Product Walkthroughs: Definition, Examples & Best Practices

What is a Product Walkthrough?

A product walkthrough is essentially a guided experience of a product, similar to what we’d call a "product tour." It’s there to show users what the product can do, walk them through its features and design, and how it all comes together to solve real tasks.

Here’s an example product walkthrough by Figma:

But unlike a sales pitch, a walkthrough isn’t about convincing someone why they need the product or why it’s the solution to their biggest problem. Instead, it’s about letting the product speak for itself. 

A product walkthrough can come in many forms, too, such as videos, tooltips, hotspots, pop-ups, or full interactive tours. There’s no limit to how you can structure it. 

We’ll break down each of these forms shortly, but the main takeaway here is that a product walkthrough is about letting the product showcase itself and giving users a real, immersive introduction.

Types of Product Walkthroughs

You can think of a product walkthrough as a flexible strategy —a guiding concept that can be tailored to fit your product and target audience. You start with the core idea of showing users around the product, but how you execute it is entirely up to you.

There’s no rigid path or one-size-fits-all approach here.

In fact, here are some “paths” you can follow to create your own product walkthroughs 👣

Welcome screens

Welcome screens are the first UI modals that appear when you visit a website or, in this case, when you log into a product.

They can serve several functions, including:

• Announcing a new feature
• Conducting a user survey
• Providing a warm welcome to new users
• Setting up and personalizing the product for individual users
• Highlighting main features and functionalities

➡️ For example, Shopify’s welcome screen asks questions about the user’s use case and helps them personalize their product experience:

In a few steps, Shopify tries to get to know the user better (their use cases, needs, goals, etc.) and sets their account and main dashboards accordingly. 

This way, Shopify not only provides a more personalized and relevant onboarding experience for its users but also gains valuable insights into its user base. With the information it gathers here, Shopify can continually refine its features and offerings to stay aligned with users' needs.

✅ What’s good in this example?

• Engaging survey with clickable modals, emojis, and transition effects. 
• Explanatory microcopy for each “feature” and its functionalities.
• Real-time personalization and setup.

❌ What’s -not really- good in this example?

• No visuals related to the highlighted features. 
• No contextualization on where to find the features or how to use them.

Pop-up guides

You can think of pop-up guides as a bridge between static, non-interactive welcome screens and fully interactive in-app tutorials. They offer guidance similar to in-app tutorials but remain stationary, like welcome screens.

 Here’s an example from Make to help illustrate this middle ground:

Here, Make explains how to create a workflow (Scenario) step by step. 

Just like an interactive guide, we have "Back" and "Continue" buttons, along with information on how many steps are left in the tutorial. The microcopy for the steps is similar to that of the welcome modals.

The videos in each modal show how the UI should look during each action and where the user should click, providing some context. However, the user is expected to memorize the steps and the positions of the buttons and features shown in the video.

And let’s face it; although this might work for a simple 4-step workflow with a straightforward UI and button layout, it probably will not be effective for more complex tasks and features.

✅ What’s good in this example?

• Explanatory visuals.
• Clear and well-structured microcopy and steps. 

❌ What’s -not really- good in this example?

• It can be hard for the user to keep everything in mind and repeat themselves later on.

In-app tutorials

In-app tutorials are guides that walk users through specific features of your product and show them how to make the most of each one. Depending on the tools you use to create them, these tutorials can be interactive or static. 

They might also be videos on welcome screens or written read-only how-to guides users can access through your resource center. 

Each method varies in effectiveness and efficiency, but the goal stays the same: to provide users with guidance on using your product right where they need it, within the product itself.

Here are some examples 👇🏻

➡️ Flourish, a feedback management tool, explains how to add team members to the platform through an in-app tutorial:

Inviting someone new to a platform might seem like a straightforward task, but it’s actually a meaningful step —it’s a real commitment to using the tool.

Sometimes, a simple reminder or seeing the task on an onboarding checklist can motivate users to follow through with what might otherwise feel like a “boring” task. By making this step clear and rewarding, Flourish helps its users make that commitment with ease.

👉🏻 Check out Flourish’s successful onboarding in more detail.

✅ What’s good in this example?

• Explanatory and to-the-point microcopy. 
• Original CTA usage (“I’m ready to invite my team”).
• Triggered from an onboarding checklist upon the user’s desire, not automated.

❌ What’s -not really- good in this example?

• The steps could wait for the user to complete the action and then continue.

➡️ Another example comes from Vieworks, a video marketing tool. In this guide, Vieworks walks the user through each step of adding a seat:

👉🏻 Check out Viework’s successful onboarding in more detail.

