The Ultimate ‘How to Create Better Product Tours’ Guide
There arenโt many people out there who would tell you that you DONโT need product tours for your SaaS.
But the phrase โproduct toursโ covers a wide range of different onboarding and training mechanisms.
And in todayโs SaaS environment – letโs be honest – some of them are pretty rubbish.
So when we talk about the best software for building better product tours, weโre going to be quite specific about what makes a product tour worthwhile and what features a tool needs to achieve those things.
Weโre going to look at:
- Why you need Product Tours
- What Good Product Tours Need to Do and to Include
- Product Tour Types and their UI Components
Why you need Product Tours
Nobody really questions the need for product tours, do they? This is real Product Management 101 stuff:
- The goal of new user onboarding is to get them to experience the value of your product as quickly as possible
- Most users – encountering your service for the first time – are not going to be able to immediately know how they can do that
- So, you need to show them!
So product tours are aimed at:
- Increasing user engagement so that they activate sooner
- Decreasing the friction of the learning curve and simplifying the user experience
- Demonstrating your value proposition at the most effective time
Of course, itโs possible to onboard new users one-on-one. For some high-ACV enterprise products, that approach still works. Not with self-serve, product led SaaS businesses with a lower ARPU though.
Forget about the added cost and the difficulties of scaling for rapid growth that this approach suffers from for a moment…
As early as 2013, surveys were showing that a lot more users prefer self-serve onboarding to speaking to a trainer!
Source: zendesk.com
So itโs not only more efficient and cost-effective to onboard and introduce new features using in-app experiences –
– users actually prefer them!
For the same reason, you will probably want to pick the best software for building product tours from whatโs available on the market.
You could build all the necessary features in-house from scratch, but who has the time or spare tech resources for that?
Most self-serve product tour tools will cost you less in a year than youโd pay a good developer in a month. And since good product onboarding never ends – you need to keep selling your users on the value of your product regardless of the stage in their user journey (thatโs what Continuous Education Loop is all about!) – the development bill will run quite high if you try to build everything yourself. And what if your UI changes and you need to change the experience flow? All the dev time will go to waste and youโll have start from scratch. And of course – pay for the reworks again.
On the other hand – if you choose ready-to-use onboarding software – many of the options require no coding whatsoever. Instead, they use easy-to-follow interfaces, like this:
Source: userpilot.com
But letโs take a step back.
A few paragraphs ago we said that product tours need to achieve three things: increase engagement to drive activation, decrease the learning curve, and demonstrate the value at the right time.
A lot of product tours out there in SaaS-land donโt do these things well at all!
Thatโs why at Userpilot, we donโt like the term โproduct tourโ.
Itโs too passive. Too old-fashioned. Too closely tied up in peopleโs minds with the kind of 100-slide presentation you used to be forced to sit through before you were actually allowed to start using a new tool.
Thatโs whyย a lot of people hate them:
Source: userpilot.com
We much prefer the idea of Interactive Walkthroughs, for reasons that will become very clear in the next section.
What Better Product Tours Need to Do and to Include
Source: UI-patterns.com
The author and researcher BJ Fogg developed the model above, showing that getting somebody to carry out a desired action depends on three factors:
- Their Motivation to do it
- Their Ability to do it
- The nature of the Prompt given
One of Foggโs key insights is that, time and again, not enough attention is paid to Motivation – the question of โwhy should I do it?โ as opposed to โhow should I do it?โ
This gives us a handy framework for working out the features needed in the best product tours.
They should be:
- Focused on value
- Contextual – tied to what is important and familiar to the user at that moment
- Clear on the next steps that need to be taken
- Putting the user in control of their own experience
- Relevant, to the point and take up as little of the userโs time as possible
- Optimized for usability – that is sticky, memorable and user-friendly
Good product tours break down the onboarding experience into lots of small steps – each one focused on getting the user to expend the minimal effort to realize something of value.
If itโs too long, it will bore people and theyโll switch off.
If it covers too much ground, theyโll forget bits of it or find parts irrelevant to them.
Now, choosing these key steps depends on your user journey: what 2-3 key activation points must happen for your user to realize the value of your product?
Source: userpilot.com
These moments of realization – We call them โAHA moments!โ
Why do so many SaaS companies offer free trials?
Well, there are probably lots of reasons – but a big one has to be that people like to play with a software tool to see if it fits their needs before they commit to it.
And there is the psychological fact that the overwhelming majority of people learn best by doing things – rather than being told or shown.
Check out this learning pyramid for the evidence.
Source: National Training Laboratories, Bethel, Maine
โKnowledge is situated in practiceโ, say the academics.
We say: make sure your product tours are INTERACTIVE!
Product Tour Types and their UI Components
Now that weโve discussed the difference between the good, bad and the ugly product tours – letโs see what types are available out there! These are also all the factors youโll need to bear in mind when choosing the best software for product tours.
In this section, weโre going to introduce the bits and pieces of UI youโll want a tool to put at your disposal, and the types of tour you can build them into.
Linear Tours
This is the simplest type of product tour. It just consists of a series of informative steps, shown to users, in order.
The user doesnโt make any choices – and they only interact to click โNextโ or to dismiss the tour.
