What does our onboarding look like these days? Do we have any in-app messaging for our new integration? How is that old tooltip performing, anyway? If your team members are coming to you with questions like these, I’ve got you.
There’s no easy way to fix general communication, but you can get better at surfacing what flows you’re building and how they’re performing with a few simple habits.
First, determine your audience. Ask a few questions:
For us at Appcues, it was:
Two quick notes before I dive in. First,this process was more time consuming than difficult. Every one of these Made with Appcues guides has a time estimate on it, but honestly, this could be anywhere from an hour to a weeks-long project. Start small and grow! Secondly, it needs to become a habit or it’s just going to fade away. It almost faded for me only 60 days in—don’t let it slip!
Ok, so, as I mentioned above, I determined Notion and Slack are where most of my audience spends their time, so that is where my lovely archive will live. I researched our information architecture and found a good spot for my docs, then I decided to start building a table.
I recommend the table format because it’s searchable, filterable, and usually makes it easiest for people to find information. If you’re not using Notion, maybe Airtable or a Google Sheet would be the best option.
I added a table to a Notion page within our Marketing section that included key columns I thought people would be interested in:
I also created specific views to make it easier for folks who might not be as familiar with filtering and searching tables to easily see what flows they were interested in.
I realize that I added a lot of columns that might not be relevant for everyone. Even if your organization doesn’t need as much detail as we do here at Appcues, almost everyone who is curious about what flows are live wants to see:
Setting this up for the first time is where that time commitment I mentioned earlier comes in. You gotta be strong, my friends. Just put on some good tunes or your favorite show in the background and start screenshotting and cataloguing. You’ll be surprised how happy everyone is that they now see what users see! Transparency and showcasing your hard work never gets old.
Once your table is live, everyone can see the hard work you’ve put into Appcues. Next, you’ll need to make sure you’ve got a regular cadence for updating this dang thing. I set myself a regular reminder on my calendar, but there are plenty of ways to give yourself a friendly ping.
Lastly, make sure everyone knows that you’re adding to this table! Why go through all the effort if people keep asking you what’s live? We have a dedicated Slack channel for our internal Appcues usage here, and that’s where I make our announcements.
I bet some of you are asking, why bother? Why duplicate efforts? All of this info is in Appcues, right? Let me spell out with a lovely bulleted list why you might want to build a flow repository outside of Appcues:
What am I missing here? How did you build your internal flows catalogue? Send me a note at lyla@appcues.com or reach out to me on LinkedIn.