Suggested playbooks to check out before starting this one:

• Mapping out your user journey
• Creating user personas
• Identifying your product’s aha moment

6 steps to building goal-oriented product tours:

Step 1: Show it to the right user.

• Understand the importance of relevance in product tours. A tour should guide users toward their goals, not overwhelm them with unrelated features.
• Refer to our other playbook for identifying your product’s aha moment and mapping your user journey.

Step 2: Determine the goal of the product tour.

• Ask what the user is trying to accomplish and what they should be able to do after completing the tour.
• Pro tip: each product tour should focus on only one goal or task. 
• We’re a firm believer that learning by doing is the best way to onboard users. The best product tours consist of a hands-on learning experience that guides users through a series of steps to achieve a goal.

Step 3: List the 3–5 things users need to do.

• Respect users' time by keeping your tour brief. Avoid unnecessary steps that could add friction to the onboarding process.
• Aim for a tour with 3–5 steps. If more steps are needed, consider breaking it down into multiple product tours.
• You can present multiple tours through an onboarding checklist, as done by Bynder Orbit, a cloud-based organizational app.

Step 4: Select the UI pattern for each step in the product tour.

• Choose a UI pattern that matches user needs and app requirements. The 3 most popular patterns are modal windows, tooltips, and hotspots. 

Modal windows can pop up over your UI or take over the entire screen. 

• We suggest using modals at the start and end of the tour to provide context and more resources. 
• Brightcove, a leading video hosting platform, starts their product tour with a welcome video through a modal window.

Tooltips point out specific features within the product. 

• They're most commonly used in product tours to guide users toward accomplishing their goals. 
• For example, HubSpot uses a tooltip to introduce social post-scheduling.

Hotspots are small dots and icons that highlight a specific feature. 

• They're excellent for encouraging user exploration with gentle nudges in the right direction.
• For example, Grammarly’s learn-by-doing demo document does that nicely by introducing new users to the editing tool features.

Step 5: Focus your copy and design on the benefits.

• Explain why each action or feature matters to the user. Don't merely point to key features—explain their relevance.
• Pay attention to your communication with users during the tour. Use clear, concise copy and integrate UX power words wherever possible.

Tip: As part of your design and copy, each step should have a progress indicator letting users know how many more steps are left in the tour. For example, Canva’s four-step product tour has the progress indicator in the upper left corner of the tooltip.