✅ What’s good in this example?

• Fully interactive –it waits for the user to complete each step. 

❌ What’s -not really- good in this example?

• The microcopy could be formatted better with bolds or titles and sub-explanations.

🎥 Watch this video to learn more about in-app tutorials.

Interactive walkthroughs

Interactive walkthroughs are in-product tours that guide users through the interface, pointing out where key features are located and explaining their purpose. 

As users move through the tour, they actively participate by clicking on different features, dashboards, or subpages, which keeps the experience flowing smoothly.

Depending on your product strategy, you can provide personalized, goal-oriented walkthroughs tailored to different user segments or opt for a simple, general one —which we don’t really recommend.

Let’s see some examples 🔎

ClickUp’s interactive walkthrough holds the hands of its users while showing them each feature and dashboard around the UI:

The walkthrough (or "tour," as they call it) begins with a brief explanatory video that covers the basics of the ClickUp Hierarchy. In this video, ClickUp highlights key functionalities, use cases, and the overall value proposition. 

Afterward, ClickUp reinforces the information from the video by providing a contextualized product walkthrough.

✅ What’s good in this example?

• The information that cannot be given during the walkthrough is provided before the walkthrough with a video modal.

❌ What’s -not really- good in this example?

• Nothing major; let’s give credit where credit is due 🙌🏻

➡️ Another great example is CitizenShipper’s interactive walkthrough:

CitizenShipper triggers this walkthrough for mobile website visitors, guiding them through each section of the home dashboard and explaining what each one means and represents.

👉🏻 Check out CitizenShipper’s successful onboarding in more detail.

✅ What’s good in this example?

• Friendly and engaging microcopy. 
• Well-formatted, with lists and bold text used when necessary. 

❌ What’s -not really- good in this example?

• 10/10 example here 💯

Onboarding tooltips

Tooltips are small boxes of information that can be used to create engaging narratives, guide users through your product, or share tips and tricks about your features. They’re also great for explaining feature settings and capabilities in a clear and concise way.

Here’s how Trello uses them to create its product walkthrough:

As you can see, Trello not only explains the capabilities of the features and UI elements but also provides tips on how to make the most of them, including useful shortcuts.

✅ What’s good in this example?

• Informative microcopy. 

❌ What’s -not really- good in this example?

• No formatting whatsoever.
• No exit button.

We can already hear you asking:

"What’s the difference between a tooltip and a guide or a walkthrough?"

Tooltips are UI elements that can be used to create onboarding flows, like guides and walkthroughs. So yes, a walkthrough or guide can be made up of a series of tooltips.

However, you can also use tooltips individually without creating a sequential flow. This means that even if you have multiple tooltips, you can trigger them separately when a user hovers over or clicks on a feature/ UI button.

Like Flourish does here:

👉🏻 Read more on tooltip examples and best practices.

Hotspots

Hotspots are eye-catching UI elements designed to grab the user's attention and encourage them to click. But they’re not just simple "click me" buttons. Like tooltips, hotspots are small info boxes —just a bit fancier and more visually engaging.

You can use hotspots to:

• Announce new features/ UX improvements 
• Explain product features 
• Trigger guides and/or videos

For example, Plandisc, a calendar tool, uses this hotspot to trigger a tutorial:

When the user clicks on the CTA within the hotspot, it triggers an interactive in-app guide and explains to the user how to share a plandisc.

👉🏻 Check out Plandisc’s successful onboarding in more detail.

✅ What’s good in this example?

• Non-distracting way to offer guides.
• A walkthrough created with hotspots like this allows users to focus on learning what they need rather than exploring everything at once –create your own walkthrough experience. 

❌ What’s -not really- good in this example?

• A guide hidden within a hotspot might go unnoticed or unchecked at first and cause frustration or confusion in the user. 

Explanatory videos

There are many ways to use videos to create engaging product walkthroughs. Here are a few approaches:

• Human-led walkthroughs: Sales or product team members guide users through the UI, explaining features and their benefits.
• Product-only videos: No narration —just screen actions that showcase features and interactions within the UI.
• Animated walkthroughs: Animated sequences demonstrating workflows and highlighting the key features, or illustrating processes step-by-step.
• Customer testimonial videos: Real users sharing how they navigate and use your product, offering relatable insights and tips.

There are even AI-powered tools that take your written transcription and turn it into an explanatory video with an avatar!

👇🏻 Here’s an example:

This is a 2.5-minute AI-generated video explaining how to utilize Trello: create boards and tasks and collaborate with other people on them.

✅ What’s good in this example?

