The PM “Guide” to Pendo
As a Product Manager who is committed to providing the best onboarding experience to my customers, I was on a mission to find an onboarding tool that would help reach my goal with minimal training and assistance.
Where it all began…
Months away from our Product release, we worked with the Marketing team to evaluate tools that will help us achieve the following:
- Onboarding Users
- Increase Customer Adoption
Eventually, Pendo was brought to the table by one of our business executives. From the get go, working with the Pendo team to try out their onboarding tool on our website and mobile applications has been a learning experience not only for the PM in us but also the customer.
For the purpose of this article, here are some common terms that are used in the Pendo application:
Guides: These are in-app(web and mobile) walkthroughs that navigate the users through the functionality of the apps through interactive tooltips and banners. Through guides teams can also collect Feedback on new features and functionality.
Segments: Segments(Cohorts in a few other analytics tools) are a grouping of users on the basis of demographic information, user behaviour on the app, guides viewed and usage information(device type, browser version, etc)
Activation: Activation is the triggering of guides on a particular page or based on certain click events.
Guide Elements: These are pre-defined templates that can be used to guide users through the functionality of the apps
Still with me?
As a first time user of an onboarding tool, I had very little knowledge on how the entire process is supposed to work. So, I made a list of use cases that I would want to test on Pendo which would cover all the scenarios that are required to provide the best onboarding experience.
Post the initial setup(Setting up Pendo Accounts, Adding instances for the web and app, Adding the Javascript Snippet and Initialising Pendo, Identifying and setting up events), the development team handed over Pendo to us.
I took to Pendo like a moth to a flame. I started with the Guides section. Each step was clearly indicated and it was so easy to navigate through the flow. To setup a walkthrough process on Pendo, the user has to
Create a guide → Choose from a decent list of pre defined templates → Open your application through the Pendo designer → Select the activation points → Design the guide elements → Save → Assign a segment → Preview
Aaaaaand presto, you’re done!
Pendo can support an extensive list of use cases such as:
- Navigating a user through different sections of the web and mobile applications
- Use images, videos and GIF’s to make the guides more interactive
- Add buttons, text boxes, tooltips, polls, etc. wherever required
- Rearrange the sequence of tooltips by simple a drag and drop
- Trigger guides on any page or add a custom URL or define rules for the guides
- Trigger guides based on wether other guides have been viewed or not
This is not by any means an exhaustive list. Based on your products requirements, Pendo can handle multiple usecases and what’s best, you can figure these out on your own.
I’m sure there is a but in there…
Post my experience with Pendo guides on my web application, I was thrilled to try out the mobile version. Unfortunately, my experience was not as rosy. I believe the Pendo team is still working to improve the guide experience on the apps.
There were issues with the Pendo designer on the iOS app(Last tried in 2020). We also faced an issue on triggering tooltip guide elements on different sections of the apps.
I do believe though that it is a different scenario if your app contains web elements. The guides can be created on the web pages and the container sizes can be changed to fit mobile app screens. Essentially, your mobile applications(android and iOS separately) will be treated as different web applications.
Takeaways
Even though we had a Cons list, the size of the Pro’s list made Pendo our preferred choice for an onboarding tool. The ease of use and the extensive documentation made Pendo so easy to adapt. In the 2–3 weeks that it took us to try Pendo out, we reached out to the team all of once or twice with questions or queries. The response was quick and they even setup calls to fully cover the doubts we had.
Pendo also has a Product Analytics tool. Although we did not sign up for the analytics tool, we took a sneak peak through our trial account. Waiting to do a deeper dive when the situation presents itself.
So for all the PM’s out there looking to adopt an onboarding tool for your apps, do add Pendo to your list. You will not be disappointed.
