I re-imagined what SaaS product tours should be like. It turned out to be useful for my users 🚀

Akash Hamirwasia
7 replies
I've come across so many product tours / onboarding experiences, where some buttons on the UI are highlighted and the user is expected to read through them and click "Next". I've often found myself and few of my friends spam clicking those Next buttons to skip the entire product tour because it's a very intrusive experience. For my product – https://slantit.app, I tried bringing the best parts of a video tutorial and a product tour. The result is a personalised experience where I interact with the user, explain the product and my live arrow explains different parts of my UI. The user can pause, make edits, change stuff and play the tour again to continue. (Try it at https://slantit.app/editor) After releasing this (https://twitter.com/blenderskool...), people who tried this found this approach much better, not just visually but also as a product tour. It takes them just a minute to understand and play with the product instead of clicking buttons or reading some text to understand the UI. I would encourage you to take the tour yourself too, and I'm all ears on your thoughts / suggestions you might have 🙂

Replies

Samuel Bailey
That's fantastic, your innovative approach to SaaS product tours seems to be making a real impact on user experience; could you share some insights on how you ideated this concept and the challenges you faced during implementation?
Akash Hamirwasia
@sbailey691 Thanks Samuel! I got this idea after realising that people these days don't seem to have time and patience to read through long text(not generalizing to everyone), but video + audio is something people can pay attention to and go through quickly without requiring them to think a lot. Plus, adding a human face to it also grabs attention and makes it feel personal as if someone is guiding you through(which everyone has gone through since their childhood). Technically, the most challenging bit was the arrow animation that is in sync with the video. People can click buttons, scroll and do various things during the product tour which can break the animation of the arrow. So I had to implement a very robust system for it to work 🙂
Debra Henderson
It's amazing to see this innovative approach to SaaS product tours – it's user-centric, intuitive, and looks like it could revolutionize onboarding experiences, kudos to your creativity and vision!
David Morgan
To improve the user experience, product tours could be made optional, interactive, concise, and personalized, employing tooltips instead of full-screen takeovers, allowing users to learn at their own pace, and targeting instructions based on user activity to avoid intrusiveness and the temptation to spam click the "Next" button.