Best Practices

If you work in multiple environments, it’s a good practice to publish your content on your test environment before deploying it in production.

Adding relevant Tags is a great way to keep your guides accessible and easy to find for your users.

Use contrasting colors for Whatfix widgets, to make them stand out/noticeable on the website. Make sure that your widgets are not lost on your interface.

Use the contrast checker available on this site to help you decide - https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/.

Use words and simple sentences. Keep the description in your tip simple and to the point.

Use Beacons to highlight new features and UI changes. Link Flows to beacons in case there is an associated procedure.

When inserting images in your content, ensure that they don't exceed the width of the tooltip or pop-up to avoid any distorted images.

Remember to configure Whatfix Analytics to find out how your content is faring. Are your users completing tasks? Which step are they getting stuck at? What search terms do not give any results? You can track this data and use it to improve the performance of your content.

When translating content in the UI, avoid copy-pasting content. The formatting of the content could get copied and may generate sync issues. If you have to copy and paste, use the CTRL+SHIFT+V (Windows) or  COMMAND+SHIFT+V (Mac) to paste content. These shortcuts copy only the value.

Use Flows for sequential actions. For example: Product tour, Tutorials, and UI guidance.

Name every Flow clearly for easy retrieval during search. Use simple descriptive words that your audience is likely to use. Keep the title short. Use gerunds.

Do not use special characters when naming a Flow. Special characters may cause issues when trying to download the Flow as a video.

     :::(Info) (your title goes here)

If the Flow title includes spaces or any of these special characters (<,>,:,",/,|,,?,*,#,%,\s,\n,.), then they are replaced with an underscore (_) when the flow is downloaded as a PDF or a Video.
:::

Use easy to understand words and simple sentences. Keep the description in your tip simple and to the point. 

Create Flow on production/live website which is stable and is not constantly being updated by code changes. If the underlying code of your application is being changed, it may break any Flows that you may have created.

Limit the number of steps in a Whatfix guide to not more than 15 steps. This helps your users understand the value proposition of your guides quickly and easily. 

In case you can't keep the number of steps under 15, then consider splitting the guide into two and interlinking them. This keeps your guide crisp and simplifies user tasks.

When interlinking content, ensure that the button on the end message that links to the remaining procedure is titled appropriately. Use a short, action-oriented phrase.

When interlinking content, ensure that the button on the end message that links to the remaining procedure is titled appropriately. Use a short, action-oriented phrase.

Position the tooltips so that they don't hide any elements on your page. In certain cases, the tooltip could inadvertently hide certain important UI. 

Remove personal/sensitive information using the Blackout feature. While creating a guide, use the Blackout feature to avoid capturing sensitive information like email, phone number, username, etc.

Use the Spotlight feature to get the user’s complete focus on the element on which the tip is displayed. Users cannot interact with other elements when the Spotlight tip is active. 

When inserting images in your content, ensure that they don't exceed the width of the tooltip. Exceeding 270 pixels introduces a scroll bar.

Instead of creating individual steps for each field in a form, you can create Smart Tips that describes each field. This way all you need to create is a single step for the entire form asking the user to interact with the fields to find more information, thus reducing the total steps in the Flow. Also, the users can choose to see the tooltip help only for the fields they need information about, rather than seeing info for every field in the Flow steps.

Another benefit is that you can use the Smart Tips to validate user input ensuring the right information is entered. For more information, see Data Validation using Smart Tips

A Beacon once created, must always be a part of a Beacon Collection for it to reflect on the page/application. A Beacon Collection is a group of Beacons belonging to the same page.

Always have ​one Beacon collection ​​per page​ in your application. Whatfix evaluates only one Beacon segment at any given time, so if two or more Beacon segments are active, only one of them would be evaluated. Criteria for evaluation depends upon the visibility settings or number of conditions (in case visibility settings are the same for two segments)

If you like to have the same Beacon segment work across application environments, it is better ​to provide URL paths instead of full URLs, else the Beacon segment in one environment may not work in another​.

When editing or modifying a particular page to add new Beacons, please look for any existing Beacon collection for that page. Don't create a new Beacon segment/collection for a page if the collection already exists.

• Use the Visibility Rule settings to configure when a Beacon should appear. A Beacon disappears after it is shown to a user. You can control the frequency of a Beacon appearance as well from Visibility rules.

• If you want to show a Beacon at a particular frequency like once daily, weekly every Monday, selected days of the week, etc. choose the Custom option with the date range defined under Visibility Rule settings.

See Scheduling a Beacon

• Once the Beacon show count is exhausted, it disappears on the application. In case, you want to show the Beacon for all the users again including those who would have interacted with it, use the Refresh Beacon setting.
  
• Only an Account Manager can reactivate an existing Beacon.
  Also, be mindful of your date range settings when refreshing a Beacon. A past date in your visibility rules might not refresh the Beacon successfully.

See Refreshing a Beacon.

Animating Self Help increases the chance to catch users' attention and help them find answers themselves.

Segment guides using Tags so that users receive more relevant and focussed content.

Add links to your support articles in the Flows steps to deliver more information. Use this wisely.