Product Tours

Interactive guides that help new users quickly learn a product’s features and functions

What are product tours?

Product tours, also known as walkthroughs or flows, serve as interactive guides, typically via a sequence of “steps” or individual modals/lightboxes/tooltips, etc. Tours usually allow users to navigate forward and backward and may contain buttons with CTAs for other actions or experiences.

Commonly, teams use these patterns to introduce users to key features during onboarding, teach a workflow (sometimes in response to a support question), or enhance feature understanding, adoption, and engagement.

Use cases for product tours

  • User Onboarding: Showcasing key features for new users can help reduce distraction and time to “aha” or value, increasing activation and retention

  • Feature Adoption: Highlighting new or underutilized features or communicating their benefits to existing users to encourage their use.

  • Reducing Support Queries: By explaining features directly within the app, product tours can significantly lower the number of basic support queries and make it easier for users to learn the product vs. emails or documentation

  • Introducing Changes: after a UI redesign or brand update, product tours can help users re-familiarize themselves with essential navigation or functionality

Best practices for product tours

  • 1 Keep them short! Our Benchmark Report, which used millions of data points, suggested that the drop-off after 4–steps was materially higher. 
  • 2 Embrace self-discovery. Instead of pushing a tour, allow users to start at their convenience. Using Checklists or Resource Centers or offering an opt-in vs. snooze as a first step can help. 
  • 3 Don’t try to cover everything in a single Tour; instead, focus on a single user action as a goal and orient your tour to remove friction, confusion, and indecision toward that goal. 
  • 4 Try not to showcase or explain self-evident items from the existing UI. For example, using Product Tours on forms or inputs is usually a bad idea. 
  • 5 Don't set it and forget it; measuring performance and iterating will lead to much better results

Examples of great product tours

Recommended reading 🤓

15 Best Product Tour Software Tools & Solutions to Improve Your In-App UX

User onboarding is your time to shine! Find a tool that works best for you among these fifteen top-notch software solutions, and use it to increase product adoption and drive growth.
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