A Guide to In-App Guides

In-app guides help users navigate your product by introducing key features and guiding them through essential actions. Unlike external resources like emails or knowledge bases, these guides provide real-time support within the product experience.

By making it easier for users to engage with your product, in-app guides drive feature adoption, reduce churn, and foster long-term customer loyalty—ultimately contributing to business growth.

What are in-app guides?

In-app guides are interactive, contextual elements within an application. They help users navigate features, complete tasks, or understand new functionalities directly within the product interface.

Some companies misuse in-app guides by showing them at the wrong time or presenting irrelevant information, making it harder for users to engage. For example, introducing an advanced feature during onboarding might overwhelm new users instead of helping them take their first steps.

The best in-app guides feel like they’re not even there––they seamlessly integrate into the user experience and feel like natural steps in the user journey rather than interruptions.

Well-crafted in-app tutorials introduce users to your key features and capabilities, ultimately increasing the likelihood of customer success and product adoption.

Three common formats for in-app guides

Use tours, checklists, and announcements to deliver helpful information and guide users through your app.

Tours

In-app product tours are step-by-step walkthroughs consisting of prompts that guide users through your product's core functionality. In-app tutorials are used throughout the user journey and are especially helpful for more complex or advanced features. They make your product more accessible for new users, encourage users to learn, and ultimately help users get more value from it.

Checklists

Checklists are like to-do lists for new users. Most often used for the user onboarding experience, checklists are excellent tools for driving user engagement while increasing feature adoption. They can include sections and completion indicators (like progress bars or check marks).

Announcements

App companies primarily use announcements to inform users about new features, important updates, or changes within the app. They keep users knowledgeable and engaged with the product. For a seamless user experience, you can display them as banners or pop-ups.

How to use in-app guides to guide users through your app

Successfully guiding your users means providing what they need, exactly when needed, without being intrusive. Here are a few ways to do that.

1. Surface the right content at the right time

To deliver in-app guidance, cover the essentials early on—during onboarding or the first few times a user logs in. Then, based on contextual triggers, surface relevant content throughout the user’s journey. These triggers prompt your app to deploy guides based on user actions. For example, if a user hovers over a new feature but doesn’t interact, you can show them a guide with a quick explanation to encourage engagement. These triggers help prevent confusion, rage clicks, and more.

Some other use cases for contextual triggers include:

• Triggering tours at the start of the onboarding process to accelerate first-time success
• Triggering a new feature announcement
• Triggering an upgrade recommendation based on product usage

2. Reduce friction

When users encounter friction—whether due to lack of knowledge, confusion, or unnecessary steps—they’re more likely to abandon workflows, limiting their ability to see the value in your product. In-app guides remove barriers that prevent users from becoming active in the long term.

Use in-app guides to streamline the user journey and remove roadblocks. With Amplitude, you can use prioritization logic, which companies employ to avoid overwhelming users by focusing on the features they need the most help with.

Checklists are especially helpful in reducing friction for your users. They encourage users to take intentional steps to resolve a problem they’re having in your app. Here are a few ways to use checklists.

• If a user stalls during onboarding, surface a checklist that shows them the next step and how to do it
• If a user hasn’t finished configuring their data or other systems to your app, prompt them with a checklist to complete key setup steps

3. Create a feedback loop

A feedback loop helps you gather user insights, address pain points, and continuously improve the product. Feedback loops give users a voice so they feel heard, and they give you—the app—actionable information. For example, after a user completes a task, you can trigger a survey to understand their experience and identify areas that need improvement.

In addition to surveys, you can also analyze behavioral data—such as feature usage patterns or drop-off points—to better understand user engagement. Combining direct feedback with usage analytics helps you better understand how users interact with your product.

Here are some practical ways to yield user feedback:

• Triggering post-task surveys after specific actions, like their first time using a key feature
• Monitoring session recordings to identify friction points where users struggle or abandon workflows
• Tracking completion rates of onboarding checklists to see where users drop off and may need additional guidance.

How to measure success

There are two general paths for measuring success:

1. Build your in-app guide(s), and then decide how you want to measure success
2. Decide how you want to measure success, and then build your in-app guide(s)

Regardless of which path you take, the best processes are iterative ones. On an ongoing basis, consider how you can modify your guides to improve outcomes.

Track their interactions to better understand which guides (and types) drive more meaningful engagement and which may need adjustments. For example, if users frequently dismiss an announcement, it may indicate that the timing, placement, or message isn’t resonating. Or, on the other hand, if a checklist consistently leads users to complete a key action, it’s a strong signal that it’s adding value.

Here are some of the most common metrics to measure success for apps.

Active users

Active users are typically measured by day or month. Daily active users (DAUs) and monthly active users (MAUs) are the number of users that use your product during a given day or month. When active users increase, your product is probably doing well; when active users decrease, something may be going wrong. Active user analysis is useful for a higher-level pulse check and does not yield targeted conclusions; the figure is often influenced by various other factors (e.g., customer retention, marketing spending, and product or feature launches).

Churn and retention rate

The churn rate is the percentage of users who stop using your product during a given period (e.g., during the user’s first week or month). Retention rate is the percentage of users who continue using your product after a given period. High churn and low retention indicate opportunities to improve user engagement. Focus on helping new users experience your product’s value more quickly through a guided onboarding flow and by helping them find key features early.

Feature adoption rate

The feature adoption rate is the percentage of customers who have used the target feature during a given period. It can help your team pinpoint which features need improvement and which are thriving. In-app guides can play a significant role in driving feature usage. If feature adoption is low, but you’re seeing that more users are engaging with the feature, then core functionality may be missing. From here, you might turn to session replays, user behavior analytics, or experimentation to discover the appropriate antidote.

Drive more engagement with in-app guides

Practical in-app guidance helps users seamlessly navigate your product, discover key features, and stay engaged—ultimately driving adoption, retention, and long-term success.