SaaS product tours: helpful or hinderance?
I would love to know the general opinion on product tours. personally, 9 times out of 10 I find them annoying and dismiss them. But I am also not necessarily a typical user, being from a saas and technical background. wonder if there's any official research on whether they help or hinder.
Usually when I go into a product I'm task motivated: I have an objective in mind. It's like when you go to a website and a cookie banner comes up. You just want it out of your way so you can do your thing. I find product tours can be similar.
But aside from opinion, I'd love to know if there's any data if users are overall better off with or without them.
In an attempt to get some rough (mostly opinion) data, here's a poll.
I was just about to message privately on this, but why not discuss in public!
I sense as with almost every question in the world of SaaS the answer is "it depends" but that's not too useful without digging into what it depends ON!
I think it's interesting there you said "I have an objective in mind" – from the tools I've used, I think the product tours I HAVE engaged with have taken me through the product outlining how I get something done.
The tours people skip (I believe), and the tours I skip, are the ones that simply go "Here is feature X, here is feature Y, here is feature Z". They're feature focused rather than outcome focused, and they're too long so people lose attention.
I also think there's a perfect time to show them – and often that perfect time is not the second you create a new account.
V keen to hear from others though if there's more data / studies on this I'm not aware of. Maybe Nielsen Group has a study? https://www.nngroup.com