Coach marks must be skippable and available to see again
Aliases: skip tour · replay coach mark · dismissible spotlight
What it is
A coach mark sits inside someone else’s task. They must be able to take the task back at once, and they must be able to fetch the same explanation later, when that step is actually needed. Skip and revisit are two faces of one right: not now does not mean never; having seen it now does not mean having to finish a whole tour. Without skip, the bubble is a forced lesson. Without revisit, skip is permanent loss.
Why it happens
The licence to interrupt comes from “you may refuse.” Skip returns control: this sentence does not enter working memory now, and the main task continues. Need for the teaching often lags — Export is useless on the first visit and needed on the third. If skip destroys the copy, the lagged need has no door, and people guess or hunt a help centre. Revisit turns the same explanation into summonable help rather than a one-shot advert. Skip must be an explicit control, not only a scrim tap: in some implementations a scrim tap walks to “next,” and the user thinks they are closing while they are lengthening the interruption. The revisit entry should sit next to the feature being taught, not on a one-time welcome page, or the entry is gone when the need arrives.
Studying it
With and without skip, and with or without a way to reopen the copy from the feature, intercept people mid-task with a coach mark. Record how long the main task is blocked, skip rate, and whether the explanation can be found later when the feature is actually used. Independent variables: whether skip is explicit, where the revisit entry lives. Dependent variables: block duration, lagged recovery success. No skip should show waiting or random tapping; no revisit should show a second failure at the feature.
Where it stops holding
Copy that must be seen for safety or compliance is not a coach mark and does not skip; that is a modal or persistent notice. A revisit entry that appears only for accounts that already saw the tour leaves a user on a new device with neither skip (already past) nor revisit. Auto-popping on every release and refusing skip locks returning users in a changelog. Skip should not mean “never show any help again”; that extends refusal of one bubble into shutting the whole help system.
Applying it
- Give every coach mark an explicit skip or close whose action is “dismiss the teaching layer,” not “next.”
- Keep a reopenable copy next to the taught feature (a help icon, a menu item) with the same content as the bubble.
- Skip suppresses auto-pop; it does not delete the summonable copy.
- How to check: skip once, then do a task that needs the feature, and see whether the same explanation can be called from beside the feature. If it cannot, revisit does not exist.