Interactive product tours help increase digital adoption rates, introduce new additional features in a creative way, and simplify a complex product for larger audience groups.
Think of the interactive product tours as a source of light. Without an interactive walkthrough, users probably will stumble in the dark. They need your guidance to understand and experience the product's full potential.
You don't have to include every little detail and feature of your product to create a successful and effective product tour. In fact, the simpler, the better. It should introduce the key elements and make room for users to discover the rest on their own.
Poorly designed interactive tours, on the other hand, can lead to low retention rates because they confuse (and frustrate) users about what to do next.
In this article, we will show you:
- What is an interactive product tour
- How to make a good first impression with an interactive walkthrough
- Best ways to create interactive product tours
What is an interactive product tour?
Interactive product tours are short and user-controlled walkthroughs that highlight the key features of a product. Interactive tours allow users to experience the product or service at their own pace, exploring the product features with your guidance. They also minimize the time and effort you put into user acquisition. Combined with a stellar website that is easy to use and carefully designed, you can introduce interactive product tours to your customers and capture their attention.
Image taken from Strikingly website
Instead of exhausting (and boring) your potential customers with a long manual, you can increase user engagement with an interactive product walkthrough. Most users prefer to use a product or service on their own terms and interactive product tours provide them with step-by-step instructions while giving them the liberty to test the product in action.
Ultimately, interactive product tours improve the user experience by compelling users to take meaningful actions, simplifying the learning curve, and giving them the confidence to purchase your product.
An effective product tour configures the specific pain points of a user and matches them with features that will solve these problems, moving along the user journey on their own with the help of your short and on-point education.
Why do you need an interactive product tour?
Interactive product walkthroughs are all about inclusivity and freedom.
Here's how.
Your entire product cannot consist of basic features or tools. There must be advanced features as well. And if users do not adopt these advanced features, they will not experience the product to its full extent. And if they do not get the most value out of your product, they will switch to another that they can use.
Long story short, their customer journey will be cut short because your user onboarding process failed to accommodate their needs and expectations. You must understand that user behavior has a wide range of patterns and your job is to meet every user at their level, which is to say that your interactive guides should both appeal to tech-gurus and those who are not that tech-savvy.
To sustain high-level of customer satisfaction, your interactive walkthroughs must guide users through key actions without requiring them to move along complicated steps. Users should be able to test the features and choose how to proceed. Your guide should still offer additional help in case of a problem or misstep.
Interactive product tours make it possible to monitor different user segments, adjust the user onboarding process according to their behaviors, and increase feature adoption by simplifying the entire experience. It is also important to expand the walkthroughs to your landing pages; therefore, you must provide the necessary information for your users to navigate easily and get value from your product as soon as possible.
Image taken from Strikingly website
5 Best Ways to Create Interactive Product Tours
Every product offers a unique value and successful product tours reflect these values, move different audience segments through key takeaways and create seamless onboarding experiences.
Here are five best practices for designing interactive walkthroughs and you need to hit these points with your interactive product tour to ensure long-term engagement.
1- Focus on Your Value and Key Features
The first way to create a comprehensive product tour is to focus on your core product value. Instead of showcasing the "cool features" you think are the best to represent the product's functionality, highlight the core product features that will benefit the user and onboard the user as quickly and efficiently as possible.
You don't need to introduce every feature at first. The interactive demos help users understand how your product or service works, offer contextual guidance regardless of the complexity of the product, and reduce the time the user spends to get their desired results. You can introduce additional features later once the user is familiar with the user interface and the fundamentals.
2- Get Users to the "Aha! Moment"
Your unique value proposition is the creative and compelling creative point that differentiates your product from others in the industry. And this proposition is what connects your product with users.
However, the initial spark is often fragile; before you know it, it can burn out.
So how do you prevent this?
Get your users to the "aha! moment" as quickly as possible. And without annoying them with unnecessary details at the beginning stages of their onboarding experience.
The "aha! moment" happens when you carefully guide users to clearly experience the value of your product and make them see how it will improve their lives. Although this discovery is depended on the user, an interactive product tour reduces the time and effort they will spend.
