# Guided onboarding

Guided onboarding is an approach to onboarding in which the product leads new users through setup and their first tasks step by step, using prompts, checklists, product tours or a person, instead of leaving them to find their own way.

## How does guided onboarding work?

Guided onboarding works by putting the next step in front of the user at the moment they need it, inside the product, so they don't have to search a help center or guess.

The usual building blocks:

- **Product tours and walkthroughs** that point at parts of the interface in sequence.
- **Checklists** that list the setup tasks and track what's done.
- **Contextual prompts** that appear when the user reaches a screen or skips a step.
- **Empty states** that tell a user what to do on a page that has no data yet.
- **Human guidance**, such as a setup call or a customer success manager, for accounts that need it.

The best guided onboarding is triggered by what the user did, not by time or page load. A prompt to connect a data source should fire when the user opens a report that has nothing in it, not on their third login.

## What is the difference between guided and self-guided onboarding?

In self-guided onboarding the user works it out alone: the product, a help center, maybe a video. In guided onboarding the product (or a person) decides the order and shows each step.

Take an expense product where a new finance admin has to set an approval policy, connect the company card feed and invite employees. Self-guided, they open settings and hunt. Guided, the product opens on a short checklist, each item links to the exact screen, and a prompt explains what the approval threshold controls before they set it.

Self-guided suits simple products and experienced users. Guided suits products with setup that has an order, a dependency or a decision with consequences.

## Where does guided onboarding fall short?

Guidance shows the user where to click. The user still has to do the work, and that is where people drop out.

- **It follows one path.** If the user's goal isn't the path the team designed, the guidance is noise.
- **It breaks when the interface changes.** Tours anchored to buttons need upkeep every release.
- **It runs once, up front.** A tour shown on day one is long gone by the time the user reaches the step it covered, and few users go back to replay it.
- **It explains hard steps instead of finishing them.** Mapping import fields or setting permissions is still on the user.

The next step is an agent that does the step with the user rather than pointing at it. Foldspace's Product Agent works this way: the user asks from wherever they are, and it answers, navigates and runs the setup actions the team has defined, with that user's own access, [drawing a form or picker in the conversation](https://docs.foldspace.ai/guides/in-chat-ui/) when it needs a choice.

## Learn more

- [Product Agent](/platform/product-agent)