How to Create Compelling Product Tours for Users

A product tour is an in-app guide that helps users navigate the user interface and key features and complete important actions within your product. Tours provide timely, contextual guidance that can strengthen the overall product experience.

Effective product tours reduce onboarding time, improve activation, and prevent user drop-off. However, poorly designed tours can frustrate users and drive them away. To get it right, guide users at the right time—without overwhelming them.

What are product tours?

A product tour is a step-by-step guide designed to improve user onboarding and feature adoption. These tours can include embedded tutorials, guided product walkthroughs, interactive onboarding flows, in-app coaching experiences, and more.

A well-structured product tour automates the onboarding process, helping new users get value from your product faster without relying on customer support. Beyond onboarding, product tours also introduce users to advanced functionality through feature-specific guides.

Product tour best practices

Following product tour best practices helps improve the user experience and ensures seamless navigation.

Personalize product tours

A one-size-fits-all product tour won’t work for new and advanced users alike. New users need different guidance than returning users, and beginners don’t need the same depth as experienced users.

Instead of forcing every user through the same onboarding flow, adjust product tours based on simple criteria like account type, role, or actions taken. For example, if your product is a project management tool, you could show first-time users how to set up their first project while showing experienced users a brief overview of new features.

Keep tours short to avoid user drop-off

A long product tour can lose users. For example, delivering a lengthy onboarding flow before users can start playing around on their own may cause them to abandon the product altogether.

Keep tours short and focused so users can get started quickly and explore advanced features over time. It doesn’t make sense to show a first-time user how to adjust a reporting template if they haven’t yet created a report. Instead, break up your guidance into ongoing, digestible parts so users can learn as they go.

Offer tours throughout the user journey, not just during onboarding

Provide product tours when they’re contextually relevant, not just at the beginning. For example:

• Launch a guided tour for collaboration features when a user clicks an “Invite” button
• Introduce an integration walkthrough when no data source is connected

You can automatically trigger a tour when users interact with a feature for the first time. You can also offer tours on-demand, so they’re always available through a help menu or support chat.

Make the product tours interactive

Make product tours hands-on by guiding users through real actions instead of just presenting instructions. Interactivity keeps users engaged and reinforces learning. Rather than just explaining how to create a report, an interactive tour walks them through selecting data, applying filters, and generating their first report in real time.

How to develop an effective product tour

Keeping the best practices above in mind, follow these steps to create an engaging product tour, whether to improve the onboarding experience or to guide users through a specific feature.

1. Identify the key actions users need to take

Helping users complete key actions that drive engagement and feature adoption can improve retention—especially when guidance appears at the right time.

Identify actions that provide the most value to the user, whether creating a report, setting up a workflow, or inviting teammates. Consider different use cases—power users may need deeper feature guidance, while first-time users benefit from onboarding tours. Analyze user data to determine which actions correlate to long-term retention. For example, if users who invite collaborators within their first session are more likely to stay, that’s a key action to guide them toward.

2. Design a step-by-step flow that fits into the product experience

Structure your tour as an integrated, interactive guide that leads users through features without disrupting their workflows. Aim for five steps or fewer to keep the experience streamlined.

Keep each step focused, clear, and actionable. Instead of describing what a feature does, guide users through it. For example, instead of saying, “This is where you manage permissions,” show them to the settings and guide them through configuring permissions.

3. Plan the timing and placement of product tour delivery to match user needs

Use analytics to find where users drop off or struggle so that you can deliver guidance at those friction points. For example, if users abandon a setup process before completing it, trigger a tour when they revisit that page.

Deliver the tour when users are ready to engage––not too early, but before they become frustrated or abandon the product. If a tour appears too early, it may feel irrelevant to the user and get dismissed (e.g., showing a user how to integrate third-party apps before they’ve finished basic account setup). If a tour is triggered too late—like offering a walkthrough for report customization only after a user has struggled to create multiple reports manually—it loses its impact because the user has already had a bad experience with the process.

4. Collect user feedback to improve offerings over time

Determine which feedback mechanisms work best and use those to collect input that yields data-driven improvements to your product. For example, after they take a product tour, you could deliver a microsurvey where they can rate the experience from one to five. Or you could send them a more detailed survey via email for more context.

In addition to feedback directly from users, track user behavior analytics to identify how many users finish the tour and where they drop off. Adjusting your tours based on feedback helps you keep them relevant to your users’ needs so they get the most value from your product.

Use product tours to provide helpful product guidance continually

A well-designed, interactive product tour drives feature adoption, but providing helpful guidance is an ongoing process. Track performance, gather user feedback, and refine your approach to keep product tours effective.