What can you do, then, to accelerate this process?
Let's say that you have a product and users must set up their accounts and preferences before they actually start using it. Within your comprehensive product tour or user onboarding process, you can add checklists and progress bars to affirm users' actions and encourage them to spend more time with your product.
As they explore what your product can offer, the users will reach their "aha! moment" sooner and you will be able to categorize them as active users.
Including hotspots, checklists, guides, and other customizable tools in your extensive product tours are perfect for increasing product adoption and making your product teams' job easier. Adding a personalized user interface or option for product tours improve the user's journey towards their "aha! moment" as well.
You can also analyze recent customer feedback to gain insights into what motivated the user to continue using your product to make necessary adjustments to your product adoption process.
3- Keep It Simple
Whether a product manager or a business owner, you must know that simplicity is the key. And it sells better.
Think about your product experiences with other companies. Try to remember the times when you got frustrated because you could not understand how a feature or tool worked. You probably stopped for a moment and said: "This is too complicated!"
What did you do next?
You probably tried to get the features to work in the way you wanted a few more times, and if they did not work, you stopped using the product.
This is what happens when a product's learning process takes too long and it gets to the point of annoying users. There is a wide variety of products and services that your customer can use (and would switch to immediately), so you must streamline product experiences and ease the learning process for your users.
Interactive product tours are designed to make users' lives easier and building a simple product is the key to customer retention and growth. Product tour tools like UserGuiding allow you to create guides and checklists for your product with code-free editors and customizable tools based on your needs.
In short, you must present a complex product with its basic functionality to secure a good rate of customer engagement and attract a larger pool of audiences with a wide variety of knowledge base.
4- Get Feedback
Although you may be certain that you have created the best product walkthrough ever; there is no harm in asking other people for feedback. Some product tour examples you have created can look simple and effective to you. However, you are not the target audience. Therefore, it is best to collect additional user feedback to understand whether you can see an increase in the number of people who use the product to its fullest extent.
Some product tour softwares integrate additional features to collect feedback within the software or their online platforms and websites, so it is easier to arrange audience segmentation and diversify your questions.
Strikingly equips your website with the necessary tools to collect feedback on your website. So once you create your product walkthrough, it is easier to showcase how users can maximize their interaction with their customers. Before you start collecting feedback, however, make sure to test your product and examine any errors you may encounter.
Image taken from Strikingly website
5- Make Every Step Clear
The product adoption process does not happen overnight. This does not mean that you cannot speed it up. In fact, you can set up monthly users for long-term engagement by making every step of your interactive tour as clear as possible. Before designing your own product tour, it is best to optimize your website.
Strikingly has all the tools you need to enhance your website so that the interactive product tours are as efficient as possible. For example, you can edit all elements on your website and publish changes with a few simple clicks.
Image taken from Strikingly website
Editing and optimizing your website will simplify your product tour, which is essential to keep users interested and engaged with your product or service.
Although extensive product walkthroughs are great for showcasing what your product can potentially do, there is also the risk of overcomplicating or using vague language. Each step should be clear and sequential. Order the steps in a way that will move users to the point of activation and "aha! moment."
If you have additional features that will make the product's function clearer, add them. For example, you can point to the Chrome extension or another browser extension you have for a better user experience. It is better to be direct about the platforms where your product can be accessed by monthly users easily.
Final Words
Remember that every user has different needs and it is important to customize your product tours to avoid annoying users who have already completed the tour. You can segment different groups to create different product tours to personalize the content and connect with your audience on a deeper level.
It is also beneficial to use other software products for interactive product tours to simplify the whole experience. These tools provide you with advanced analytics, code-free editors, and other additional features to educate your users as fast as possible.
Author Bio: Aysenur is a Creative Content Writer at UserGuiding. She enjoys writing on SaaS, product, and growth for the UserGuiding Blog. Outside of work, you can find her reading a gothic novel or doing crossword puzzles in her room because words are everything to her.
