The Welcome Tutorial: brief, skippable, useful
Narraya's welcome tutorial: five steps, five minutes, skippable. Not an offence to the writer's intelligence, just a map of the shop.
Writers don't love tutorials. It's a small truth of our trade: those who spend their days searching for the right word nurse a legitimate suspicion toward anyone who claims to "explain" a tool to them. The subtext — not spoken, but felt — seems to be: "we're guiding you because on your own you wouldn't manage". And a writer, most of the time, does manage on their own. They always have.
Yet there is a welcome tutorial in Narraya. It's worth explaining why, and above all, what it is not.
It's not an offence to your intelligence
A tutorial, as we've designed it, doesn't assume you can't write. It only assumes that Narraya isn't Word, nor Scrivener, nor ChatGPT, nor any of the tools you've used before. It has its own concepts — narrative memory, credits, linked sheets, chapter kanban — and showing you once, in order, saves you the two hours of blind exploration you'd otherwise spend discovering them alone.
It's a pact: five minutes on first access, and the interface stops being opaque.
What the tutorial covers
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The library.
Where your books live, how to create new ones, how to organize them. Two minutes to understand the starting point of every session.
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The editor.
How to open a chapter, where to find focus mode, which are the essential shortcuts. No encyclopedic ambition: just the bones.
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The character sheets.
Where they're created, how they link to chapters, when it's worth filling them in. A structural feature worth a minute of attention.
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AI analysis and credits.
How to trigger an analysis, what it costs, why the cost is shown first. The part where Narraya differs most, and so deserves a clean exposition.
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Preferences.
Light/dark theme, interface language, notifications. Everything can be configured later, but it's worth knowing where they are.
If you skip the tutorial and after a week realize it would have helped, you don't need to create a new account. Go to Settings → Help → "Reopen welcome tutorial". You can redo it as many times as you want. Some users review it after a month: by then they have the right questions, and the tutorial's answers become clearer.
The tutorial is skippable, the banner is dismissible
On first access, a banner offers to start the tutorial. You can start it, postpone it, close it permanently. There's no wall: if you're the kind of person who prefers to explore a new interface bare-handed, Narraya doesn't stand in the way. The banner appears once, and if you dismiss it with "don't show again", it never comes back.
It's a small question of respect: any platform that forces you through a required introduction treats you like a novice to be tamed. We prefer treating you like an adult who decides what to read and when.
Three profiles, three experiences
The tutorial's usefulness varies greatly depending on what you've used before. We tell you up front, so you choose consciously.
You've never used a dedicated writing tool
You come from Word or Google Docs. The tutorial helps you greatly: character sheets, kanban, narrative memory are new concepts. We suggest going through it in full.
You're a Scrivener or yWriter veteran
You recognize the mental model of a structured writing tool. A quick pass is enough to see where Narraya distinguishes itself: AI memory, credits, editor inspired by print. You can skip the basics.
It's your first encounter with AI for writing
You've written books, perhaps even published, but AI you've never used in the process. The tutorial is valuable especially for the last step (AI analysis, credits): new concepts that deserve a proper framing.
What the tutorial does not do
It doesn't try to sell paid plans during the five minutes. It doesn't ask you to "complete" actions to unlock confetti or badges. It doesn't enroll you in a weekly educational email sequence. It is an introduction, not a disguised marketing funnel.
Above all, it doesn't ape the interactive experience of games. Some onboardings make you "practice" every feature with a fake exercise before letting you loose. That's appropriate for complex software like Photoshop; for a writing editor, it's infantilizing. Narraya shows you where things are, then leaves you alone. You'll use them when you need them.
In the end, the best onboarding for a writing tool is one thing: the tool works well, the first session flows, and the second session doesn't require re-reading the manual. Narraya's tutorial is just the bridge between first opening and autonomy — a short bridge, which you'll cross only once, if all goes well.
Want to see what the first access looks like? The live demo starts from a pre-populated account, where you can imagine what it would be like to enter Narraya fresh.