# Product tour

A product tour is a guided sequence of in-product messages, usually modals, tooltips and hotspots, that shows a new user around a product's main screens and features. Product tours typically run on first login to orient users before they start their own work.

## What is an interactive product tour?

An interactive product tour runs on the real interface and moves forward when the user clicks the highlighted element, instead of playing like a slideshow. The goal is to build muscle memory: the user's hand is on the actual button.

Tours come in three common forms:

- **Modal tours:** a carousel of screenshots or short videos over the app.
- **Interactive tours:** step-by-step pointers on the live UI that wait for a click.
- **Demo tours:** a clickable replica of the product on a marketing site, used before anyone signs up.

## What is an onboarding tour or application tour?

An onboarding tour is a product tour triggered at a new user's first login. An application tour is the same pattern applied to any software application, and the term is common for internal business apps rolled out to employees.

A typical onboarding tour in a project-management tool runs five steps: a welcome modal, a pointer at "New project," a look at the board view, a pointer at the invite button, and a closing "You're all set." Notice what happens next. The admin knows where the invite button is, but the team still isn't invited, the tasks aren't imported and nothing is connected.

## When do product tours work?

Tours have good uses. They work when the user needs orientation, not a task: a redesigned navigation, a moved menu, a new area that looks nothing like the old one. They work best when short, skippable and shown once.

They struggle when they run long, appear before the user has a goal, or follow one linear path for many roles. A finance user and an admin don't need the same five stops.

Published completion rates vary with tour length, trigger and audience, so measure your own. Then measure what matters more: do users who finish the tour complete the core task at a higher rate than users who skip it? If not, the tour isn't helping.

## What comes after the product tour?

Users came to do a task, not take a course. The agent-led approach keeps orientation where it helps and, for the tasks users came to do, lets the user ask for the result and has the product do it with them. Foldspace calls this a generative experience, laid out in [our post on generative experiences](/blog/not-a-tour-a-generative-experience-what-replaces-product-tours-in-the-ai-era): instead of a tour pointing at each step, the Product Agent [takes the steps with the user in the product](https://docs.foldspace.ai/start/faq/).

## Learn more

- [Not a Tour. A Generative Experience. What Replaces Product Tours in the AI Era.](/blog/not-a-tour-a-generative-experience-what-replaces-product-tours-in-the-ai-era)