• Great visual usage, walking the user through each step.
• Cost-effective and relatively easier to create (compared to shooting the videos with your own teams).

❌ What’s -not really- good in this example?

• Lacks engagement –monotonous tone, no facial expressions, etc. 

But what happens if you put the money, time, and effort into creating your own videos?

Well, let’s see an example of that, as well.

Loom welcomes its new users with a detailed onboarding checklist –which we will examine very shortly– and then, for each feature and functionality on the checklist, they offer an explanatory video:

This is the video explaining how to record a video with Loom; there are different videos for each must-try feature on the onboarding checklist. So, in a sense, the onboarding checklist can be thought of as a walkthrough hub.

Anyway, back to the video. 

This video is longer than 1.5 minutes, and there are 3 more steps with separate videos on the checklist. So it takes more than 5 minutes to complete the videos alone…

And it might not be very optimal and worthwhile from your users’ perspective 🕰️

✅ What’s good in this example?

• Very educative and detailed.
• It can be easier to understand compared to written guidance. 
• Has the human touch 🪄

❌ What’s -not really- good in this example?

• It might be intimidating for the users, especially if there are a lot of videos and/or the videos are lengthy.

Onboarding checklists

Onboarding checklists are useful tools for highlighting important features, but that's not their only purpose. They can also serve as a roadmap, guiding users to understand the product better and explore its functionalities step-by-step.

Now is a good time to go back to Loom’s checklist:

As you can see here, Loom guides users through each step of using the product —from downloading Loom to recording, sharing, and tracking video engagement— all with a single checklist.

Each item on the checklist includes a brief description of the feature, along with a CTA button to the feature on the product UI as well as a link to an educational how-to video. 

Since these steps follow a sequential order, each CTA remains inactive until the previous step is completed. You can’t share a video without recording one first, and you can’t record until you've downloaded the tool. 

✅ What’s good in this example?

• Detailed and clear checklist steps. 
• Value-providing and goal-oriented structure. 
• Effective CTA usage –different CTAs for the guides and the features.

❌ What’s -not really- good in this example?

• 10/10 onboarding checklist 💯

Let’s see another checklist example from HeyGen, an AI video-generating tool:

HeyGen’s onboarding checklist adopts a unique horizontal design, breaking away from the typical top-down format. Each step highlights the tool’s key features and guides users closer to discovering its value while presenting clear value propositions. 

The checklist is concise and user-friendly. It has just three steps. Completed steps dim to encourage progress and maintain motivation. 

A truly creative and original approach from an innovative tool!

✅ What’s good in this example?

• Short, to-the-point, value-oriented checklist steps.
• Unique design.
• Clear and distinct CTAs.

❌ What’s -not really- good in this example?

• Nothing!

Which Products Should Utilize Product Walkthroughs?

If you’re aiming to boost user understanding, engagement, and ease of navigation, then yes, it’s a great idea to add a product walkthrough. A walkthrough helps users learn how to use your product efficiently, which is critical if you want them to see its full value right away. 

Below are some common use cases for walkthroughs. 

If these resonate with you, it’s time to consider implementing a product walkthrough strategy.

Product Walkthrough Use Cases

Onboarding new users

One of the most important moments in a user’s journey is the onboarding experience. Think of it this way: the first impression your product makes determines if users stay, explore, and eventually become loyal customers. 

A walkthrough can simplify onboarding by guiding users through key actions they need to take. It’s especially useful for complex tools with multiple features or intricate workflows.

Here’s how Flowla, a sales enablement tool, utilizes a product walkthrough to onboard its new users and make them feel comfortable and right at home:

👉🏻 Check out Flowla’s successful onboarding in more detail.

✅ What’s good in this example?

• Very friendly and engaging tone. 
• Formatted and structured information flow.
• Fully interactive steps.
• Provides reasons and motivations to utilize the highlighted features.  

❌ What’s -not really- good in this example?

• There could be a “Back” button.

You can also personalize the onboarding experience by tailoring different walkthroughs for each user segment and enhancing their UX with different contextual tips.

This approach allows you to showcase features that are directly relevant to each user's unique needs and help them reach their goals faster. By aligning the walkthrough with each user’s specific use case, you’re not only adding value but also creating a smoother, more engaging onboarding journey.

💖 Liked the notion? Create your own personalized onboarding flows with UserGuiding.

Introducing new features

Even your most loyal users might overlook a new feature if they’re not directly shown where it is and how it works. When you introduce updates or add features, a product walkthrough can help ensure that users notice, understand, and adopt these changes. 

Notion creates a short walkthrough with announcement modals and tooltips for its new AI feature:

Right from the start, Notion answers the question, "How can this feature make my work easier?" before its users even have to ask.

