In Defense Of The Humble App Walkthrough

Editor’s note: Aaron Travis is vice president of user experience at Citigroup and CEO of PolySuite.com. Follow him on Twitter @attravis.
When starting a new web or mobile app, you may find yourself confronted with an instructional walkthrough illustration or help text indicating how to use it. If you are a technophile who looks at new apps every day, you might quickly dismiss these aids and wonder why designers keep adding these things that just get in the way of using the app.
There are intense debates about this subject, as shown by the article If you see a UI walkthrough, they blew it by Max Rudberg, currently  trending on Hacker News, or the follow-up Rethinking The Mobile App Walkthrough by TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez.
Although I’ve been working in UI design for 15 years, I would rather share a personal story about how walkthroughs help a sizable portion of the user population, which just happens to include my wife.

Driving Directions: The Walkthrough Vs. The Map

A few years ago (before smartphones) my wife and I sat down in the car to drive to a wedding.  “I printed the directions from Google Maps,” she told me, and handed me a stack of printed pages. “Where is the map view?” I asked, concerned as I flipped through them.  “Oh, I only printed the turn-by-turn directions. I never use the maps.” she replied.
Panic immediately set in for me. You see, I always prefer to see the bird’s-eye view of where I’m going. It gives me a more complete understanding of the environment and helps me to navigate better. The idea of blindly going step-by-step through a sequence until arriving at a destination makes me nervous. What if we get off track? Clearly, my wife has the opposite view, finding it easier to follow the directions rather than interpreting a map while driving.