Guide designers help you to create in-app guides to engage users and guide their interactions. These guides can serve various purposes, such as onboarding new users, highlighting new features, providing tips, or offering personalized promotions. Designing these in-app guides requires a careful balance between functionality and aesthetics. The guides should be visually consistent with the overall design of your web or mobile apps, ensuring they enhance the user experience rather than interrupt it. Key design elements include clear and concise text, attractive graphics, and intuitive interactive elements like buttons or links. Personalization based on user behavior and preferences can further increase the effectiveness of in-app guides, making them more relevant and engaging for users. By thoughtfully designing and implementing in-app guides, you can improve user retention, satisfaction, and overall engagement.
Pendo has four different designers for creating in-app guides:
- Visual Design Studio for web apps
- Visual Design Studio for mobile apps
- Adopt Studio for Pendo for Employees
- Classic Designer
The designer you use is dependent on the version of your Pendo app and the end-users of your app, either customers or employees.
Visual Design Studio for web apps
The Visual Design Studio for web apps is the guide-authoring interface that launches over or next to your web application for you to build and edit guides. The Visual Design Studio makes guide creation accessible to teams across an organization, regardless of their technical knowledge. Whereas the Classic Designer requires a basic knowledge of coding languages, such as HTML and CSS, the Visual Design Studio uses a visual point-and-click interface. This makes building and editing guides a more intuitive experience.
The Visual Design Studio was launched on 18th February, 2019, and this is the designer you are using if you became a Pendo customer after this date. For more information, see Introduction to the Visual Design Studio.
Visual Design Studio for mobile apps
The Visual Design Studio for mobile apps is different from the one for web apps, which opens as an overlay in your web app. The Visual Design Studio for mobile apps uses snapshots of pages. When you tag a page in Pendo, snapshots of the pages are added into Pendo and these are the pages that you work on. For guide building, there are some feature differences between the Visual Design Studio for web apps and the Visual Design Studio for mobile apps, such as the custom code building block or the poll bulidng block aren't available for the Visual Design Studio for mobile apps. For more information on creating guides for your mobile apps, see Create a guide for mobile.
Adopt Studio for Pendo for Employees
Adopt Studio is the name of the designer in the Pendo for Employees extension app that allows you to create in-app guides, communications, polls, and content, with no technical expertise required. For more information about Adopt Studio, see Take a tour of Adopt Studio.
Classic Designer
The Classic Designer is for users who are comfortable with custom code and want to add more of their own customizations. The Classic Designer requires a basic knowledge of coding languages, such as HTML and CSS. The designer lets you create and edit guides. The Classic Designer leverages an iframe to deliver your app preview to provide a streamlined guide creation experience over your environment. The Classic Designer is the first guide designer in the Pendo platform and is the designer you are using if you were a Pendo customer prior to 18th February, 2019. For more information about the Classic Designer, see In-app designer (Classic).