1. The first announcement modal (or welcome screen) introduces the new feature by listing its key value points and capabilities. 
2. The second modal covers important details about privacy, reliability, and pricing for the feature. 
3. The tooltips on the feature’s page provide guidance on how to start using it.

✅ What’s good in this example?

• Clear and to-the-point instructions. 
• Transparent in terms of the feature’s limitations.
• Informs about the add-on options.

❌ What’s -not really- good in this example?

• No progress bar or navigation buttons for the guide part.

Improving user engagement

Do you ever notice that users don’t return after signing up? 

Low engagement can often mean that users aren’t seeing enough value in your product, possibly because they don’t understand how to use it fully. Product walkthroughs can tackle this by highlighting key features, suggesting next steps, and motivating users to explore.

For example, if you create interactive guides for your relatively complex but essential features and trigger them from your onboarding checklist like aclipp does here 👇🏻

You can not only alleviate the confusion and frustration your users experience but also increase the engagement and usage rate of individual features of your product. 

✅ What’s good in this example?

• Important features are highlighted on the checklist. 
• Fun and engaging tone, with emojis and gifs 🚀🎉

❌ What’s -not really- good in this example?

• Could be too friendly and casual for some people (if there’s such a thing 🤔).

If you want to take the fun in your walkthroughs to the next level, you can think about integrating gamified elements into your design, as well. 

Here’s how Canva uses gamification to announce its new features:

• ✔️ Moving elements 
• ✔️ Real-time counter
• ✔️ Shiny doors and passages 
• ✔️ Popping confetti 

After this theatrical intro, Canva gathers its new feature walkthrough presentations in a checklist:

And each bullet on the checklist has a seperate presentation walkthrough going over the functionalities of the features and how to utilize them.

Like this:

As you can see here, each slide is dedicated to one functionality/ sub feature of the new “Magic Studio”. And Canva explains how to use them with a short step by step bullet list.

✅ What’s good in this example?

• Unique and bold feature announcement. 
• Good way to gather and reposit a lot of how-to information –especially for big releases like this. 

❌ What’s -not really- good in this example?

• All the gamification is in the introduction, there’s nothing “fun” with the actual walkthrough. 
• Checklist items are not check-able. 
• Too many unrelated and “filler” images on the presentations.

Reducing support costs

A well-designed walkthrough can answer many common questions and reduce the need for customer support. Users who have access to helpful in-product guidance are less likely to submit support tickets or call for assistance.

(Which frees up your support team for more complex issues.)

❔ Very basic questions like:

• How to customize my profile
• How to integrate with other tools
• How to manage billing and subscriptions

❔ Can be answered with short tutorials, tooltips, or hotspots. However, you can answer questions related to advanced features or settings, like:

• How to export or share data
• How to customize workflows
• How to manage user permissions

All these possible user questions depend on your product type and product itself, of course. But you get the point. 

Plus, you can also gather your checklists, product tours, and interactive guides in one place, like an in-app resource center. This allows users to return later and check for information when needed. 

By doing so, you not only reduce potential onboarding challenges for new users but also provide a way for existing users to refresh their memories about feature capabilities.

Here’s an example resource center from GroveHR:

👉🏻 Check out GroveHR’s successful onboarding in more detail.

✅ What’s good in this example?

• In-app support with an organized and centralized resource center. 

❌ What’s -not really- good in this example?

• Tooltip copies could be more explanatory. 
• Some emojis or formatting choices on the tooltips are not supported by all browsers, which leads to design inconsistency.

Pro Tip: You can also integrate your knowledge base with your resource center and leverage your morre detailed tutorials and best practice articles there, as well.

And GroveHR does that, too!

You can search for knowledge base articles in the resource center and read them without leaving the product. 

🎁 Start your free UserGuiding trial to create your own knowledge base and resource centers!

📚 Read more on how to become a self-serve business.

Promoting upsells and cross-selling

If your product has various tiers or add-ons, a walkthrough can be a smart way to showcase additional features that users might find useful. By strategically integrating upsell or cross-sell opportunities into the product experience, you can increase the likelihood of users upgrading or purchasing additional features.

Here’s how Crunch, an accounting tool, achieves that:

After introducing the home page, main dashboard, and chatbot, Crunch takes the user to the add-ons and upgrade pages. But it doesn’t bombard them with every single add-on option. 

Instead, it simply plants the idea —like putting a little bug in their ear— letting them know there are additional options if they’re interested. 

It’s a subtle nudge, not an all-out sales pitch! 🐝🐞

✅ What’s good in this example?

