I was watching a user session last Tuesday when it hit me like a badly-timed modal.
A new user had just signed up for this productivity app - let's call it "TaskMaster Pro" because they all have names like that. They landed on the dashboard, and immediately a cheerful modal popped up: "Welcome! Let us show you around in just 3 minutes!"
Two buttons: a big blue "Get Started" and a modest gray "Maybe Later."
They clicked "Maybe Later" before the modal finished loading.
Three minutes later, they were clicking around like a confused tourist in a foreign airport. Five minutes after that, they closed the tab and presumably went back to using sticky notes like a civilized person.
Here's the kicker: this person had just paid $19/month for a solution to their productivity problems. They wanted to succeed. But we'd trained them, in that first precious moment of motivation, to choose ignorance over guidance.
And we thought we were being polite about it.
The "Polite" Way to Abandon Your Users
"Maybe Later" buttons feel like good UX design, don't they? We're giving users control. We're respecting their autonomy. We're not being those pushy companies that force ten-step tutorials down people's throats.
I used to design exactly like this. I'd craft these thoughtful onboarding flows, spend weeks perfecting the copy, then dutifully add a "Maybe Later" button because, well, what if someone doesn't want to learn right now?
What a considerate designer I was. Also, what an idiot.
Here's what I learned after obsessively tracking user behavior across dozens of products: "Maybe Later" almost never means "later." It means "never," with a small side of guilt.
Users who clicked "Maybe Later" on onboarding flows had 73% higher churn rates than those who completed the guidance. Not because they were less motivated (they'd literally just opened their wallets) but because we'd given them explicit permission to stay confused.
We were like a GPS that asks, "Want directions to your destination, or would you prefer to wander around lost for a while?"
The Three Ways "Maybe Later" Sabotages Success
When you slap a "Maybe Later" button on something important, you're accidentally sending three devastating messages:
"This probably isn't urgent." If it really mattered, you wouldn't make it optional. That's the subconscious logic users apply, even to things like learning how your core product works.
"Please make decisions without information." You're asking someone to choose whether they need guidance before they understand what they're being guided through. It's like asking someone at the entrance of IKEA if they want a map before they've seen how big the place is.
"Your success can wait." Every piece of guidance they defer becomes a problem they'll encounter later - except now they'll be alone, frustrated, and probably writing a passive-aggressive support ticket.
The Day I Watched Someone Choose to Fail
A few months ago, I was user-testing a collaboration feature for a design tool. A woman (let's call her Sarah because that's a nice, professional name that won't get me sued) discovered our shared cursor functionality for the first time.
A helpful tooltip appeared, explaining how team cursors worked. Two options: "Got it, thanks!" and "Maybe Later."
Sarah clicked "Maybe Later" faster than I could blink. Not because she wasn't interested in collaboration - her whole reason for upgrading was to work with her team. She clicked it because the tooltip felt like an interruption, and interruptions are annoying when you're trying to get stuff done.
Ten minutes later, Sarah tried to collaborate with her teammate. She couldn't figure out why she couldn't see his cursor. Five minutes of increasingly frustrated clicking ensued. Finally, she messaged him: "Is this cursor thing broken?"
She wanted to learn. She needed to learn. But we'd trained her to postpone learning until she was already failing at the thing she was trying to learn.
It was like watching someone decline swimming lessons and then jump in the deep end.
What Users Actually Want (Hint: It's Not More Buttons)
The products that feel effortless don't give you escape hatches from learning - they make learning feel effortless.
After studying apps with suspiciously low support ticket volumes, the pattern became clear: they don't ask users to choose between learning and doing. They weave learning into doing so seamlessly you don't notice it's happening.
They design guidance that feels native, not invasive. Instead of modal pop-ups that block everything, they use contextual hints that appear exactly when you need them. It's the difference between someone tapping you on the shoulder mid-conversation and someone quietly sliding you a note when you look confused.
They anchor learning to outcomes, not features. They don't teach "how to use advanced filtering." They teach "how to find that one customer you were thinking about." When guidance helps you accomplish something you actually want to do, you engage with it.
They make skipping possible but slightly annoying. If someone really wants to bypass something important, fine - but they have to work a tiny bit harder for it. A gentle confirmation like "This takes 30 seconds and prevents common mistakes - skip anyway?" isn't manipulation. It's context.
They create obvious paths back to help. If users genuinely aren't ready right now, they make it dead simple to find guidance later. Not buried in a help center that requires three clicks and a search, but right there in the interface where it makes sense.
The Audit That Will Humble You
Here's a fun exercise that will make you question your life choices: Go through your product and count how many "Maybe Later" buttons you have on flows that matter.
Then ask yourself:
- If 70% of users click "Maybe Later," why are you interrupting them in the first place?
- If this guidance is important enough to interrupt for, why are you making it optional?
- What percentage of your support tickets are questions about things you tried to teach people on day one?
I did this exercise with a client last month. They found 23 different "Maybe Later" buttons across their onboarding flow. Twenty-three opportunities for users to choose confusion over clarity.
Their support team was getting 200+ tickets a week about basic functionality. Functionality they'd built an entire tutorial about. Functionality that 78% of users had explicitly chosen not to learn about.
What Happens When You Stop Being So "Polite"
've worked with teams that removed "Maybe Later" buttons from critical flows entirely. The results are wonderfully predictable:
- Initial completion rates go up (shocking, I know)
- Support tickets about basic functionality drop dramatically
- User activation improves because people actually know how to use the thing they paid for
- Teams start designing better onboarding because they can't fall back on "users can skip it if they want"
But the most interesting change is cultural. When you can't defer user education to some hypothetical future moment of perfect motivation, you start asking better questions: Is this the right time to show this? Is this information actually helpful? Can we make this feel less like homework and more like help?
Removing escape hatches forces you to design experiences that users actually want to engage with. And when you do that properly, you don't need escape hatches.
The Real Choice You're Making
Here's the choice I think about now when I'm tempted to add a "Maybe Later" button: Do I want users to succeed immediately, or do I want them to feel like they had control over their eventual failure? Those aren't the same thing. And optimizing for the illusion of control at the expense of actual success is a trade-off that serves no one.
Users don't want more choices:
- They want better outcomes.
- They want to feel capable and confident using your product.
- They want to accomplish their goals without friction, frustration, or having to become amateur detectives to figure out how your interface works.
"Maybe Later" optimize for the wrong metric. They optimize for politeness over effectiveness, comfort over capability, theoretical user agency over actual user success.
And there's nothing polite about letting people fail when you could have helped them succeed.
Your Next Steps (No "Maybe Later" Option)
If you recognize your product in this post, and statistically speaking, you probably do, here's what to do about it:
Audit your "Maybe Later" buttons. Count them. Then ask yourself: if this is skippable, why are you showing it? If it's not skippable, why does the button exist?
Watch actual user sessions. Not highlight reels from usability tests, but raw footage of people trying to use your product. Count how often they skip guidance, then struggle with exactly what they skipped.
Track the correlation. Users who skip onboarding vs. users who complete it. Support ticket volume. Time to first value. The data will be depressing and motivating in equal measure.
Fix one flow completely. Don't try to solve everything at once. Pick the most important user journey and make it impossible to get lost. Then measure what changes.
The best products don't just work well - they teach people to succeed with them.
No "Maybe Later" required.