Building a Context-Aware Onboarding System in Next.js

When I started building TourKit, I thought onboarding tours would be the easy part.

Create a few tooltips, highlight some elements, and move users from step to step.

Turns out I was completely wrong.

The real challenge wasn't building the UI.

It was deciding when a tour should start.

The Problem with Traditional Tours

Most onboarding systems follow a fixed flow:

Dashboard → Analytics → Settings → Complete

But real users don't behave like that.

Some users land directly on the analytics page.

Others skip half the product and jump straight into settings.

Showing the same onboarding flow to everyone creates friction instead of helping.

My Goal

I wanted onboarding to react to where users actually are.

For example:

• User lands on /analytics → show analytics onboarding
• User lands on /settings → show settings onboarding
• User opens a feature for the first time → explain only that feature

Instead of forcing users through a long tutorial, the onboarding should feel contextual.

The Technical Challenge

The difficult part wasn't rendering tooltips.

It was handling:

• Route changes
• Delayed component rendering
• Missing elements
• Dynamic page content

A tour could start before the target element even existed in the DOM.

This caused selectors to fail and onboarding to break.

The Solution

I built a trigger system that waits for specific conditions before launching a tour.

Example triggers:

• URL-based
• First visit based
• Feature interaction-based

This allowed onboarding to adapt naturally to user behavior.

What I Learned

The UI is often the easiest part of onboarding.

The real complexity lives in runtime behavior:

• Knowing when to start
• Knowing what to show
• Avoiding interruption

The best onboarding doesn't force users through a tutorial.

It helps them make progress.

Final Thoughts

Building this feature took far longer than I expected, but it completely changed how I think about onboarding.

Users don't want more steps.

They want momentum.

I'm currently building TourKit, a developer-first onboarding platform focused on lightweight and contextual onboarding experiences.

Try it out - here - Tourkit

Would love to hear how others are approaching onboarding in their products.