Creating a Mobile Guide 

Overview

We highly recommend preview and testing a guide before publishing it to your population. Follow the below instructions to see how.

Requirements

To use the Visual Design Studio, Pendo users will need one of the two following permissions:

• Pendo Administrator Permissions
• Pendo User Permissions with at least the
  • Create Guides from Layouts
  • Manage Published Guides
  • Create Guides & Layouts from Scratch

Create a Guide

In order to start creating a mobile Guide,  ensure that the mobile application is integrated with SDK 2.x. Verify this by going to Subscription Settings > an “Integrated” label should be visible on an integrated App.  

Your app is integrated with the V2 SDK

Choose “Guides” from the left-hand navigation menu, then select “Create New Guide” from the “Visual Design Studio” button drop-down on the top right.

 Create New Guide

Select the relevant mobile App from the drop-down menu.

Select any available mobile layout templates and rename the Guide. 

Customize Guide Content

Click on “Manage in My App” to open the Visual Design Studio to edit the Guide.

Manage in my app

Tip: You can hover over the Guide preview to see the “Manage in My App” option to launch the visual designer.

Edits to the Guide can be made from within the “Edit Container” box. The container's default settings are set by the app's Theme. To edit the container settings, change the Theme to 'Custom'. 

Edit Container Settings

Once the initial edits are made,  click “Apply,” you can then hover over the placeholder items within the Guide Preview and click to edit. In order to add a new Building block to the Guide, hover between items a blue line will appear > click on the 'plus' sign to add a desired building block.

Adding Building Blocks to Guide

Choose Guide Transition Animation

Select how a guide transitions in and out of each step. To change this go to > Edit Container > Transitions > Animations Type > select Animation Type, Duration, and Direction where applicable.

Example of Slide Animation 

Preview A Guide

Use “Preview Guide On Device" to see how a Guide will look on the mobile device. You will be directed to connect a device and the guide will show on the device.

It is extremely important to test how the guide looks on an actual mobile device prior to publishing since the visual designer is just a “web preview” of the guide. 

Preview your Guide on a real device or an emulator

Guide Activation Methods

Select how a guide will be activated. Available activation options can be found in the action bar >  Activation Settings:

• App Launch: When the app launches.
• Page View: When the user views one of the pages you defined.
• Target Element: When the user clicks the feature you defined.
• Track Event: When the Track Event you defined is being called (SDK 2.7+) 
• Launch Guide From Guide: In order for a guide to be launched from another guide (SDK 2.10+), there is no need to set a specific activation method (you can leave all activation methods unselected). This option can also be combined with other activation methods.  

Select the activation type for your mobile guide

App Launch - Guide will be launched to segmented visitors as soon as the startSession method is called and mobile session starts.

Common Use Cases:

• Show "What's new" on the new app version
• Start a new user onboarding
• Version Sunsetting 

Page View - Select the pages in the App where the guide will appear. Either select an already tagged page or tag a new page by clicking the' Tag New Page’ button. In this case, a device will need to be connected (connect a device ) in order to capture a new page. If you select multiple pages, the guide will be activated when one of them is viewed for the first time.

Select an already tagged mobile page for guide activation or tag a new page

Common Use Cases:

Target Element - after selecting the desired page, select an element that will activate the guide.  by clicking it in the screenshot. 

Target Mode - Select an Element

Common Use Cases:

• Add a help button to your app to show contextual help, set the frequency to show every time.
• Onboard a specific feature

Track Event: Select the Track Event to be used as thus guide trigger. Once the Track Event will be called the guide will be displayed to the segmented visitor.

• This allows you to launch guides whenever wherever you want. If on a process completion, server response, etc.

Test Guide on Device 

To verify the selected activation is working as expected, use the ‘Preview Guide On Device’.

Once you finish working on the guide, save your changes using the top left-hand “Save” button and click “Exit” to leave the designer. 

Segment and Schedule A Guide

When you’re satisfied with your Guide, navigate to your Guide’s Detail Page to adjust the guide’s segment & scheduling.

• Select the segment of users who will receive the guides. The default segment is ‘Everyone’. You can see how many users are included in your selected segment and what is the number of the eligible visitors.
• Schedule when your Guide will go live (and, if needed, when it will no longer be active).
• Eligible Visitors: Sometimes the number of eligible visitors is smaller than your segment. Why is that?
  Some of your users might still be using an old app version with an old SDK version. In this case, Pendo's new features may still not be available for these users.

Publish and Validate A Guide

To publish your Guide, update the Guide’s status to Public. Since there is no ‘Staging’ option for mobile, never publish a mobile guide without testing its full flow on a mobile device.

1. Disconnect your device from Pendo (click on the Pendo FAB on your device, and select disconnect -> permanently disconnect)
2. Close your app and relaunch it (guides are sent to the device at the beginning of the "session").
3. If you are included in the guide's segment, you will be able to see the guide in your app by triggering the guide's "activation" criteria.
4. Note that once a user sees the guide, they will not see it again.