Your users' experience with your product doesn’t just stop after their initial onboarding. They’re going to have ongoing questions, stumble through new features, and run into challenges. 

You have two ways you can tackle this:

• Enlist help from your Engineering team to build out permanent in-app tooltips and support triggers.
• Rely on your Support and Success teams to continuously educate users.

But let’s be honest, neither is ideal or efficient for a scaling business.

Plus, in a world where product experience is so key to success, you need to deeply consider what’s best for your users—like buying a car kinda deep consideration. It’s not about educating them on features and capabilities on your time, but rather on their time—when it actually matters to them.

That’s why we added a new experience type to your toolbelt, Pins! 

What are Pins?

Use Pins to provide contextual, always-available support and help to your users—whether that’s best practice tips, a link to a help article, or a way to trigger an in-app walkthrough.

Simply place them inline in your app, without bugging your engineers! Cool, right? 

Two types of Pins

There are two Pattern types that fall into the Pins category, let’s take a look: 

1. Icon with tooltip

Exactly what it sounds like–an icon with tooltip is a persistent tooltip that includes a question mark, info, or any custom icon you’d like to use alongside it. Icon with tooltips are great for providing subtle help and context where users need it without causing distractions for users. 

2. Button

Another no-fuss name here. Buttons are clickable in-app triggers placed either inline or overlayed on your app that let you drive user action. Buttons are perfect for scenarios where the main call-to-action is clear and no additional context is needed. A button that says ‘Take a tour’ button or ‘Learn more’ is pretty straightforward for users and they don’t need any other information so you drive user action, when users need it most.

Both of these Pin types let you guide users to where you want them to go, when they want to go there. That’s what we call a win-win!

So many use cases, you’ll be on Pins and needles

Pins open up a world of opportunities and ideas. This experience has a heck ton of use cases, but we rounded up a few favorites to get your wheels turning. Enjoy this list of pinspiration!

Offer less pushy, more proactive help content

Simplify a complex product with tons of bells and whistles by providing contextual help and information for users to consume whenever they’re ready to cross that bridge. Many SaaS products are packed with features and options that can overwhelm users, but icon with tooltip pins provide an easy way to break down this complexity into smaller chunks, without overloading users with content and information they may not need quite yet. Not to mention this can help reduce some of the experience frustrations that occur from having a complex, feature-full product. The quickest place to add this type of Pin is to: 

• Address frequently asked questions: Strategically place a icon with tooltip to answer commonly asked questions, reducing the need for users to contact support. You can also add the option to trigger a Flow or help article if the user wants to learn more.‍
• Share valuable, non-disruptive tips and tricks: Sharing product tips via newsletters or social posts can lack any real context. Now, you can have tips available to users when it’s the most relevant in their journey—in-app, when they’re using a specific feature.

Show users around to deliver more value

Sometimes users just aren’t ready for an onboarding flow right at first login. So give them a chance to replay it on their own terms, when they are ready. You can also build other helpful flows to show tips and trips, use cases, examples, and more. Then craft drop a button and let users engage when its convenient for them.

Increase awareness for new and underutilized features 

Draw your user’s attention and drive product and feature awareness and adoption through native-looking and permanent labels, tags, and callouts. Place a button to help customers notice a new feature or callout a valuable feature that users aren’t using.

Drive the right user action

Encourage your users to navigate to other pages and resources–inside or outside of your product.

• Collect permanent feedback: Gain valuable insights from your users with persistent feedback buttons that launch survey flows.‍
• Send users to another location: Direct users to complete an action, visit another place inside your product, or send them to any other link (like a support article) that helps them.

The list is endless

These are just a handful of creative ways you can use Pins to improve the experience users have with your product. But trust us, there’s even more:

• On-demand educational walkthroughs
• Static notifications, like system outages
• Webinar or resource awareness
• Your brilliant ideas we can't wait to see!

Ready to put a Pin in it?

Hopefully, this blog post has done its job and you’re ready to go drop your first Pin in your product. The good news is that Pins are available to all customers on our Essentials, Growth, and Enterprise plans. 🥳 Simply log in and click over to the new Pins menu. Not using Appcues yet? Sign up for a free trial to get started and test drive Pins for yourself! 

Also, thank you for bearing with me all the way to the end of this post. My puns were so bad that you could hear a Pin drop…

Okay, that was the last one, I swear. The name is so pun-able that I decided to just go for it!

Finally, we’d love to see how you end up using Pins in your app. Take a screenshot and tag us on it on Twitter or LinkedIn!