Unlocking the Power of Product Tours

The Importance of Product Tours

Every software application, especially those that are pioneering new concepts, comes with a learning curve. As the product owner, it’s your responsibility to help users navigate this curve and unlock the full potential of your product. Product tours are an excellent way to achieve this, providing a gentle introduction to your application’s features and capabilities.

Designing Effective Product Tours

Crafting a successful product tour requires careful consideration of your users’ needs and goals. Here are some essential tips to keep in mind:

• Make it Optional: Not every user wants to be forced through a product tour. Consider adding a “skip” button to cater to those who prefer to explore on their own.
• Keep it Simple: Don’t overwhelm users with too much information. Focus on the key steps they need to take to get started with your product.
• Be Sequential: Structure your tour to follow a logical sequence, making it easier for users to follow along.
• Be Suggestive: Rather than showcasing every feature at once, suggest relevant features based on the user’s actions and progress.
• Provide Value: Focus on your product’s core offerings and highlight the benefits they provide to users.

Building a Product Tour with Vue-Tour

To demonstrate how to create a product tour in Vue.js, we’ll use the popular vue-tour library. With over 20,000 weekly downloads and 2,000 GitHub stars, vue-tour is a reliable choice for crafting engaging product tours.

git clone https://github.com/vue-tour/sample-repo.git
cd sample-repo
npm install
npm install vue-tour

Next, let’s define the steps as an array of objects in our component’s data property. Each object should contain the target element, content, and any customizations we want to make.

export default {
  data() {
    return {
      steps: [
        {
          target: '#step-1',
          content: 'Welcome to our application!'
        },
        {
          target: '#step-2',
          content: 'Here\'s how you can get started.'
        }
      ]
    }
  }
}

Now, let’s add the product tour to our page by calling the vue-tour function and specifying the steps we’ve defined. Finally, we’ll trigger the tour to start when the user loads the page.

import VueTour from 'vue-tour';

export default {
  mounted() {
    VueTour.start(this.steps);
  }
}

The Result

With these steps, we’ve successfully created a basic product tour that introduces users to our Vue.js application. Of course, this is just the beginning – we can customize and refine our tour to better suit our users’ needs.

Debugging and Optimizing Your Vue App

As you continue to develop and refine your application, don’t forget to monitor and track user interactions to identify areas for improvement. This will help you gain valuable insights into user behavior and application performance.