Management and QA

Use tags and naming to create an easy way to find what you’re looking for without digging and confusion. Appcues comes preloaded with a few tags to get your ideas flowing. Remember, you can’t search by tags but you can filter by tags.

You can only search by Flow name. Put important things you might search by in the name, like “tooltip”,“modal”, "customer success". Tags are best thought of like replacements for folders since no, Appcues doesn’t have folders (yet?).

For some more tag inspiration, try these categories:

• Flow goal (onboarding, trial, post-purchase, sales, survey)
• Team (marketing, customer success, sales)
• Year created/published
• Person building the flow
• Page/section of product the flow appears on

• Have a plan: Internally, have a plan for deployment, updating, governance, and ownership.
• Kickoff: Before kicking off Appcues, ensure you are including all the right parties and representatives from your organization to secure early adoption and understanding.
  
• Train everyone: You may think a couple folks within your organization need to use Appcues, however, we often see several teams and departments wanting to take advantage of the Appcues tool once it's implemented. To get ahead of this, we recommend training any and all teams and individuals who may want to take advantage of Appcues to ensure you are all starting off on the same foot.
  
• Leverage permissions: Give all your teams access to the Appcues account and flow creation, or monitor by Editor, Publisher, and Administrator roles (roles will vary by plan) to balance access, flexibility, and oversight all at once.
• Establish one "Appcues Lead" per team. This person should generally be responsible for all campaigns and flows for the team, managing their teammates, and ensuring their content plays well with others. In many organizations, this individual is part of the Product, CX, or Marketing team but choose the team and individual who best aligns with your overall goals.
• Quarterly strategy reviews. Outside of regular touch points, you may also find it helpful to revisit your strategy regularly to see how and where Appcues can help drive your goals and outcomes.
• Have an internal communication channel. Whether your organization uses Slack, Teams, or another chat platform, make communicating fast and easy by creating a dedicated Appcues channel for discussing, posting updates, and sharing details about your flows.

Appcues kick-off checklist:

• Engineering/product review to go over any technical questions raised during implementation
• Define process for reviewing and sharing content
• Build repository or directory so everyone can see Flows
• Create a timeline and expectations for individuals involved with Appcues
• Training for team members who will be using Appcues
• Training for team members who will be reviewing Appcues content

Go behind the scenes with these resources!

• How we QA flows at Appcues
• How we share and document Flows at Appcues

Every team is different, but here’s a list of the most common ways that people share Flows. Feel free to pick and choose the combination of tactics that work best for you or let us know if we’re missing one!

• Archive - List name of Flow in Appcues Studio, which segments or user journeys you are targeting, link to test or view Flow, screenshots, performance/results/notes
• Request form - Ask for goal of experience/Flow, requestor’s name/team, date to be launched, areas in product they want the Flow to be seen, links to content they want included, links to imagery or collateral to be included
• Communications flow chart - Using a sketch board tool, flow chart out all communications; screenshot Flows and show them in the context of the journey or use shapes/symbols to represent the flow and various types of communications; this is an ongoing, long archival project meant to unite all your automated product and/or marketing communications in one view so anyone at your company can easily see what a new user might see in various scenarios
• Cross-functional team/communication channel - At Appcues, we have a dedicated Slack channel where the team publishes new Flow alerts and general Flow discussions are had; Regular committee meetings can serve this same purpose (if you have a CSM, don’t be shy to ask them to facilitate or help with this!); Be clear about who people should go to for questions/see Flows/get access to Appcues or find any of the information you created above!

There are lots of ways to track and organize your Appcues experiences, and you may be wondering what customers have done.  Feel free to check out this video from Alexa at Tempo (about 30 minutes). She shares what's worked best for her team!

While you're getting familiar with building Flows, you'll eventually want to test them and make sure they're working just like you imagined. We'll cover four techniques:

• Preview Mode
• Test Mode
• Publishing to an internal environment (Recommended)
• Publishing to yourself or your testers (Recommended)
• Reset Flow History ('show once' flows only)

Preview mode is a tool in the Appcues Builder for reviewing content while in the building process. It's great for quickly walking through the flow as an end-user would:

• Quickly review what a single flow will look like on your site
• Interact with your page to view hotspots/tooltips that are built on dynamic elements, preview tooltips, and interact with form fields or embedded content

Find the Preview button (it looks like an 👁️) in the bottom right hand corner of the Appcues Builder.

Test mode is for allowing teammates to review your flows in a live environment, without requiring them to log in to Appcues or install the Appcues Builder.

• Review how your flows will look and behave in a live environment by sharing the link with teammates, outside the Appcues Builder.
• Endlessly review a flow intended for only certain users and to only be shown a limited number of times.
• Test your page targeting, to ensure your flow will work across URLs, including dynamic pages.

To launch Test mode, click the 'Test' button on a Flow's settings page.

Publishing is the best way to test how flows interact with other flows, and to make sure it obeys user and frequency targeting. If you have a staging/internal environment that you can use, then you can publish the flow in that environment. What you can do with publishing to an internal environment:

• Test whether user properties and events are working correctly.
• See how multiple live flows will interact live.
• Test user and frequency targeting - e.g. the flow only shows once, and for brand new users.
  

After that, you can then publish your flow! Doing so will publish the flow safely to just the internal environment, where your end-users won’t be able to see.

This approach does put the flow live, but it requires you to have a safe internal environment. If this doesn't exist, there is another approach that consists of testing it live for yourself or creating a segment for your testers.

If you're lacking an internal/staging environment, another approach that will still allow you to test flows live is by creating a segment containing your internal testers and then publishing a flow targeted only for that group.

• See how the flow runs live into your application.
• Allow only your team or yourself to see the flow.
• Test if the flow runs correctly with your Page Targeting criteria and flow conditions.
  

To target the flow to your internal testers, you can either create a Segment or use the 'Audience' targeting criteria of a flow to adjust how you'd like to define your internal testers. Here's an example using specific email addresses your testers might have: