Today, we're announcing multi-page and multi-state Product Tours—our most requested feature of 2024. We’re breaking the single-page barrier that limited our first foray into product tours.
This update introduces seamless cross-page guidance, interactive tour triggers (like click to trigger), and habit-forming capabilities (like wait for user click)—all built within Candu's flexible Editor.
But first, here's why we rebuilt our product tours.
The Single-Page Limitation Problem
For years, product teams have faced a frustrating tradeoff. Browser-based tours offer real-time guidance across pages but lack rich customization options. Meanwhile, building content in an Editor allows powerful styling and interactions, but traps you within an editor, which is suited for changing specific pages. Tours, famously, need to jump from page to page.
At Candu, we made the decision to build Tours alongside all our components (checklists, banners, forms, etc.) in our full-fledged Editor. But for tours, this meant we were offering an electric car with incredible features but limited range. (My first electric car was the Volkswagen eGolf. With all of 60 miles of range, I loved the ride… up until the moment I had to get home.)
Modern applications are dynamic and multi-page, and our tours couldn't keep up. Here are real customer user journeys that we couldn't accomplish with single-page tours:
- A product marketing team wanted to highlight a new feature, but it was tucked under a submenu
- A product manager wanted to guide users through a workflow that spanned sections on their dashboard, settings page, and configuration modal
- A design team needed users to opt in to a redesign by clicking a toggle, before showing them around the new design
- A growth team wants to improve activation by guiding admins to add new members, by opening a modal and filling in a form
Single-page applications today are dynamic, stateful things. Yet despite their styling and interactive capabilities, our tours didn’t go far enough.
"That solves the kind of pain points we had. We've simulated a similar behavior with great effort, so this new functionality will allow us to remove all that extra work."- Breffni "Bref" Murdoch, Principal UI Engineer at Tigera.
Bringing Power to Multi-Page, Stateful Experiences
The limitation wasn't just inconvenient—it fundamentally constrained how effectively our users could guide users through complete product experiences. This is why multi-page tour functionality has been our most requested feature by far.
While tours became our 2nd most popular content type, customers needed more. Product teams created separate tours for each page, then daisychained them together, hoping that users would follow along. Yuck. The result was a fragmented experience that was a beast to debug.
Now, with Tours v2, we've extended the range of your electric car while preserving everything that made the ride exceptional. You get all the premium features you love (z-indexes, layers, click-to-trigger), with the freedom to guide users across your entire product—from page to page, state to state, without compromises.
Four Key Innovations in Tours v2
1. Seamless Cross-Page Journeys
Tours transition naturally across different pages of your application. When users navigate to a new page—for example, opting into a tour from a product homepage—the appropriate tour step appears automatically, creating a continuous, cohesive experience.
We've also implemented dynamic URL support, allowing you to incorporate variables from properties and from the URL itself—essential for personalized guidance that adapts to each user's unique context.
2. Contextual State Awareness
Modern applications are dynamic, with interfaces that update when users take action. Tours v2 is fully state-aware, responding intelligently to:
- Modals and dialogs opening
- Menu items expanding and collapsing
- Tabs and panels switching
- Content loading asynchronously
- User selections changing the interface
Effective guidance needs to respond to what's actually happening on screen, not just what was initially visible," as Rocío, Candu's Head of Design, puts in, Tours v2 makes this possible, creating experiences that feel responsive and contextually appropriate.
3. True Interactive Guidance
Tours v2 transforms passive instruction into active learning through:
Trigger-a-Click functionality where Candu clicks the page elements
Wait-for-click functionality requiring users to interact directly with the site before proceeding
Strategic backdrop highlighting focusing attention on specific page elements and selectors
This evolution from passive pointers to active guided journeys creates more engaging, memorable experiences that build genuine product fluency. Users don't just learn where features are—they develop habits around how to complete key workflows.
4. Sophisticated Triggering Options
We've significantly expanded how tours can be initiated:
- Enhanced page visit triggers with improved targeting
- Element click triggers (NEW!) launching tours when users click specific interface elements
- State change awareness (NEW!) responding to UI updates
- Advanced programmatic triggers offering deeper developer controls
This flexibility ensures guidance appears as users need it—neither too early nor too late in their journey.
Performance and Usability Enhancements
We recognized that multi-page tours would require capturing more snapshots of your product. That's why we completely rebuilt our snapshot interface, making it 10 times faster to capture new pages and states.
The revamped interface is cleaner and more intuitive, explicitly optimized for multi-page workflows.
Additional Tour Enhancements
Our dev team didn't stop at multi-page functionality. Tours v2 includes several other improvements you've been requesting:
- Click-to-target tour elements - Highlight elements to select them rather than typing in selectors
- Dynamic variable support - Adapt tours to different user contexts and inject URLs directly from the end-user’s URLs
"These enhancements add up to a dramatically smoother workflow when you're creating or editing a complex tour," notes Flora Sanders, Senior CSM. "What used to take hours can now be accomplished in minutes."
The Future of Contextual Guidance
Tours v2 represents a big advancement in product guidance, but we're just getting started. Our vision for the future of contextual guidance includes:
- AI-driven tour creation automatically generating tour content from existing help content
- Intelligent segments determining the optimal moments for guidance
- Tour analytics v2 measuring effectiveness and user engagement step-by-step
- Conditional branching logic adapting to user actions
Start Creating Multi-Page Experiences Today
Tours v2 is available to all customers starting today. Ready to transform fragmented product experiences into coherent, guided journeys?
We can't wait to see the embedded, dynamic product support you’ll create with these new capabilities.
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