If the tour has more than 5 steps – most (80%) of users actually dismiss it before theyโre done. Needless to say – these tours are not very effective.
Most linear tours will start with a modal.
Hereโs how you would build a modal in a linear tour in Userpilot, for example.
Source: userpilot.com
After that, users may see a succession of other modals – like a slideshow.
But there are other UI components that work well here:
- Tooltips – add context by pointing out specifically where a feature can be accessed, along with a bit of explanatory text. Hereโs an example from Airtable
Source: airtable.com
- Videos – if your software tool allows you to embed videos into tours, this can be a great way of making your onboarding content more accessible and engaging. Userpilot, for example, makes it super-easy to embed videos into your modals.
- Hotspots – These are a bit more subtle and less intrusive than tooltips. They are little highlights that draw a userโs attention to a function but which need to be clicked on before they reveal any information. Already, you can begin to see elements of interactivity creeping into even the simplest kind of product tour! See below how we promoted our new NPS feature with a hotspot when we added it to Userpilot.
Source: userpilot.com
Linear tours are most suitable for Proactive Onboarding (see my earlier blog for a definition of that term!) of a very simple, basic functionality.
For example:
- Showing what the measures on a new dashboard mean
- Finding different functions on the navigation panel
- Changing a password
If you can just show a user something and be satisfied that itโs โmission accomplishedโ then a linear tour might be enough – especially as they are by far the simplest to design and deploy. Still, I would encourage you to use a different onboarding flow – that allows you to set goals, get your users to actually use the feature you want them to adopt, and measure your success rate.
Branching Tours
A branching tour is the next step up.
Itโs like a โChoose Your Own Adventureโ book – if you remember them!
That is, at certain points along the journey, the user can pick a direction to go, and the tour then continues reflecting that choice. So instead of one single line, there are multiple different paths that can be followed through the tour, ending at different places – but all set out and determined in advance.
Source: userpilot.com
Its easy to turn linear product tours into branching ones in Userpilot. You just add extra options onto the desired steps as shown above and flesh out each branch from there.
A branching tour has some distinct advantages:
- You can allow users to segment themselves by asking what they will be using the service for, and then giving them the tour that best fits that persona
- You can allow users to choose their own priorities for which features they onboard first
But while branching tours add a little bit of interactivity, they still depend on learning by showing.
Interactive Tours or Interactive Walkthroughs
As the learning pyramid shows – if we want learnings to stick – people need to be performing the tasks as they learn.
Interactivity also helps weigh in against Foggโs Motivation factor:
- People are more engaged when they are doing something
- You can even boost the motivation further by providing an incentive to complete them, e.g. a discount code
- While learning, they are also getting closer to realizing value from your SaaS
- Each step completed is a potential Aha! moment towards understanding the value proposition
An interactive tour depends on user inputs – rather than being observers in the onboarding process, theyโre participants.
Source: salesflare.com
The more complex your SaaS is – that is, the more steps the user has to take to get to first value – the more invaluable an interactive walkthrough is.
Salesflare (above), for example, is a CRM system that needs users to take 12 steps before they will start seeing benefits. They have a great interactive walkthrough which eases users into this complex process – and puts it all into context with a checklist showing whatโs been finished and what is still to be done.
In fact, Salesflare have gamified their walkthrough to a certain extent. Every time a user ticks off a step, they get extra days added onto the duration of their free trial!
Source: salesflare.com
At Userpilot, weโve made it really easy to create interactive walkthroughs using our unique system of Driven Actions.
Source: userpilot.com
That is, at a certain point in the Experience you create as a part of your tour, you can set an action the user needs to take before they can proceed.
We have five different types of user actions you can set:
Source: userpilot.com
When the Driven Action is taken, the next set of instructions will appear.
So once a user has been shown how to complete a task using Driven Actions, theyโve actually already completed it!
Weโve made a big deal out of learning by doing – and rightly so.
But now we need to look at WHEN learning should take place.
Because presenting a product tour – particularly an interactive one – at the wrong time can be a very disruptive and annoying experience for users, and counterproductive in terms of driving engagement and adoption.
Btw. if you want to dive deeper into how to improve your Product Adoption, sign up for our Product Adoption School!
Like we said earlier, you need a product tour software tools that lets you get CONTEXTUAL.
That is, you need to be able to anticipate at precisely which moments a user is going to want to learn how to use a feature – and provide that training right then and there.
To do this, youโll need to define behavioral cues that trigger the appearance of the onboarding resources.
Source: userpilot.com
As you can see above, Userpilot gives you loads of options for defining who is going to see onboarding experiences when. For example:
- Brand new users can be singled out for new user basic onboarding when they log in for the first time, which will not be shown to them again
- Users who began but did not complete a task can be prompted to return to their saved progress when they return to your app
- Users who are showing a pattern of dropping engagement can have features they havenโt used before flagged to them, to help them realize new sources of value
Source: userpilot.com
- Different segments of users can be defined to provide customized onboarding flows – even down to company name!
Contextual onboarding like this really taps into the Motivation aspect of Foggโs equation: users are most likely to respond to your prompts at the moment when they are most motivated to get that value – when the โwhy do it?โ is most auspicious!
