New Onboarding Views

[morgan]

Onboarding Views

A lot of us use the About View to provide instructions on how to use the app. That's partly why we allow you to start an app with it. But the About View format is pretty limited for this purpose. It only has a single page with a one image and some fixed text below. It's hard to communicate everything in that space.

So we developed a view specifically dedicated to onboarding new customers. It works like any of our other first class views, working directly from your data. You can construct multiple pages that clients can swipe through.

Here's what it looks like

Expect to see it soon, and feel free to leave feedback in this post. Specifically, what kinds of instructions or training do you give your clients before they use your apps? What happens with new clients? Do other existing clients describe how to use the app? We’re curious how we can help you train new customers.

Thanks!
Morgan

[Fabian_Weller]

That looks awesome @morgan. Thank you very much.
I would love to use this also for showing Updates (new functions) in an App.

[Daisy_Ramirez]

Outstanding!! Looking forward to it!

[Grant_Stead]

Dang, you’re rolling out some clean updates!
Looking forward to reimagining our apps

[Daisy_Ramirez]

Hi Morgan, here’s a thought for you. We’ve had clients ask for exactly what you’ve designed above but they’d like to have it appear automatically upon the first few logins and/or the first time and then automatically stop (once they’ve used the app for awhile).

The other request I’ve gotten here is to have the screen appear with verbiage/images as above and require a signature upon first login. Once the authorized signature was acquired they want the screen to go away automatically.

[Jonathon]

Is this a christmas gift? It feels like a christmas gift.

Edit: Would it be possible to have a required fillable field with this view (grey out the Get Started until there is input)? One use case could be obtaining a users first and last name to associate with their email when they first launch the application.

[Koichi_Tsuji]

Just awesome!

[Grant_Stead]

Awesome, a great move directionally to start prioritizing how as developers we can onboard our own people… Next up is institu chat widgets

[Daisy_Ramirez]

Totally agree! Chat, Chat, Chat!

[Jon_S]

It’s official…

@morgan = UI/UX Santa!

Wicked update! Very usefull!

[morgan]

Haha, thanks @Jon_S!

@Daisy_Ramirez those are great suggestions. Right now you can use Show_If expressions to show/hide the view like any other, which might handle some scenarios, but not exactly the cases you’re describing. I’ll investigate how to enable some of the ideas you’re talking about in a general way.

[Jonathon]

@morgan Here is my current user onboarding workflow:

Once I have whitelisted an e-mail and a user has logged in, they are presented with a ‘new user’ form which allows them to input some preliminary information about themselves. Until they do this, security filters prevent any other app links from loading.

I have tried using a starting view of a form for new users; unfortunately people can bypass the form by pressing cancel or the back button. This new view you have shown does not suffer from this problem (the cancel/back buttons arent shown).

[School_Bus]

Did you have to do anything to make this the first page they see if it’s their first time in the app?

[Lucinda_Mason]

UX.Options.Starting View.

put the name of the onboarding view you want the user to see the very first time they open the app

[Jonathan_S]

how are you recording if its the first time a user has used the app?

[School_Bus]

I collect the e-mail of the user in my initial set up screen similar to Jonathan useremail(). Then I have a security filter in place so a user can only see rows in which they’re e-mail is listed.

Haven’t tested it out yet, but that’s what I’m going with.

[School_Bus]

thank you for the starting view. I guess i thought starting view was just for any time someone entered the app, not just the first time they entered the app

[Lucinda_Mason]

I also collect the useremail() and other pertinent info from the user on an Add New User form. I also built a looping error message if they close the Add New User form so they can’t do or see anything else, even menu items, in the app.

I think AppSheet tracks whether it’s a user’s first time in the app.

“thank you for the starting view. I guess i thought starting view was just for any time someone entered the app, not just the first time they entered the app” I did too. But was corrected in this very helpful community.

[Bahbus]

@School_Bus In my sample app Incident Reports, I actually use a conditional starting view if you want to see what I did for it.

[QREW_Cam]

This is incredible, Thank You AppSheet Team for constantly pushing new UI updates!
The Graphic Designer inside of me jumps for joy each time!

I love this look, would incredible to see this as a fully fleshed View Type; using page header ‘Show’ column type and the button to use custom actions!

Ooooorrr a pagination option for the detail view with an Action Columns Type so we could place a button anywhere in a detail view and assign an action to it!

[Tiger1]

Nice. As usual Appsheets delivers!

[morgan]

Great, thanks @Jonathon. That’s helpful to see, and glad to hear this new onboarding view can help. I’ll chat with @carie about future improvements to our onboarding views that could incorporate some of the needs you and others are describing.

[Koichi_Tsuji]

Hi Morgan,
I m looking forward to testing this new feature which should be around the corner to get started with. To guide us, is it possible you post the brief instruction where, which pane, we are able to find the section to set up those page, and how?

[Benhur_Fmedia]

tsuji_koichi:

Hi Morgan,
I m looking forward to testing this new feature which should be around the corner to get started with. To guide us, is it possible you post the brief instruction where, which pane, we are able to find the section to set up those page, and how?

Yes, I agree

[Alex_Tashlykov]

Oh!!! It looks very well! Looking forward to it!

[Andrew_W]

Great idea! Having images and display long text is a great way to introduce the app. I agree with the suggestions submitted by @Daisy_Ramirez and @Jonathon.
Great work @morgan !

[Duplex_Engineer]

Great. Looking forward to it!

[Andrea2]

Hi Morgan. When will this be ready?

[retailpartnerco]

I will probably put a quick tutorial slideshow together for that. The feature looks great!

[Jessy_Mrozowski]

Any documentation on how to get this functioning properly? I’m having some trouble. unless it’s not fully implemented yet

[retailpartnerco]

@morgan, I am a little bit confused on how to add this to my app. Is it just a different about page, or is it just another type of view that you put in your menu? What if I want the user to only see it the very first time they log into the app? I agree with @Jessy_Mrozowski, there should be documentation. But the feature looks exciting!

[morgan]

Hi @retailpartnercom @Jessy_Mrozowski, thanks for your questions. It should behave just like any other view, where you simply select the columns in your table that you want to display. Each row will be a slide in a slideshow. I’m noticing some people have an issue at the moment where the view is blank no matter what. Is this what is occurring for you? Please send me a screenshot if you can. I’ll also add some documentation for everyone.

Thanks!

[Jessy_Mrozowski]

@morgan Yeah my view was just blank which is why i was a bit confused. I’ll upload a screenshot later.

[morgan]

Ok thanks. That’d be very helpful. I’ll notify everyone on this thread when I’ve fixed the issue.

[Jessy_Mrozowski]

@morgan Video Uploading for yea

[Fabian_Weller]

I see exact the same blank view.

[Tiger1]

Mine is blank as well…

[Zach_McNaughta1]

Bank as well

[morgan]

Hey everyone, I fixed the issue with the blank onboarding views, so it should be working now. Please try it out again and let me know if you have any feedback or issues.

Thanks!
Morgan

[Sean_Lim]

It’s up for me now, but I’m on my Chrome browser and navigating through the different rows is not possible. There are three dots on the bottom but I cannot click through them in any way (nor with arrow keys).

Also is there button on the Onboarding view that gets the user to UserSettings? For me that’s how the user chooses their profile that gets them to the information they need.