This post was published in medium
One of the most tedious and often times needed parts of delivering software to our users (or customers) is giving them clear instructions (guides) on how to use our product, most of the time we write detailed user manuals, only for us to be required to onboard users on how to do processes in our products, you know, employee B of customer A wants us to explain again how to create X report on the tool we made for them because apparently employee B was so busy doing his work that he did´t got the time to read our manual…
Now, going back to personal experience…
We are investing a lot of time and effort in creating intuitive guides which will (hopefully) boost our customer retention, prevent frustrations and give an amazing UX.
The solution? Create (code) user guides.
We reduced the meetings when we included intuitive guides in our products, most of the time the user onboarding could be done with the press of a button.
Our first stop was to try to implement one of the existing products that offered on boarding, while it was ok, it was not as straightforward to incorporate to our apps and when we wanted to delegate the creation of guides to our less tech-savy coworkers (picture Business Consultants documenting a specific process in a ERP) we hit a wall.
Oh, and don´t let me get started on the outrageous prices on enterprise onboarding software.
I get it, most of the solutions are like having a formula 1 sports car, the best of the best, but, it is extremely complex to use, expensive and not a lot of people can handle it… Some of us want a toyota, inexpensive, easy to use and gets us from point A to point B.
That´s why we opted to use open source/commercial tour libraries (Shutout to Bootstrap tour, Driver js, Intro js among many…)
There are plenty of open source libraries to code them, nonetheless there are some drawbacks, while we boost the UX of our product, we need to invest a heavy amount of resources depending on the number of processes to map and in the number of steps of each one, and I haven’t started on the pain it is to setup a multi-page navigation system.
An example from personal experience, we had to document processes for a large project, we spent a week coding tours…
While it looks amazing and it is a big WOW factor, it is expensive to implement.
And let’s also add the factor that only the tech department can create them, that’s why we created an alpha for a tool that enables creating this types of guides to anyone in the team, allowing customer service to create them meant that we did not have to send a request to our tech team to code those guides, neither we had to wait days to make the tutorial live.
So… what did i do?
I created a straightforward tool to create tours with ease, at first i used it internally for our company´s customers, then to document my hobby projects and after 8 months of validation, hard work and having a vision, i made it a SaaS accessible for anyone at a extremely fair price.
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