Understanding the Basics of In-App Flows
What is a flow?
A flow is a layer, triggered in real-time, that sits on top of your product. It is a sequence grouping of steps that are designed to onboard, guide, engage, and educate your users.
Flows are very powerful and extremely easy to create without the need for any coding. They can help improve user activation and feature adoption by driving meaningful real-time actions as well as product onboarding to make it easier for users to navigate through your app.
Flows consist of steps, each step is an individual UI pattern like a modal, slideout, tooltip, and more. The step is made up of components such as text, buttons, HTML, or media and can be fully customized to make sure that the look & feel are as expected.
These UI patterns can be combined to make powerful flows or used separately to achieve certain goals. For example, you can build a single-step flow to announce a webinar or multi-step flow to welcome users to your app and highlight a couple of important features.
What do you need to start creating flows?
To build, edit, and design flows, you will need the Userpilot Chrome Extension builder. Chrome Extensions enable users to tailor Google Chrome browser functionality and behavior to individual needs or preferences. Using our builder, you'll easily be able to create powerful & well-designed contextual product flows.
If you haven't already installed the Userpilot builder chrome extension, you can go over to Chrome Web Store to freely download it.
Note: Userpilot Chrome extension builder is only used for authoring (creating and editing content) – Userpilot is browser friendly and supports many browsers for your end-users.
Flows best practices
Here are key tips that you should keep in mind before starting to build your flows.
Short and concise messaging
if you want to build effective product flows that have high completion rates, you need to be concise (don't use 20 steps while 5 are just as effective). We generally recommend flows with not more than 5 steps to avoid overwhelming users.
Defined Targeting
Identify your target audience and page locations that you want to target the flow towards. It wouldn't make much sense to target your new signups with a flow to push a secondary (less important) feature. Instead, it would be more relevant to them to see a tip on a key feature in a certain URL.
Understand your users
Don't build your flows blindly but think about the goal that you're trying to drive from your users before building the flow. For example, are you trying to turn their attention to a certain feature they haven't taken advantage of yet or explain a workflow that they are struggling with?
You can read more tips on creating flows in this article.
Next steps: Learn how to create your first flow.
If you have questions about the basics of flows, please reach out to us at support@userpilot.co