"GIFs give instant value without unnecessary clicks or pauses. Demonstrating functionality quickly is a courteous gesture that thoughtful products can extend to their users"
Experience
Product managers are always looking for ways to better engage users—through product tours, onboarding flows, and one of our personal favs, GIFS.
Most people are visual learners, so using visuals in your onboarding can have a huge impact. That’s why a well-crafted GIF is worth its weight in gold when it comes to demoing a product’s capabilities.
And the Pitch team has mastered the art of GIFs to educate users on key features in their product.
😍GIFs show, don’t tell
Rather than linking a video library or making folks click out to get more information, Pitch shows users their document editing feature through embedded GIFs.
“GIFs give instant value without unnecessary clicks or pauses. Demonstrating functionality quickly is a courteous gesture that thoughtful products can extend to their users,” says Pip Johnson, Customer Success Manager at Appcues.
Pip is the CSM on Pitch's account and has seen first-hand how effective their GIF strategy has been.
That's because when users see how to accomplish something in your product, it sticks with them a heck of a lot better than when they read those same same steps in text-form.
🚀GIFs provide value right away
Another advantage of using GIFs in your onboarding experience is that users don’t need to click on the play button. As Pip said:
“Rather than putting it in a video where the user's gonna have to click play in order to see the content, I just love that they've gone straight in with just a very helpful GIF. You can demonstrate to users immediately what it is they need to do.”
Rather than overloading users with generic information, Pitch’s targeted GIFs show exactly how the product will benefit users. This builds excitement, engagement, and motivation to continue learning about Pitch’s features.
🤲 Let users help themselves
GIFs also cut down on customer support queries for Pitch by proactively addressing frequently asked questions. As Pip noted:
“A question that Pitch’s support team might get quite often is, ‘How can I edit my text?’ By inserting a contextual GIF right where users need them preemptively solves that question."
By directly showing how text editing works in an easy-to-understand GIF, Pitch reduces friction and confusion for users.
💡 Key Takeaways
There are several key lessons we can learn from Pitch’s GIF game:
- Use GIFs to visually demonstrate key capabilities - don’t just rely on text and screenshots
- Target GIFs to address commonly asked questions to reduce customer support burden
- Ensure your GIFs communicate value and capture user attention during onboarding