One of the most important best practices of showing in-product experiences is making sure these are contextual and non-intrusive.
Defining a Tour's recurrence, or, in other words, whether your Tour should repeat and how often it will do so, is an important factor of planning and building a Tour.
Quick access
When creating an announcement Tour -- one that will show to your users when they meet certain criteria -- you'll be prompted to select a recurrence option. You can select one of the following options:
Don't repeat after the Tour is exited or completed*
Repeat on the next page load
Repeat immediately after exited or completed
Repeat after a set timeframe
Note: In case the intention is to have a Tour show only once, when setting the Tour NOT to repeat after exited or completed, make sure that the Tour has a clear way to be completed and that any dismiss options are exiting the Tour and not snoozing it.
"To repeat or not to repeat, that is the question", a great mind once could've said. Nonetheless, this is a matter of great importance that should go into the planning of your Tours.
Each recurrence setting is unique and should be used wisely so that the right outcome is achieved. Therefore, we'll dive deeper into what you might want to consider when selecting a recurrence option
Repeating a Tour is useful if you want it to show repeatedly for the same user. For this, you can use either:
Repeat on the next page load
Effective when your Tour's first Step does not have a trigger action (such as a user click), since you may not want it to re-appear immediately after it ends.
Repeat immediately after exited or completed
Useful when the Tour's first Step has a trigger action such that the trigger action (or label/icon) is available again for the user to act upon. This is particularly effective for self-service use cases, such as:
Help icon for a certain feature.
Feature or page walkthroughs.
Another great reason to repeat your Tour is for testing it: you can set the audience to be Just me and then experience your Tour as an end-user.
A Tour with any of these recurrence options will repeat as long as they continue to meet all the necessary conditions for the Tour to show (such as Target Audience, URL Rules, Element Rules, triggers, etc.). In cases when the user falls out of the Target Audience, the Tour will not show again for this user, even if it is set to repeat.
Showing a tour once is great for any guidance that doesn't need to repeat. For example, if you want to use your Tour for:
Onboarding your users with a welcome walkthrough
A one-off feature launch
Downtime or outage update
... other ad-hoc use cases (here you can find more ideas)
If you select Not repeat after exited or completed, then the Tour will show until a user either:
Exits the Tour, by clicking the Dismiss option on any step
Completes the Tour, by completing the last Step.
Once a Tour that is set to not repeat is either exited or completed, it will then not show again to that same user.
Dismiss options take precedence over the defined recurrence setting. The reason for this is that, when your users snooze a Tour, they haven't completed or exited it, so they will still be in the Tour.
Therefore, let's say a Tour is set to show on each page load, but has a remind me later button, which snoozes it for two days. After clicking the remind me later button, the Tour will only show again after two days, regardless of whether it is set to show on each page load.
