Ikea knows how to guide your SaaS customers in a better way

This is about SaaS product tours and Ikea knows it better than you do. What? Ikea? Yes, Ikea.

Product design has to be intuitive that is why we should not have product tours. While that might be true according to you but what is the actual definition of intuitive? What is intuitive for you, might not be intuitive for someone else.

If you have something like google where there is only one thing to do i.e only search, then you can have intuitiveness at its best but the SaaS products mostly don’t have just one functionality.

Now, as you have agreed that the SaaS product tours are important, let’s get to the real Ikea stuff.

You have shown your users, the benefits of the product, you have sold your product to them, don’t sell the same thing again. It will make them feel annoyed. Below is the example:

Instead, the message should have been something like this:

You are 30 seconds away from saving your life’s work.

Why the sentence like above? because the user would have known the product value by now, this is the time to tell them how easy is to use the product and make them gel up with the product.

Ikea tells you upfront, what do they do. Inside the store you won’t get repetition of the same message, instead, you will start seeing their collection, the moment you step inside the store:

Ikea doesn’t tell you how your home will look with their products, instead, they show you, how their products will look in your home or how you can create your home with the Ikea products.

Remember, you will see this while touring the Ikea store. Their products, and how happy people are after using their products can be seen outside the store through the windows.

You have shown the magic of your product with the copy, design, videos on your landing pages same as Ikea windows. Now, you have to actually make the customer feel, how will be their life after the next few steps.

This will keep them going through the product tour steps to achieve the first milestone.

You can use the humanly possible photos here but why photos and why not illustrations? because you are selling your software to a human and humans are emotional. Make them emotionally connected with another human being and not only with illustrations.

Guide your users through the whole journey but don’t let them or make them exit (Remember, Ikea’s arrows here).

Additionally, walk your users through the most important feature of your product first and make them feel better. Ikea does this by showing the bedrooms first.

We can learn many things from Ikea stores but here are some more:

• If there are no product tours in the product, your customers will be lost.

• If the customers cannot create something as a part of the guided tour, you are looking at another support ticket/onboarding session booking or chances of losing the customer.

• If you want to show the users the power of your product then you need to have power in your tours.

• If the product complexity is high then demos are good but for simple ones, product tours should take all the load.