3 Things to keep in Mind for Effective Product Tours
Product tours can indeed be effective tools for helping users better orient within your product. If done right, they can serve as an introduction for new users, they can show the product UI and help the users come closer to understanding how everything works there.
But if done wrong, product tours can actually cause the user to get disappointed from your product and to eventually leave it.
There are a few things that you might want to take into account before designing a product tour UI. So, here you go!
Know your users
Products can be different and it all depends on the type of product you are trying to present and the audience as well. It really matters to whom you “selling” that product. So, in some cases, a long product tour full of action-driven tooltips and various UI patterns might work quite well. But in other cases, the potential users might not want to be guided a lot. So make sure you take your audience into consideration.
You cannot be 100% objective about your product but at least you can take these into consideration:
Functionality
Ask yourself the following questions:
- Are there a lot of things to do within the app?
- Is it an app with only one main functionality or it’s something more complicated?
If you are offering a lot of functionalities, then it might be OK to have a more detailed product tour.
UI
Is your product UI unique? Sometimes it helps and sometimes it doesn’t help the users to navigate through the app. But if UI is unique anyways, then you might want to teach a few things about it to the users before they get started.
Users
Ask yourself the following questions:
- Are your users motivated and excited about trying the product?
- Have you marketed the right audience to get to try the product?
The more engaged the users are, the more they will try to take out of the product tour.
Do not forget to take into consideration the tech-savviness of your users. For example, millennials are extremely tech-savvy. Young adult users seem to rely heavily on hovering as a strategy to determine clickability. This is just an example of how different user behavior can be depending on their age. So, make sure you do your research before working on the product UI.
Choose the right UI pattern
Some folks use tooltips, some use short video tutorials, others use modal windows or hotspots to take their product tours to the next level.
It’s up to you to decide which pattern to choose and which tools to combine with what. Of course, you need to do all of this considering the things I have mentioned earlier i.e. the functionalities of the product and the potential users.
Let’s now take a look at a few random items within a product tour. There are quite nice:
Slack using hotspots during the onboarding tour
Slack using tooltips to tell about the Channels
Stripe using a small modal window to introduce a new feature
Mint using a modal window
Test it, test it, and test it
Whatever you do, don’t view it as the ultimate truth. Test it! Once you are done implementing your product tour, use analytics to track and measure whether it works or not. It’s not that scary to dive into user data, so make sure you do so. Otherwise, you might end up with a cheesy product tour that no one has time or nerves to take.
Once you track the user behavior, make improvements accordingly and implement them as soon as you can. Test the improvements, too. Test it until you make it perfect. And you know, perfect never comes because you can be perfecting a product forever. And that’s why building and designing products is such an exciting thing to do!
Summing up
Product tours are a complete nightmare for some users and they are an extremely helpful experience for others. Why is it so? It’s mainly because some builders have done their research properly and some haven’t. Be the guy who does his research before starting to build anything and keep the above 3 tips in your mind. Happy designing!
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I am an Internet Entrepreneur with extensive experience in product management, software engineering, business operations, and strategy. And I am also the co-founder and CEO of CodeTrace, which is a real-time skills-assessment software that measures developer’s experience based on their code.
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