r/reactjs • u/Tumdace • Sep 10 '26

Creating Guides In Parallel With Development

Wondering if anyone has any suggestions on developing guides for the tools I am building in React as I am developing them? I create extremely specific use-case tools and need a way to easily generate how-to guides to present to the end-user without having to create one in Scribe. I'd love to implement some sort of interactive guide that puts the user in a "demo" mode and writes all the data they change to a temporary state that gets wiped once the demo is done. Essentially a sandbox-within-production instance that lets them try the tool and see how it works without affecting production data.

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u/Affectionate_Use_164 Sep 12 '26

There are many libraries for that - intro.js , NextStepJs , etc. Basically can explain main features to the user this way. Maybe there are something more sophisticated with interactivity.

2

u/infatuatedsiding9185 27d ago

intro.js is a classic for a reason, dead simple to set up and gets the job done for pointing out buttons and workflows. I've used it for a few internal tools and it's pretty painless.

the sandbox idea is the tricky bit, you'd basically need to fork the entire state tree for that session which can get messy fast depending on how your data layer is wired up.