Guide · Onboarding strategy

Tour, demo, or video? Use each where it works.

A clear answer to the question every onboarding thread asks, and what changed now that narrated video is cheap to keep current.

Make the video side easySee pricing

Three different tools for three different moments

In-app tooltip tours guide a signed-in user through the first few clicks in their own account; they are great for activation and terrible for explanation. Click-through demos let a prospect explore a captured copy of the product before signing up. Narrated video explains a task with context and a voice, plays anywhere, and is what people search for. Teams that do well use all three. The video was the one that went stale fastest, until the script became the thing you maintain.

When to use which

A field guide.

01

Tooltip tour

First session, three to five steps, in the user's own data. Skip at any time. Never more than one per screen.

02

Click-through demo

Prospects, landing pages, sales follow-ups. A sandbox they can poke without a login.

03

Narrated video

Any task that needs a why, a help article, a release note, a YouTube search, a sales deck.

04

Combine: tour links to video

The tooltip's Learn more opens the two-minute video for that feature.

05

Combine: video seeds the demo

The same script that narrates the video can seed the demo data on screen.

06

Measure the right thing

Tours: activation rate. Demos: sign-ups. Videos: tickets avoided and watch-through.

What changed

Video used to be the expensive one.

Recording, voicing, and cutting a video every release kept teams from making enough of them. When a video is a performance of a script, it costs an edit and an export, and the library can be as big as the product.

A simple plan

1

Tour the first three clicks

In-app, skippable, once.

2

A video per task

Short, narrated, placed next to the feature and in the help centre.

3

A demo for prospects

Click-through on the landing page, seeded with the same demo data.

Tours versus video: the questions people ask

Do users actually watch onboarding videos?
Short ones placed in context, yes. Long ones linked from an email, rarely. Keep each video to one task and put it where the question arises: the empty state, the tooltip's link, the help article.
Are interactive tours annoying?
They are when there is more than one per screen, when they block the page, or when they cannot be skipped. Three to five steps, once, skippable, and they help.
Which is cheaper to maintain?
Tours and demos are usually edited in a visual builder when the UI changes. Hand-recorded videos are the costliest, which is why they go stale. Script-performed videos cost a sentence edit and an export.
Can a video replace documentation?
No. Keep a text version for search, accessibility, and skimming, and attach the video to it. Captions and spoken locations make Tuti Tuti's videos more accessible than most, but text still wins for finding one answer fast.
What about product demos with AI avatars?
An avatar talking over screenshots is a presentation, not a walkthrough. For teaching software, the thing to click should be lit on the real screen while it is named.
How many videos should we have?
One per task people ask about, which for most products is twenty to forty. That number is only reachable when each one costs minutes, not days.

Use all three. Make the video side cheap.

One script, many short videos.

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