Airtable's animated product tour
As a spreadsheet-database hybrid, Airtable offers users a powerful collaborative platform where they can organize everything—from the scenes of their next play to every single event in their lives. The simple tooltips of a traditional product tour couldn't do justice to the extensive capabilities embedded in each feature of the app. So instead, the Airtable team chose to use animated gifs.
Why this is really good UX:
- By choosing to use gif-based tooltips over traditional ones, Airtable can showcase the full function and capabilities of their database in one continuous flow.
- Writing out individual instructions for each function could get complicated and confusing. But the gif works well with a spreadsheet interface that's very informationally dense.
- The gifs can be easily accessed at any point from the help menu in the app's templates to offer in-context assistance.
- In contrast to video product tours, users never have to leave the app environment to watch the tutorial.