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In-app guides offer an excellent way to guide both new and existing users through your product, showcasing its features and functionalities. However, the question often arises: "How many steps should my guide include?"

 

 My first recommendation is to empathize with your customers and consider how many steps you would personally go through when learning about a new product or feature. Including too few steps might result in inadequate guidance, while including too many steps could lead to significantly lower completion and feature adoption rates. It's important to strike the right balance.

 

 

Fortunately, at Gainsight PX, we are passionate about data and have determined the ideal approach to drive customer engagement through in-app guides. Our analysis reveals that keeping the guides within 5 steps yields completion rates of almost 30%, with 2-3 steps being the optimal range.

 

Completion rates from automatic engagements based on number of slides

 

However, what if your product is highly complex and requires longer guides? No need to fret, as we have a solution for you.

 

Are you aware that you can incorporate in-app guides into your KC Bot? This enables users to access knowledge and learn at their own pace. Our findings indicate that implementing guides within a bot, with up to 5 steps, results in completion rates of almost 50%. Furthermore, even with up to 8 steps, completion rates remain at 25%.

 

 

To summarize, when utilizing an automatic in-app guide, it is recommended to keep it within 5 steps. However, if you require more than 5 steps, a viable option is to incorporate the guide into your KC Bot, enabling users to complete it at their preferred pace.

I love this @jnies!

It seems like we all agree its about empathy and context - sometimes that means embedding a video on step one and other times it might mean giving them the option (and as a result, the agency) to go more in-depth if they don’t fully get it with the first couple of steps.

It also means that we should approach engagements journalistically, so making sure that the core information is on the first step and then varying levels of supporting evidence on the subsequent steps!

For feature releases, that means focusing the users attention on the most important features! Or for onboarding- maybe that’s the stickiest features or the ones that get them quick results.

Love this! Another tip that seems to work well is to break longer guides up into smaller subsets - if your product is complex and guides start to get long, consider breaking a longer more complex action into chunks with 2-3 steps each that users can knock out one by one.

As a quick example, you could have three guides to create a shared document: 

  1. Guide users to first create a new document
  2. Then, show them how to edit the document and add multi-media, etc., in a second in-app guide
  3. And in a third guide, show them how to make the document public for collaboration

Simple example, but works well for more complex actions too! You can then see which guide within the process isn’t getting good completion rates, and optimize that part of the guidance more specifically.

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