Guidelines for creating effective product tours

Any new programme adoption will likely involve some learning curve, so be prepared for it. A product tour quickly highlights an app’s key, value-packed features while assisting users in navigating this barrier. Good tours balance irking users with much participation and disappointing users with insufficient guidance.
Effective product tour vary for each app since every product has different features and every user has different demands. Following those thoughts, here are some excellent practices for creating a fantastic product tour that propels users through your flywheel and onto the following step of their journey.
- being sequential
Don’t merely display a haphazard group of tooltips to users with no apparent hierarchy. Your product tour should have clearly defined steps that advance users closer to activation at each stage.
- Concentrate on the fundamental idea
Explaining every last detail can only result in dissatisfied and frustrated users. To keep consumers moving toward their “aha!” moment, make sure you’re only emphasising the features they really need to enjoy the primary value of your product. (You can always add more features in the future.)
- Be succinct and to the point.
The desire to use your app is high among new users. Make sure your tour is brief in order to respect their time. Steps that are unneeded increase the onboarding process’s friction. Three to five phases are typically sufficient for an onboarding flow because less is more.
- Choose appropriate pattern for your product tour
There isn’t a perfect product tour user interface that applies to all situations, but there are best uses for well-liked onboarding flow design patterns, including as tooltips, hotspots, and modal windows, that keep customers interested and teach them how to use your product. It’s critical to match the UI style you select with the demands of both your programme and your users. While simpler apps might only need a few basic pointers, more complicated apps can need more specific onboarding advice. Consider your users’ motivation level as well. How likely are they to finish a longer product tour? Exactly how tech adept are they? When deciding the UI pattern to utilise for your product tour, it’s critical to consider the user’s perspective.
- Focusing on the Basics
Product tours are the new industry standard for helping customers reach their “aha” moment or highlighting valuable features that aren’t being used to their full potential. As consumers interact with your product, you can help them rapidly realise its value and take the appropriate step to complete their task by providing contextual guidance. A successful product tour requires both art and science to create. Design and styling, authoring prowess, data research, testing, and iteration are all necessary until a tour properly satisfies your users’ needs.
- provide benefit for your product tour
After watching your tour, visitors should feel grateful. Don’t have them work too hard to receive value from the trip; it shouldn’t be in any way annoying or draining for them to complete. Instead, astonish and thrill them with extra details that they might not have learned from your interface otherwise. It’s crucial to avoid losing your credibility by creating irrelevant tours since if users don’t find your tours useful, they will leave and be less receptive to subsequent instruction. However, our benchmark research reveals that customers are 4.5 times more likely to finish a second tour if they finish the first one as opposed to skipping it.
- Clarity Is Vital
Making things difficult to understand or convoluted is one of the worst things you can do during a product tour. The entire purpose of walking users through the tour is to simplify their life by helping them become more familiar with the programme. Therefore, if in doubt, use simple language and a “less is more” philosophy, and don’t make things too complicated. Make sure the order in which you are presenting the information makes sense.
Conclusion
For new clients learning how to use your SaaS product for the first time, product tours are quite beneficial. They must Encourage users to utilise your software in a certain, beneficial way. Product tours affect user behaviour by outlining the significance of each step and directing users to take crucial activities within your product, as opposed to leaving them to figure out your app on their own.