• Inviting but not persistent add-on promotion. 
• Additional resources and links. 
• Branded, well-formatted, and engaging microcopy. 

❌ What’s -not really- good in this example?

• Nothing. Not a single bad practice here 🙌🏻

Crunch supports this walkthrough with announcement modals, as well:

👉🏻 Check out Crunch’s successful onboarding in more detail.

📋 Let’s recap what we’ve talked about in this section:

• 📎 Product walkthroughs can help you do many things, such as onboarding a new user or announcing a new feature and providing guidance on how to use it. 
• 📎They can also help you ease your first-time users’ frustration and make them feel more confident about using your product. 
• 📎 When your users know how to use your product, thanks to your walkthrough, they will be more likely to engage with your features and adopt them.
• 📎 Along with guiding and educating your users, you can also use walkthroughs to create upsell opportunities by reminding them about add-ons and premium features.
• 📎 Finally, walkthroughs can help you prevent common adoption barriers and reduce user friction. By addressing potential issues before they arise, you also lighten the load on your support team.

Benefits of Product Walkthroughs for Businesses

You can provide a structured and guided introduction to the product

Imagine walking into a museum for the first time. 

To really make sense of everything you’re seeing, you need a logical path to follow —one that guides you through exhibits in a way that makes sense, maybe by geography, time period, or even climate. 

That flow, carefully curated by the museum, ensures visitors get a full experience without missing any key highlights. 

In much the same way, product walkthroughs provide a structured journey for new users, highlighting essential features and guiding them through the most relevant tasks. 

Instead of wandering through unfamiliar menus or settings, users get a clear, purposeful path to follow, designed to make sure they see the full value of your product.

Why is this important?

You only get one chance to introduce your product to a new user, and that first impression can be decisive. From the moment they first interact with it, users are already forming opinions —about its value, ease of use, and practicality.

If they don’t see the benefits immediately, they may decide to move on before giving it a fair chance.

📌 A well-designed product walkthrough can make all the difference by ensuring:

• Users recognize your product’s value from the start.
• They understand how to use it effectively and feel confident exploring its features.‍
• They reach their "Aha!" moment quickly and experience firsthand how it meets their needs.

You can convert more leads into paying customers

When you deliver value to potential customers from the very start with personalized checklists, guides, and tooltips —essentially, a full-package, goal-oriented walkthrough— they hardly need to imagine how the product will fit into their workflow. 

The walkthrough itself shows them exactly how it can help them achieve their own goals.

And this means user retention.

Your leads and trial users aren’t trying to escape or avoid commitment. They’re engaging with your sales reps and signing up for your free trial with a purpose. If and once they find your product valuable, they’ll stick around.

You can free your support team for more complicated tasks

Your support team can only take on so many tasks at once, and let’s face it —many support requests could be resolved with a little in-app guidance. 

Product walkthroughs serve as the first line of defense, addressing common questions, like “Where do I find X?” or “How do I set this up?”. By guiding users through basic workflows right within the product, you’re reducing the number of support tickets for these easily solvable issues.

🪧 Think of it like placing signposts along a hiking trail, so hikers (or in this case, users) know exactly where to go without having to radio in for help. 

Why is this important?

💡 According to studies, following the pandemic and the surge in SaaS tool usage, customer support tickets have risen by 16% across various industries. 

36% of customer support teams are struggling with unpredictable workloads, making it harder for them to keep up with the increased volume.

Plus, 90% of customers consider an "immediate" response essential or very important for customer service inquiries, with 60% defining "immediate" as 10 minutes or less. 

So, your goal here isn’t to make your customer success team work part-time but rather to help them manage their time and energy more effectively. They need to focus on higher-value tasks, and not get bogged down with repetitive, time-consuming questions. 

Your customers’ time is limited, and so is your support team’s. 

To keep both your customers happy and your support team functioning at their best, you need to streamline and eliminate the easy tasks that eat up valuable resources.

You can collect valuable user behavior data

Product walkthroughs don’t just guide users; they also gather incredibly valuable insights. Every click, skip, and completion tells a story about user behavior and helps you understand exactly how users interact with your product. 

By tracking advanced analytics, like which steps users complete, where they drop off, and which features they revisit, you gain a detailed look into different user segments and their specific needs.

User segments are key to crafting goal-oriented product experiences, like personalized checklists and walkthroughs. Then, by analyzing how these personalized experiences are performing, you can assess how well you understand your audience and work on your user segments and personas again. 

It's a dynamic loop —design, analyze, optimize, and repeat. 

Each cycle leads to more insightful, data-driven improvements to your product.