+F11"

You can usually browse through them by clicking next. And other options provided are "Previous", "Close", "Do not show at startup".

I think I like the way Maxthon used to handle this; in the browser's statusbar (down at the bottom usually, together with "Done", the progress-bar etc), there would sometimes be a small hint or tip on what else you could do with it.

As Joel Spolsky wrote in his article-series "User Interface Design for Programmers", people don't like reading manuals. But we still want them to use the program, and the features they could benefit from, don't we? Therefore, I think it is useful to have such a feature, without the annoyance of the pop-up on startup.

What do you think? Pop-up? Maxthonstyle? No way?

Answer 1

I really only like the idea of a "tip of the day" if it is displayed when I can't do anything else anyway. For example, when the program is loading a large file. Suppose it has to load some large amount of data when the program is first started. Along with the "loading" splash screen, show a small tip, and have it disappear when the program starts. It's simple, unobtrusive, and can sometimes be very helpful to some users.

I hate to bring up "World of Warcraft" as an example in a programming discussion, but it uses this technique when you first login. Here is an example loading screen. Along with the loading bar and a full screen piece of art, it displays a small tip at the bottom of the screen. Usually these tips lead users to things they can explore further (such as a settings window, character customization tools, etcetera). For example, "Pressing ESCAPE will bring up a menu that lets you customize the the look and feel of the game".

Above all else: allow the user to easily close the tips and stop them from appearing each time. Make every key close the tip dialog when pressed. Have two buttons: "Close Tip" and "Close Tip and Never Show Again", or something to that effect.