An interactive product demo is essential for your SaaS product marketing and sales. Product demos can assist your team in accurately conveying your products' values effectively. When building an interactive demo, you need to consider user motivation, experience, and practical UI elements for different demo purposes.
Product Demo User Experience
Know your audience
Before building an interactive product demo, you need to understand the audience. Is your target audience tech-savvy? Are they familiar with specific user experiences? You will need to understand what type of interface they are familiar with and consider how to deliver a product experience. Suppose the users are familiar with complex user interfaces. In that case, they will quickly understand without additional UI patterns, but if they are non-technical users, you might need some extra elements on the product demo.
Define the purpose of the demo
Interactive product demos are for discovery funnels or lead nurtures for product marketers. The sales team can use product demos to showcase product features for prospects. The customer success team uses it to help the onboarding process. Is the intent of your product demo to show core features to everyone? Or Is your product demo for assisting customers in comprehending your product better? Each team has a different purpose for each demo, and it is the main thing you should consider.
User Flow
The user flow of the interactive product demo will be different based on the goal of the product demo itself and user behaviors. Once you define the purpose of the demo, you will need to think about the optimal user flow for the product demo. Product demos for product marketers will help achieve qualified marketing leads. The sales team would like to close more sales, and the customer success team would like to provide the best onboarding experience.
But the common goal for each team is to deliver the “Aha” moment to the user with product demos. A well-designed user flow in the product demo will achieve each team's goal. When creating storyboards for product demos, you must identify the ideal user path to get them “Aha” moment as soon as possible.
You should never assume that all user journeys will be the same, as no journey is a linear path. “We have X product features to solve Z problems, and they will want to try X.” will not help you create an ideal user flow for the Aha moment. You need to see how active users used your product and notice when they got the Aha moment based on user behavior data. And this will tell you which product features and user flows will solve their problem, and product demos should apply them effectively. The product demo should be about storytelling and not about showing your fancy product features.
UI Patterns
Tooltips
You will need to personalize user interaction points based on your product demo purposes. For example, suppose you are a product marketer and decided to show a product feature to highlight on the website. In that case, you will need some tooltips containing helpful information to help website visitors understand what it is for. Keep in mind that the UI pattern should align with your brand identity and image so that customers have a seamless experience with your product and brand. Also, you should consider enough information for each tooltip and size because if tooltips are too long or too wide, they will block the other interfaces.
Modal Dialog
Modality is a design technique that guides the user’s attention to a specific task from the current background. The model window is an influential UI pattern for the customer onboarding demo. You might not want your new user to wander around, get lost in the product, and never get to the Aha moment. Start with the welcoming model window and show each step-by-step guide dialog. But you should be careful to use modal dialog and not distract users too much. Remember, simple is the best. Don’t ask for too many tasks for each step.
Hotspots
The most commonly used UI pattern on an interactive product demo is Hotspots. It is ideal for self-guided tours or interactive product demos. You can use the hotspots for each interface so that users can click the hotspots at their own pace. Modal Dialog might not be ideal for long product onboarding (like ten + or more steps ! ) because it forces users to stay on the guides, and users might lose their interest in your product. On the other hand, with hotspots, users can explore your product as they want and interact with it if they need more information.
Interactive Product Demo UXUI Design Best Practice
Each UI pattern has an excellent advantage for each product demo purpose. The best practice for designing a product demo is to personalize your product demo for each customer and use the proper UI patterns for the demo. If your product is too complicated, you can combine tooltips and modal windows. If you want to show light product features without guiding your customers (like free trial sessions), then hotspots will help users understand your product better.
It is not easy to create optimal product demos, and it is time-consuming. However, if you start by understanding users' “Aha” moments and define clear goals that you want to achieve with the product demos, it will make it easier to build product demos.
Still don’t know where to start? Tacpoint Product Demo Solution can help you build practical, interactive product demos from A to Z.
