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Organizing Guides

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Jim Waschbusch

Hello,

I cant imagine this is a new problem, so how do you all organize/manage guides in mass quantities?

Consider a library of 500 guides where 10 of which are explicit to a given business function (Sales). The rest is just noise to them.  I'd like a way to filter on those 10 to make it easier for the designers responsible for the sales guides. How do they find their needles in the haystack?

  • Product Area doesn't make sense as that is reserved for actual product areas and is visible in Feedback.
  • Created by doesn't work as there are more than 1 users who would manage these guides.
  • Naming convention - helps but is human error-prone

thanks for any advice!

 

 

 

 

2

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2 comments
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  • Avatar
    Greg Nutt
    (Edited )

    Hey Jim - 

    This is an amazing question, and I'd love to hear how others are doing this today.  I would offer recommendations around three pieces of functionality, two of which you've already touched upon, but are key to my standard recommendations:

    1. Naming Conventions - For me, a strong naming convention is hands-down the best way to organize your Guides.  I've provided an excerpt from the content I normally share when reviewing Governance around naming conventions, pertaining to guides.  You do call out the correct pitfall that a naming convention must be followed in order to actually be useful and usually my recommendations follow with a weekly check-in on "new" guides to ensure compliance.
    2. Product Areas - It is true that the primary use of most Product Areas is for tags, but I have seen positive benefit to including some Guide-specific Product Areas to support bucketing your guides in a way that is meaningful for your teams.  As per the inclusion within the Feedback product, you can configure which Product Areas are displayed within the Product Area options within your Feedback settings.  You can also configure these to be viewable by Internal Only if you would attach them internally, but not be viewable by your end users.
    3. Favorites - A little known feature available to users is the ability to favorite Pages, Features, Track Events and Guides but clicking on the hollow star icon within the lists.  Once you've selected one or more favorites, you can quickly reduce the list to just those selected by clicking the star button next to the other slicers above the appropriate list.  These favorites are unique by user, and so can be a great way of keeping tabs for only those entities that are important to you.  However, the difficulty is that, since they are unique to each user, there is no way for you to go in and determine another user's set of favorites.

    I hope these help give you some ideas for organizing your guides a little better.  And, as mentioned above, I'm very curious how other clients are actually managing this organization in reality.

    Naming Convention example: 

    [Theme] | [Topic] | [Segment] - {Activation}

    Examples: 

    Walkthrough | Navigation Orientation | New Users - Automatic

    Alert | Release Notes v4.2 | Everyone - Automatic

    JIT | Item List - Export to PDF | No Export last 90d - Badge icon

    -1
  • Avatar
    Spencer Buchanan

    Yeah this is definitely unfortunate. We have been trying to create a naming convention, but that is a poor mans tool to a good categorizing field attached to these. 

    I am seeing that we have different initiatives in Pendo, UX - recruiting, Onboarding - Guides and education, Marketing - Communication and promoting. Alerts - Notifications for issues or new features. 

    Too often people that have access to pendo muck with each other's guides and even with this naming convention, we are unable to sort through all of our guides and we only have 130 so far. Just last week, we had 3 people turn on and off a guide they knew nothing about because they mistook it for some other guide. Our customer support blew up with people frustrated with a guide notice coming on and on again. 

     

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