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A product tour is a kind of onboarding. They introduce users to changes you’ve made to their experience. But unlike onboarding (in which you help a novice get set up for the first time), a product tour is helping experienced users navigate changes to a flow they already understand.
When designing a product tour, it’s tempting to enumerate every new feature and capability. Don’t do this.
Resist the urge to explain in favor of affordances that make features discoverable. For example, the introduction of a button labelled “Save all” shouldn’t need pointing out, but your product marketing team might insist anyway. (Tell them no.)
Here are four principles I follow when thinking about this experience type.
The user doesn’t care about your launch metrics. Prioritize features that impact a user’s most common workflows, pick 3 to showcase (5 max), and free them to explore on their own.
Introduce one concept per tooltip. Information overload trains users to ignore similarly-presented content in the future.
Introduce features at the moment users need them, instead of firehosing them on first launch. Relevant and timely content is more likely to be understood and retained.
A product tour shows users where to find the new stuff. It’s not a a sales pitch. It’s not an instruction manual. Save the slogans for landing pages and put heavy details in documentation.
