An interactive guide is a step-by-step, on-screen tutorial that provides real-time guidance to help users navigate and understand a product or software.
Unlike static tutorials or written instructions, interactive guides are embedded directly into the user interface and dynamically respond to user actions.
💻 In-app experiences: Help new users get familiar with your product or discover new features. Use tooltips, pop-ups, and hotspots to guide them to specific actions or educate.
Examples 👇
🕹️ Demos: Guide prospects and existing users through a simulated version of your products’ experience. Help them learn about your product’s functionalities and onboarding experience before they commit to a purchase, sales demo, or sign-up.
Example 👇
As prospects consider solutions to help them solve problems, let them experience your application and feel what it can do firsthand.
Drive new sign-ups by allowing prospects to validate what your product can do before they sign up. At the end of your interactive demo, prompt them to take action in the actual product.
Help new users get started with key features and understand the product quickly.
Introduce existing users to new or advanced features as they navigate the application.
Reduces the need for customer support by providing immediate, on-screen guidance, allowing users to solve issues independently.
The alternative for interactive demos is demo centers, also called product tour libraries ⤵️
How to create interactive guides depends on whether you intend to craft the guide in the actual product or through a simulated interactive demo. We’ll explain how to do both below.
The steps before you start creating are the same for both types of interactive guides, however.
Skipping over them will drastically tank results. It’s tempting to start building right away.
Don’t. Do these first ⤵️
What do you want to get out of an interactive guide? First, pick one and stick to it. Keep this in mind when going through the following steps.
If you don’t define your main focus, your guides will likely lack focus, and users will hit “skip.”
For example, you might want to:
Does your solution have more than one ideal user?
For most SaaS, that’s the case. And different user personas mean different needs and feature interests.
It is important to define the primary persona as you craft an interactive guide. The best SaaS creates multiple guides for different personas instead of a generic one for all.
The same as with the North Star KPI, pick one (using both customer research and product usage data).
It’s more effective to aim your interactive guides toward one outcome and allow users to learn more rather than force them through long guides.
For example, once you’ve gone through the initial onboarding guide, Asana make it easy to access new guides as users get familiar with the platform.
Given that people’s attention spans are short, what’s the fastest way to deliver value?
Which actions or education steps, lead people to sign up (interactive demo) or keep using the app (in-app experience)?
Finding that out will require some data science, as analyzing product usage is the most efficient way to learn which app actions correlate to a positive impact on the North Star KPI you want to influence.
An approachable way to do it is to first identify user cohorts that have strong results relative the your North Star KPI.
Then, for a given cohort, research what paths and actions were taken the most.
As mentioned previously, it’s recommended to craft different guides for personas that don’t have the same “aha moment” in your solution.
Imagine we’re building an interactive guide for Apollo.io, a sales engagement solution.
There are 2 types of core user personas:
Their aha moment when onboarding will differ (our best guess):
It’s for this reason that when you head to Apollo’s “platform overview” page or sign up to its platform, you’re prompted to choose what you’re interested in.
Most no-code guiding tools will have segmentation options.
If you choose to create a “simulated” interactive guide with an interactive demo platform, here’s how to it from recording to publishing 👇
Although most SaaS companies will opt to use a no-code tool to build interactive guides in their product experience, your product team can also do it manually by updating the user experience.
If you do choose to leverage a tool, 99% of the time, here’s what you need to do:
