This article provides guidance for using guide ordering and throttling to educate your users without overwhelming them with too much content at one time.
As you build guides over time, you may amass a collection of many valuable guides published in your application, but without the proper timing, your users may get overwhelmed by receiving multiple guides back-to-back, and may even start to ignore them altogether.
Use a combination of guide ordering and throttling to orchestrate the timing of your guides in an optimal way. Decide which guides need to be shown first, how much time should pass before showing the next guide, and which guides need to be shown immediately, regardless of throttling rules.
Audit your guides
There is no one size fits all solution for guide ordering or throttling. Some applications are used daily, while others are used weekly or even monthly. To maximize your impact with infrequent visitors, for example, you may elect to show more guides per session than you would with daily visitors. Consult Pendo data to understand your visitors’ behavior and time throttling accordingly.
Here are some important things to consider:
Activation
- Ordering only applies to automatically activated guides because other guide activation methods allow the visitor to manually trigger the guide themselves.
- Review each guide's activation type. Is this message important enough to be shown automatically? Could this be displayed as a tooltip or Resource Center announcement instead?
Targeting
- Pages: Are your guides targeting a specific page or displaying sitewide? If you have too many sitewide guides, your guides are more likely to interrupt a visitor’s workflow. Try targeting specific pages to deliver the right content only in the desired location.
- Segment: Are you targeting “Everyone” or only the users to whom this message is applicable? Being more specific with your segmentation decreases the chance of surfacing irrelevant content to the wrong audience.
Content
- What is the goal of your guide? Try breaking these out into categories like Education, Announcements, Onboarding, and so on, to help prioritize your most important messages.
- Do you have multiple guides explaining the same thing? Can these be condensed?
- Is this an important or time-sensitive announcement? Ignore guide throttling to deliver the message right away.
Order and throttle your guides
Now that you’ve confirmed that your guides are targeting the right visitors in the right places, order them to display at the right time.
Ordering
- Navigate to Guide Ordering and prioritize your guides in the order you want them to display to visitors. Guide categories can help you identify the high-level goals of each guide to determine the priority in ordering. For example, your announcement guides will likely be higher in the list than non-urgent notifications or polls.
- Set anything that needs to be shown immediately to ignore guide throttling and display sitewide.
Throttling
Throttling determines the minimum amount of time that will pass between when a visitor receives one automatic guide and when the next one will launch.
Here are a few things to consider:
- Do you want users to see multiple automatic guides per session?
- Allow less time between guides; for example, show one guide every 30 minutes.
- Do you have infrequent visitors?
- Allow less time between guides; for example, show one guide every 30 minutes, with the most important guides set to ignore guide throttling.
- Do you have very frequent visitors?
- Allow more time between guides; for example, show one guide per day.
For more detailed information about how guide ordering and throttling works, see our article on Guide Ordering and Throttling.