On onboarding, activation and in-app guidance
Guides, teardowns and honest case studies — including ones from our own products.
Product tours, popups and onboarding in the age of AI → (PDF, 2 pages)
Inside Clew: what we built instead of Appcues and Intercom tours — and what it doesn’t do
Product tours, tooltips, modals and checklists for your web app, in our cloud or on your own servers. How it is put together, what the widget knows about your visitors, and what we deliberately left out.
kust.io: onboarding built with Clew lifted activation by 30% — and what those numbers don’t tell you
A case study from our own user-research service: what we put in, what the internal numbers showed, and the questions we would ask about those numbers ourselves.
Product onboarding: five formats and how to pick the right one
Tooltips, hover hints, tours, modals and checklists solve different problems. Which format fits which situation, where each one starts getting in the way, and how to tell whether it helped.
Increasing user activation: how we set up Clew’s own onboarding with Clew
A hover hint on the sign-up form, a first-session tour, a popup with an A/B test of its colors, and a “run your first A/B test” checklist. Why each one is there, how it is configured, how much traffic the test needs — and why there are no results yet.
Onboarding checklists: choosing the items and making them tick themselves
Three to five items, each an action in the product. How to choose them, why an automatic tick beats a checkbox users tick themselves, and where checklists fall short — using the checklist in our own dashboard as the example.
10 onboarding examples from Notion, Stripe, Linear and others — and what to copy
Ten patterns from products everyone knows — Notion, Canva, Linear, Slack, Stripe, GitHub, Duolingo, Miro, Figma and banking portals. For each: when it works, when it annoys, and how to build the same thing with a tooltip, a modal or a checklist.
Onboarding without developers: what you can do yourself, and what engineering still owns
Engineers are needed in three places: adding the script tag, putting data-tour on key elements and, optionally, passing user properties. Product managers, marketers or support can do everything else in the browser. Step by step, using Clew.
GuideProduct tour examples: 8 patterns and what each one gets right
Eight product tour patterns you can copy: when each one fits, how many steps it needs, sample copy, what to measure and how to build it. No borrowed screenshots and no invented conversion numbers.