Appcues Mobile beta
Appcues experiences are coming to mobile apps soon. This month we’re rolling out our initial customers, and already learning a lot. More to come on this in early 2019.
Localization
We’ve heard from many of our customers about the need for flow content in multiple languages. We’re in the early stages of learning about how this functionality should work. If you’re interested in providing feedback or seeing early prototypes, please reach out.
Want to test these new features? Sign up for our User Testing Day
Helping users understand how to build flows across pages
- After a user makes a page change for the first time, we now render a tooltip above the action step to educate users about the new page change type
- We have another video overlay! This one renders for new users that click Navigate for the first time. This video shows users how to make page changes.
- We redesigned the action settings modal by eliminating all of the on-screen text and moving it into hover tooltips. Also, the modal now provides links to the page change docs and video overlay in case further clarification is needed.
Improved analytics
- We updated the analytics processing and delivery system to make it faster and match accurately with the exported analytics.
Faster Test Mode
- We pushed some changes that make the test mode redirect (the new page that opens and loads your test) significantly faster in most cases.
CRX bug fixes - A more resilient Flow Builder
We made tons of improvements and bug fixes to the Flow Builder this month.
- We’re smarter about how we access steps within a page container.
- We handle old user id’s that had malformed strings in them.
- We better load TypeKit for our customers that use custom fonts.
- We safely render templates even when they haven’t fully loaded yet.
- We don’t try to add event listeners to hotspot and tooltip group frames if they don’t exist.
- We fixed a bug that caused the CRX to crash on fine-tuning tooltips.
New SDK version
- This version will more thoroughly close out the Action Driven Tooltip (ADTT) so that the flow can proceed to the next step.
- If a user navigates too quickly across pages, this version saves the navigation in the SDK’s flow state in a better way. It more reliably carries that action across pages and waits for the correct one to match (or until the page check limit is reached).
Easier testing and flow collaboration with Test mode
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.
Dashboard
- 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).
Flow Builder
- New error state for the Flow Builder. When something goes ‘bump’ in the night for the Flow Builder, now you’ll be the first to know.
- More educational content in the Flow Builder, this time for Page Changes.
More Dashboard updates for brand alignment and usability
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.
More flexible user navigation through flows
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.
Dashboard
- The default domain for targeting purposes will now be the domain the flow was built on. We learned this was far superior to defaulting to “Everywhere my Appcues embed script is installed”.
- Related: if you remove the last domain in your targeting settings, “Everywhere my Appcues embed script is installed” will no longer be auto-selected. Another change to soothe anxious nerves.
- Flows will no longer show by default in the in-app widget. This was a big headache for customers who were using this beta functionality.
Flow Builder
- The “Add step” button is now displayed inside the current page group, alongside the steps on that page. Our goal is to make it clearer where you are adding steps, and be able to add steps into the middle of a flow.
- Similar to the Dashboard, we made a number of branding consistency and usability updates to the Flow Builder.
- We spotted some templates that didn’t have preview images, which made it a bit scary to add those to your flow. No more!
- A few improvements to the reliability of the Flow Builder. No need to go into nitty-gritty details, but it should work more reliably, and more improvements are planned.
SDK
- A user tracking bug we had with anonymous users have been resolved. This is now working as intended.
- 4 bug fixes for Checklists, including an update to the Google Analytics integration.
- The SDK now serves CSS from a CDN, rather than directly from the API. This should save ~100ms per request in most cases. Faster is better.
We glowed up!
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.
Custom date range for CSV export (and export re-design)
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 & Properties re-design
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.
Page Changes now added automatically
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!
Other Flow Builder changes this month
- It’s now much more straightforward to delete a single step, rather than the whole group. No more accidentally deleting your hard work.
- We removed Record mode from the Flow Builder. In it’s place, we’re working on a brand new “Test Mode” that you’re going to love. Get in touch if you want to beta test!
Checklist beacon offset
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 wait for other content to finish first
Checklists don’t block other Appcues patterns anymore. The Checklist now patiently waits for flows with modals and slideouts to complete before appearing.
Checklist Appcues.show()
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()
Other changes from this month
- Show Step and Step Child IDs somewhere in the CRX (#426)
- Fixed a nasty bug with flows ending prematurely after an action-driven tooltip into a page change.
- The page targeting helper now support wild card domains
- Share button is now 'Permalink' (better reflecting what it's for), and the Edit button has been moved down to be across from the Preview URL.
- The "Publish Flow" confirmation modal now scrolls properly, so customers on small screens can still access the publish button.
Checklist: All text now editable
All the text on your checklist, including button text, is now customizable.
Checklist analytics went live
You can now measure the performance of your checklists once you have published them.
Flow list tag management
Now you can assign tags to your flows. The original categories that we had earlier are now used as tags for your flows.
Little card in the targeting page
Tells you more about events and properties, will give you data type and example values.
New subscription page went live
Customers on modern plans should be able to see their plan details, MAU info, billing details and Billing History.
Checklist: Sequential checklist support available
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.
NPS data export went live
You can now easily export a CSV for your NPS data.
