Shepherd is a client-side onboarding framework and interactive product tour library used to create step-by-step guided walkthroughs. It functions as a UI guided tour system and DOM element highlighting tool that displays instructional overlays and tooltips to guide users through a web application interface.
The system features a dynamic layout engine for anchoring tooltips to target elements and preventing screen overflow. It supports multi-element highlighting to draw attention to several UI components simultaneously and includes focus trapping to restrict keyboard navigation to active tour modals.
The framework provides capabilities for tour orchestration, including conditional step triggering based on application state and the persistence of user progress and completion states within the browser. It also includes customizable interaction controls for step buttons and keyboard navigation support.