Overview on guides
Guides are the primary experience that is launched to a customer. For example, a guide to enable an admin user to configure and connect to appropriate data systems. Or a guide to enable an end-user to kickoff a request that their company has previously set up.
You’re able to launch as many guides as you want to a user, but to help customers stay focused (and not overwhelmed), users only see one guide at a time.
Guides, step groups and steps
Guides are made up of step groups, which contain the actual steps. Why step groups? It’s easier to remember the themes of tasks, as opposed to a full list of tasks. Plus, this way you can reorder the step groups in a guide without having to recreate the guide itself.
Best performing guides seem to have fewer than 8 steps, spread out over 2-3 step groups.
Completing guides
When one guide is completed, the user will get a success banner and then unlock the next guide. This is particularly useful when there are steps that are dependent on the completion of other steps. This way, you can create a progressive journey that unlocks as a user makes progress.
Guide types
Bento supports both account and user guides
Account guides are shared among users and are well suited for configuration steps (i.e. only one user at a company needs to set up the integration or define a setting)
User guides are 1 per user. They’re well suited for enabling each user to come up to speed and track their own individual progress
Tips for creating guides
If you already have your customer journey mapped out
Go ahead and create a guide, and then create the step group within the guide. Step groups should be chapters, for example, “integrate with key data sources” that contains steps pointing to the critical sources (and what value integrating gets you).
As you create and save step groups, they’ll be stored in your step group templates so you can reuse them in other guides.
If you delete a step group from a guide, it’s not gone! It’s just gone from this guide and can always be re-added.
If you don’t have your customer journey mapped out
Start by defining what the first aha moment is. Then, map out the shortest set of actions a user needs to take. You might not know the exact order of operations, but you can always change that later.
If you have < 5 steps, consider making it just a single step group
If you have > 5 steps consider making 1 or 2 step groups based on any themes the steps share.
For example in Bento, we’ll have a step group about making guides, and a different step group about customizing the look & feel of your Bento components.