Product Tour

The largest hole was people signing up, doing nothing on the first screen, and leaving. Help documentation was the first patch: write the screens up properly and hang a question mark button in the corner. But help opened in a new window, and coming back meant finding the spot you had been looking at all over again.

Pagedeck sat in that hole too. Of 100 signups, forty created a first document. Noa watched it happen in a usability test. People scanned the screen two or three times and closed the tab as soon as they couldn't tell what to press first. Nobody clicked the question mark.

A product tour is guidance that doesn't send anyone away to read. A tooltip appears over the screen the user is already looking at and points at one thing.

Decide what the user should have accomplished by the end, and guide only as far as that. Five steps.

1. Pick one target action. Write the aha moment — the point where someone grasps what the product is for — as a sentence about behavior. At Pagedeck it's inviting a colleague and editing the same document together.
2. Keep only the steps that action can't happen without. Three is a good ceiling. A six-step tour gets closed at the second tooltip, while a three-step one keeps noticeably more people to the end. So the real work is deciding what to cut, not what to include.
3. One sentence per tooltip. Say what to press and what that gets them, nothing more, and keep both a next button and a skip. Hide the skip and someone trying to close it leaves the product instead.
4. Decide when it fires. Once right after signup, and the rest one at a time as the user first opens each screen. Show everything on day one and none of it sticks.
5. Measure how many drop out at each step and fix the worst step first. Put the share who finished the tour next to the share who actually did the target action.

"Six steps is too many — cut it to three. Half of them close at the second one."

Step count is the biggest single factor in completion.

"This one belongs in the empty screen rather than in the tour."

Put the guidance where the user has to pass through anyway.

"Tour completion went up but first-document rate didn't move."

The guidance was read; it just didn't lead to the action that matters.

Noa cut the tour to three steps and dropped the prompts for profile photos and notification settings. Mia paired it with empty state onboarding, which turns a screen with no data yet into guidance. A tour can only hold someone who is on the screen right now, and anyone who closed it and left can't be reached again.