The background:

Not every launch is going to be an all out parade. That’s okay. At Appcues, we occasionally launch a few smaller enhancements in preparation for a larger launch. It doesn’t make sense to advertise certain features to everyone, but we do want people affected to know about changes before we wrap them up in a big bow. This example also works for lower tier product launches that don’t need a ton of hullabaloo. 

We had this exact situation happen when Joey, a product manager at Appcues, launched a component of our flow controls system. We opted to show a tooltip only to folks using that feature at the moment. Flow prioritization is awesome, but we wanted to wait and tell a larger narrative about this feature alongside a group of new capabilities. 

In this example, I’ll walk you through how we tracked the new feature and then set up our flow to trigger off this event.

Plan of action:

I grabbed my handy dandy tracking tool (aka the Appcues Builder) on our Flow Settings page, and tagged the element. 

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Then, I gave my event a recognizable and clear name. Be sure to be as explicit as possible, particularly if you are using Events Broadcaster or an integration that sends events other places. It makes it much easier to recall which specific part of the product and action you’re referring to when your names are clear.

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How we built it:

Next up, we built the flow. We went with a minimal tooltip. 

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Because we weren’t making a big splash about this feature (yet), we wanted to make it crystal clear how to use it. You won’t see the classic benefits-highlighting that you might expect in a feature launch message. Once we had our tooltip content ready to go, we configured it to launch only when someone clicked in that flow weight box.

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By default, “When the user reaches the page” is selected, so go ahead and click that “When an event occurs” radio button, then start typing the name of your event in the dropdown. 

That’s it! Now you can basically soft launch features, without leaving people totally hanging. I love using event triggered flows for this use case. What else would you use it for? Or are you currently doing something even better you want to share? Let me know at lyla@appcues.com or message me on LinkedIn.