Our teams have been heads down on a few very exciting product milestones. We can't wait to share them with you. Ok, fine, we'll share the one that's right around the corner. Soon, folks that use Appcues on multiple products will be able to log into Appcues with a single email address and switch between their accounts within Appcues Studio! Stay tuned.
The team also continued to improve Appcues' accessibility last month (see below) and will be sharing even more accessibility updates throughout Q4. Read on for the full run-down!
Studio 💫
Accessibility
The Studio 💫
Accessibility
The Studio 💫
This month was our quarterly bug bash, allowing the team to stomp out some annoying bugs!
We're continuing to improve the usability of our Flow Builder, so you can easily create content that looks and feels exactly how you want it to:
1. The only time our SDK sets a cookie is when a flow redirects the user to another URL at the end of a flow.
2. That cookie is a first-party cookie that uses the domain of your site, not ours, so it isn't affected by Chromes updates to third-party cookies.
In short: all is well, and the cookies are good. Phew! 🍪
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At a recent User Test Fest, we learned it’s unclear how placing a tooltip works—especially to new users. After considering larger changes, we settled on simple guidance in the bottom bar, which appears while placing a tooltip.
We know that things can still go wrong, even with all the work we’ve done to resolve issues over the last few weeks. When they do, we’re going to give you a heads up about what’s happened—and what you should do next. Both the Flow Builder and the dashboard got new error states in January. Our hope is that you’ll never be left feeling stuck or unclear about what to do next.
Improvement to permalink resiliency—permalinks now work even in apps with fast redirects.
We updated the analytics processing and delivery system to make it faster and match accurately with the exported analytics.
We pushed some changes that make the test mode redirect (the new page that opens and loads your test) significantly faster in most cases.
We made tons of improvements and bug fixes to the Flow Builder this month.
Appcues test mode allows you to quickly and easily test flows live on your site, just how they'll appear to end users. You can also share test mode links with collaborators, so they can see your flows live without needing an Appcues login or the Flow Builder installed.
Clearer button to launch the Flow Builder from the Dashboard, and it now opens in a new tab(eds note: thank you all for the feedback on this).
We know that things can still go wrong, even with all the work we’ve done to resolve issues over the last few weeks. When they do, we’re going to give you a heads up about what’s happened—and what you should do next. Both the Flow Builder and the dashboard got new error states in January. Our hope is that you’ll never be left feeling stuck or unclear about what to do next.
Following up on the October 2018 updates to our Appcues brand, we’ve continued making changes to our in-app Dashboard to make usage more consistent, increase the speed of search and filter on the Flow List, and color and style updates to better align with the brand. These changes also include a few UI bug fixes and a visual overhaul of the NPS product.
In November, we released “Let the User Navigate” functionality for page changes within flows. With Let the User Navigate, the user will be able to interact with the current page, and even navigate to a page outside the flow. If they end up back on a page that matches the expected path, the flow will continue. Let the User Navigate also introduces support for wildcards, so matching dynamic sections of URLs is a snap.
We’ve been hard at work on this one, and we’re excited to share the results! Appcues is growing quickly, and it was time for our brand to evolve as well. Both the homepage and app dashboard underwent a major re-design, which is still rolling out. You’ll start to see a lot of “blurple” around these parts and we hope you love it!
The app re-design is rolling out slowly, but you can activate it anytime by clicking the banner on your dashboard.
Lots of customers generate CSV exports of their flow analytics to get in-depth information on how each step of their flows are performing. We gave the export experience a fresh UX update, and added a _custom date range_ option, so you can get exactly the data you want. One more tiny change with a big impact: exports are now normal 'zip' files, rather than funky 'gzip'. Should save some time for the spreadsheet-obsessed out there.
Events and Properties are an important part of proper targeting. We re-designed the layout of the page, to make them more readable and easier to use. They are split out into three separate categories (Events, Custom Properties, and Auto-Properties) to make it clearer which properties you control, and which are sent in automatically by Appcues.
Get excited, multi-page flow builders, the building experience is about to get much easier. A Page Change action will now get added to your Flow automatically when you navigate to and start building content on a new page. As part of this update, we also removed the modal that popped up when you navigated to new URLs. Because it was scary 👻.
This is just the start. Over the next few months, we plan to continue improving the experience of building flows. We’ve snuck a few other small adjustments already, like moving the Step Settings button over to make room. Stay tuned for more!
In addition to the left and right default positions, you can now customize the positioning and choose to place your beacon anywhere in your app.
Checklists don’t block other Appcues patterns anymore. The Checklist now patiently waits for flows with modals and slideouts to complete before appearing.
You can now manually trigger an Appcues checklist just like a flow. As checklists are different from flows and are inherently persistent, once manually triggered, the checklist will appear on all installed domains/subdomains regardless of targeting. To end this behavior, use Appcues.clearShow()
All the text on your checklist, including button text, is now customizable.
You can now measure the performance of your checklists once you have published them.
Now you can assign tags to your flows. The original categories that we had earlier are now used as tags for your flows.
Tells you more about events and properties, will give you data type and example values.
Customers on modern plans should be able to see their plan details, MAU info, billing details and Billing History.
If there are certain steps that you want your customers to take in a specified order, you can toggle the checklist so that an item cannot be initiated until the preceding has been completed.
You can now easily export a CSV for your NPS data.
