Unlock the Power of Product Tours in Your React Application
Are you tired of providing endless customer support for your complex UI? Do you want to improve user onboarding and reduce the time spent on repetitive “how-to-use” questions? Look no further than product tours, a self-explanatory tip UI that breaks down complex UX into easily digestible bites.
The Importance of Product Tours
Product tours play a vital role in B2B product UI, saving customer support time and helping users familiarize themselves with UI functionalities. They’re also useful for showcasing new updates on product UI and can save time for the customer success team. Industry giants like Slack, Trello, Asana, and Invision have already adopted product tours to enhance their user experience.
The Alternative: FAQs, Video Demos, and On-Demand Tips UI
While FAQs, video demos, and on-demand tips UI can provide some level of guidance, they don’t have the same impact as inline product tours. Most users don’t look for tutorials outside the UI, and on-demand tips UI, although similar to product tours, can be less effective.
Existing React Libraries for Product Tours
When it comes to building product tours for your React application, you have limited options. Two popular libraries are React Tour and React Joyride. Let’s dive deeper into each.
React Tour Library
React Tour has around 1.4k stars on Github and is moderately active. It offers a simple product tour without much customization. You can view the demo for React Tour here. While it’s great for static pages and UI, it becomes rigid when you need custom behavior.
React Joyride Library
React Joyride has 3k stars on Github and is actively developed. Although its UI isn’t as elegant as React Tour, its API is less rigid, allowing for some level of customization. However, its docs aren’t very intuitive, and the props API can be confusing.
Building a Simple Product Tour in a React App
Let’s create a simple product tour component using React Joyride. We’ll use react-dashboard by creative tim as our base application. You can see the final product tour UI here.
Customizing Your Product Tour
To make your product tour more engaging, you can add features like:
- Skip option on each step
- Change locale text labels
- Hide/show buttons (next, skip, back buttons)
- Custom styles like button colors and text alignment
You can also add custom features like auto-starting the tour, starting the tour through manual triggers, and hiding the blinking beacon.
Creating a Controlled Product Tour
To achieve more advanced customization, you can create a controlled product tour by capturing callback events and actions. This allows you to trigger specific steps directly through button clicks.
Building a Custom Product Tour in React
If you need more flexibility, you can build your own custom product tour component. The biggest challenges include finding the target element, showing a popover component, and ensuring the popover component calculates available window space. You can use React Hooks like useTour to build your own UI on top of functionality.
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