Each tour step names a target on the page, navigates there if needed, dims everything else and highlights the one control that matters. Steps can advance on a click, on a real app event, or on a Next button, and can branch on an answer. If a target never appears the step is skipped rather than leaving the user stuck under a dim overlay.
Also called: coach marks · spotlight tour · product tour · show me how · interactive walkthrough · guided tours · walkthrough · tutorials · in-app training · how do I · onboarding tours
- 1The step declares navigation first: hash → view → settings tab → a richer action (expand the sidebar, expand a pipeline stage, open a card's modal, open a Gantt project)
- 2Target resolution runs querySelectorAll and picks the VISIBLE instance — never a first match
- 3Three visibility gates run per candidate: is it rendered, is it clipped by an overflow-hidden ancestor, is something painted on top of it
- 4A MutationObserver plus a rAF-throttled re-resolve waits for the target, bounded by an 8s timeout
- 5On timeout the engine skips the step instead of wedging
Bought-in tour tools kept pointing at nothing. This app keeps every screen loaded in the background and hides the ones you are not on, and a collapsed sidebar shrinks to no width at all while the buttons inside it keep their full size — so a naive highlighter finds a button that exists but cannot be seen, dims the page, and tells a new hire to click an empty rectangle in the corner. Tours here confirm the thing they are pointing at is genuinely on screen and genuinely visible, scroll it into view, and wait for the click. When a target never appears, the step is skipped rather than trapping the person halfway through a lesson.
- Generic tour tools point at invisible or duplicated elements in a keep-mounted app
- A stuck tutorial traps the user behind a dim overlay
- Watching a video does not build the muscle memory of doing the task
See it on your own jobs
Twenty minutes, your numbers, no slide deck. We’ll build one of your real buildings in front of you and send you the estimate link at the end — yours to keep either way.
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