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Recently, this post came up on Meta, and they brought up a good point (paraphrased):

I should have read the tour, but i couldn't even find it or even know that one existed. When you ask for help, you don't expect to first have to learn how you're supposed to do it.

I feel as though this could have been avoided if this user were pushed through the tour page immediately after sign-up. It provides a bite-sized digest that explains how the site works, and brings new users up to speed about how to best leverage this site.

Furthermore, it provides links to the full-fledged help center, which contains valuable resources like the ever-linked How To Ask? and How To Answer? pages. (Ideally, these would be linked from the tour itself, but one thing at a time.)

Would it be possible to redirect a new user to the Tour immediately after sign in or add a banner to new users that haven't read the tour yet?

Example banner:

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I'd go for the option of having a banner that reminds the user. By "banner" I mean a bar at the top like that one that appears to tell people that the site is about to go into read only mode for maintenance, or that a question one is composing an answer to has been closed. (I think that's what you mean by "banner," too.) This banner should include a link to the tour page and it should not appear constantly, nor in a way that is annoying to users. It should be easy to dismiss this banner and immediately obvious how to do so. The goal should be to get readers to take the tour the moment they are actually going to pay attention to what it says and not a moment sooner. Doing this wrong is worse than not doing it at all.

If we force people to scroll to the bottom of the tour before they can use the site, then the tour will be like one of those license agreements you have to scroll through to click Accept. By this I don't just mean that people won't really read it because they just want to move forward to use the site, but also that people will interpret the requirement to complete the tour as a meaningless hurdle imposed by a whole bunch of aloof folks in suits in a faraway boardroom.

Since it is possible to post user-contributed content on the site without registering--this is at least permitted for answers--making the tour part of the registration process would fail to reach many of the people who would most stand to benefit from it. It is also possible to take the tour before registering. At minimum, users who have already completed the tour before registering should not be forced, or even automatically suggested, to do so again. That should be easy to prevent because when one completes the tour one is awarded the Informed badge, which already carries over through registration.

Whatever we do, under no circumstances should the tour reminder take the form of a funny red dot appearing randomly atop an incomprehensible stapler icon.

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I totally agree with Eliah but I would say we need to add a few thingsto the tour page. Also make the banner more cacthing so people wanted to read it. Example: Read the tour page to earn reputaion. Also we need like a whole group to ask for the banner so it would be taken.

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  • About the tour page we need to add a few "threats" so new users wont post bad questions (had the experience myself).
    – user750983
    Commented Oct 28, 2017 at 7:19

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