Why is product onboarding almost always janky/broken/annoying?

Question

It seems like whenever I log into a new piece of software, I'm almost always hit with a bunch of in-app modals or messages explaining how to do tasks I don't want to do. On top of that, I get virtually the same irrelevant messages sent to me via email.I'm not saying I could do better necessarily. We even built an experience like this accidentally at a startup I worked at previously.The point is that the experience is super annoying, and it's a mystery to me why it keeps happening given that software companies have very strong incentives to get the onboarding experience right.Bad onboarding leads to less conversion which leads to less money.Why isn't this enough for companies to invest more in onboarding?

palmfacehn · Accepted Answer

There's always someone married to their petty objections. When release comes around, they want you to add modals to inform the user of irrelevant info related to their concerns. Another variation is the "feature showcaser". This guy wanted a new feature added. It was easier to appease him by adding the feature. Explaining why the feature was silly would take more repeated discussion time than just building it. Now he thinks these features should be showcased in the tutorial.
I put it down to too many cooks in the kitchen. Users can't README.TXT. There's no box with the software, so there's no helpful chart of hotkeys either.
The easiest, most palatable solution will always be adding the stupid tutorial and allowing it to be dismissed with a "Never show me this again" checkbox.