Bytes Route started as an idea to automate user-guiding in web-apps. This idea came out of our struggles with solving trivial onboarding problems for the customers we have for all of our software products at Caphyon.
No matter how many blog posts, guides, faqs, or videos you create, users rarely bother to check them. And the few that do read them will still encounter problems navigating your application.
Changing the name or position of a small button can make many of your videos, guides, and FAQs become out of date and needing to be updated or rebuilt, a time-consuming and stressful task for everyone.
Missing or out of date guides will push your users to contact customer support, a service that can be costly in terms of human resources.
For the most commonly encountered issues, you can implement automated tours in your app, and in doing this, take the pressure off your customer support team and let them focus on more specific problems.
User retention is hard
User retention is an important metric that many companies struggle with.
There are some very good analytics software out there right now, that can help improve your user retention: Google Analytics, Hotjar, Matomo, Woopra, Clicky, etc. These can help you better understand what your users are doing, where they succeed, and where they get stuck in your app.
You can then take these insights and try to make marginal changes so that your various metrics improve: page visits, clicks, impressions, registrations, purchases, etc.
Wouldn’t it be great if you wouldn’t lose precious clients just to get insights about how to change your app to make it perform better?
It’s sometimes more beneficial to be there for your users, from the start, when they first land on your website, to guide and direct them when they get stuck or when they are having a hard time performing a certain task.
All of this is possible with…
User onboarding
User-onboarding is the term used to describe guided experiences that can help new users get acquainted with a website and show existing users how to access various other functionalities in a more complex web-application.
Other commonly used terms to describe the same area are:
- onboarding
- application tour
- automated tutorials, tours, guides
- new-user experience
- dynamic helpers
- learning guides
- new-feature tooltips
Our Route
Bytes Route is our take on the Automated User Guiding. Although there are many tools out there that offer similar things, we wanted to keep things simple, both for the guide creator, as well as for the people who will run the guides.
We think it hits the three spots where other guiding software can fall short:
- easy to set up
- easy to create tours
- easy to run tours
Setting up
The initial setup is minimal. First, create a free account. Then, copy the script string generated for you in the dashboard and add it to your website.
Creating tours
Tour creation is easy and intuitive. It’s done with the help of our free Chrome Extension. Go on your website, open the extension, and press the start recording button.
Right-click elements that are highlighted and add a helper text to each. You can edit, delete or reorder existing steps in the extension. When you are done, save your tour. In the last modal-window, you have the choice to publish it. You can publish it later if you want to. Only published tours will be available for your users.
After you saved your tour, you can give it a quick run, to see how it would look like for your users. You can do so from the extension.
If you notice any things you will like to change, you can still edit the tour, by selecting it from the extension and pressing edit.
Running tours
After the initial setup, the tour creation, and publishing, your users will be able to see and run the tour. You can visit your website and test your newly created tour.
Conclusion
To sum up, automated user-guides are a good complement to analytics software. They are a great way to replace videos, FAQs, written guides and not having to redo them when your website changes.
In addition, this type of software help in taking the pressure off your customer support team, in order for them to focus their energy where it matters.
Bytes Route is a free automated user-guide solution that is easy to set-up and easy to build tours with. You can try it for free
For more information on how to use Bytes Route, you can also check our Documentation or read our practicle example Bytes Route, a practical example
