I personally think that the tour (of your homepage) does is not much useful otherwise - it just goes through all the elements one by one, the graphic design of the tours interferes with the design of the page, and the large amount of text in the tours makes it hard to understand whats different with the information in the tours.
I would love to see you try a couple of things and let us know how the conversion rate changed (it will also help us know the best practices when using your service):
- try the tours with a similar theme as the site (as is currently the case), but do more to separate them - perhaps by adding rounded corners, more shadows, or changing what are the main colors in the tour.
- try reducing the text in the tours.
- try putting in content in the tours that is different from the current site content - perhaps by grouping the features on the site and your tours introduce them as groups, or perhaps by focusing your tours on the benefits (as opposed to the features).
It's hard to tell where the barriers are, and what I should be looking at next
Also when the tour is finished there's no "close" which would be naturally placed where the next button used to be. When I closed the tour and wanted to start again I [apparently] had to reload, a "start tour again" button would have been good; perhaps have a tour hotkey that works site-wide to get a tour of a particular page.
The 'how' is nicely explained now, but the 'why' isnt so much. Meaning I think for me I'm not coming away with the feeling it's the tour isnt going to simplify anything on my app / site.
As you mentioned, people are lazy, so I want to be inspired to throw it into my app because what I've seen is so nicely done that I want it too.
Or perhaps you generate a tour that I can host myself ?
But to answer your question, we host the tours ourselves and provide you with a small script to insert into your page. And in the event of us going out of business, we will provide an 'offline tour player script' which you can host yourself. This is something we are already developing for some of our clients, who require it for sensitive internal apps, so we should be able to open it up for everybody if the need arises.
I'm not in the market for this so I'll leave my conclusions aside.
