If you choose a DIY solution, there can be an increasing amount of friction building up between customer-facing teams and product-focused teams when implementing tours, tips and tutorials. In Part 1, we looked at this issue to try and understand the issue from both perspectives.

On the one hand, marketing and support teams want to respond to opportunities and user needs quickly. On the other, engineering teams are concerned about switching to a third-party service because of the lack of QA and testing, and poor design capabilities.

If you’re stuck in this situation, we’ve listed some of the issues below, and how you can address your concerns with Inline Manual. We do think Inline Manual will be much better than a DIY solution if you’re running into these problems. However, with every change you have to evaluate the gains and losses by comparing it to your current solution.

Let’s look at the kind of control you will be able to have with Inline Manual.

What about installation and updating?

• The player: You will need one line of code installed in your application to have the player right in your app. If you want to have advanced segmentation and analytics with People tracking, you will need to have a few more lines of code installed. They player works on any browser.
• The authoring tool: You will need Chrome just for authoring. If you have control over installing extensions in your browser, you can install the Inline Manual Authoring tool into Chrome.

The good thing is, once you have the player installed on your app, and the authoring tool installed in your browser you’re good to go!

You do not need further support from your engineering teams to keep Inline Manual updated.

Will I be able to control configuration?

You will have full control over your account.

• Add new tours, tooltips, launchers and knowledgebase articles
• Control who sees content, such as welcome screens targeted to specific users

You can also add collaborators with role-based access, as owners, writers and readers to give tiered control over each site.

We need WYSIWYG content creation and interactive design

With the authoring tool you can add and edit content, and control how it appears.

• Include a video in a tour,
• Edit the HTML directly,
• Dim a screen and highlight single or multiple elements,
• Lock down the UI so they can’t click actions until users are prompted,
• Position launchers on the page and within contexts or sections of an application.

These are all of the kinds of things you will easily do in the authoring tool.

We want Total Design Control

Marketing and Engineering teams especially will be glad to hear you have total design control to make the tours look like they are seamlessly part of your product and not just a third-party add-on.

• Are you not experienced with HTML and CSS?
• Inline Manual can inherit the CSS from your website and instantly just match the look and feel of your site.
• You can click to change colours using our design tools.
• Are you experienced with HTML and CSS?
• You can edit each step’s HTML directly.
• You can also edit the CSS of your tours.

We also offer help from our customer success team to integrating Inline Manual and helping you achieve a seamless experience to match your brand.

What insights are available with Analytics and People tracking?

Analytics will work right out of the box. Access depends on your subscription level.

• Which tours are really helping people?
• Where are users getting lost or dropping off?

Having access to Inline Manual’s analytics will allow you to compare the experience across your application and see how users are benefiting from the content you create. For example, our customers often see higher completion rates for tasks.

People tracking on the otherhand, is one thing your developers would configure. (A few lines of code, similar to installation!) People tracking will let you see user-by-user who is playing and completing your tours. Having that information is helpful because you will be able to make sure auto-launchers for specific groups of users. It also helps with segmenting so you can control who sees what.

We want reliable QA and testing

Marketing and Engineering both want a clear quality assurance process.

With Inline Manual you can create a QA and a production site, each with their URLs and unique API keys. When you create a new walkthrough, you can assign it to the QA site and test it there. Once you’re happy you can assign it to the production site. You don’t have to do kludgy things like duplicate it, or recreate it.

This is all done within the administrator dashboard, and again you don’t have to lean on your development team to deploy.

This leads us to talking about version control and releases.

Can the marketing team handle version control and releases?

You can create releases as you make improvements and iterations to your content, all from within the admin dashboard. And again, you do not have to ask for help from your developer team.

This is super helpful when you are preparing to launch a tour for a new campaign. Once you understand how to create releases, you will be able to manually specific the new version of your content and control when your campaign launches.

The great thing is, this puts marketing teams in control of their timeline, and not tied to the development schedule.

If you’re wondering what kind of control you can have - sign up to our next webinar to see how to Get Started with Inline Manual.