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When you view a Stack Exchange site without being logged in, you see a friendly banner, prompting you to take a tour and understand the features of the site:

enter image description here

This links off to a high quality resource that can help new users understand how the site works. However, the moment a user signs up to the site, this banner disappears from immediate view and hides itself as a link under the help menu.

My proposal is to continue showing this banner until one of the following conditions are met;

  • The user gets the "Informed" badge
  • The user reaches a set amount of reputation (250 or 500 should be sufficient)
  • The user chooses to hide the banner

This should increase the exposure of the tour to new users, who are the people who need the tour, rather than hiding it the moment a user signs up.

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    I think that new users seeing and reading through the tour is important enough that we maybe even send the user a notification after they create an account advising of its existence - not only would that make them notice the top bar and familiarise themselves with getting notifications, but it would further increase the chance they see the tour - maybe something like: "Welcome to <sitename>, <user>! We have a quick tour that you can go through that explains how we work here, to view it now simply click this message!"
    – Flyk
    Commented Jan 22, 2014 at 18:10
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    This seems like a good suggestion to me. Anything that improves new user experience is okay with me.
    – Buns Glazing
    Commented Jan 22, 2014 at 19:12
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    I like it. Anything that improves old user experience with new users is okay with me.
    – Lightness Races in Orbit
    Commented Jan 29, 2014 at 18:07

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I would like to propose a variation to your proposal in which we be more insistent about users being aware of what is in the Tour of each site they use.

Each site can customize the beginning of their Tour, and so taking the Tour of one site does not necessarily mean that no other Tour ever needs to be taken.

I often see users who have been on a site for years being apparently unaware of customizations that site has made to its Tour.

I would like to propose that:

  • the Tour banner be shown to all users until they have obtained the Informed badge (for having taken the Tour)
  • if a Tour has not been customized by a site, and the Tour of a site without customizations has already been taken, then there is no need to show the Tour banner on that site.
  • when a Tour is customized for the first time, or has its Tour customizations further modified, then a banner mentioning that the Tour has been (further) customized should be shown once to all users.
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