Introducing: Interactive User Guides

Over the last twelve years, Formitize grew from being a digital form provider to a complete all-in-one business platform. Thousands of unique users login to their Formitize dashboard every month to manage one, multiple or all aspects of their business processes. While we are continuously working on providing additional and more powerful features for our users, we simultaneously look for ways to simplify the way our platform works and increase the user experience.

Automated and Interactive User Guides

One way that we have simplified the user journey within the Formitize platform is through automated and interactive user guides. When a new user signs up for Formitize, the automated guide will explain how to set-up their account, show the user where to click and provide an indication of how many steps they are away from completing the guide.

Easy Account Setup for the best Start

Everything that we do is aimed at creating the best possible user experience, whilst at the same time boosting our user’s productivity to allow them to scale their business to new heights. When users login to our platform for the very first time, we want to make it as easy as possible to set up their accounts and make their Formitize platform their own.

With our new interactive user guides, setting up a new profile has never been this easy. The interactive user guide will automatically start after a user’s first successful login.

The user guide will generate a pop-up screen and invite the user to set up their account.

Once the user has started their guide, the guide will automatically trigger the setup flow. This will then guide the user through the entire setup process, which includes setting up:

Their company logo.
Their preferred colour scheme.
Their Business contact details (which will automatically populate this information for their forms, invoices and communication workflows).

The guide automatically ‘locks’ the parts of the platform that are not relevant to the guide. In the image above, you can see that the guide has ‘locked out’ everything on the page except for the settings cog. The instructions next to the highlighted section then explain what the user is expected to do in this section of the automated guide.

In-platform Communication

Next to our interactive user guides, we have also introduced in-platform communication. This is really useful when we launch a new feature or have an important announcement that our users need to be aware of.

At the same time, we are mindful not to share too many announcements throughout your Formitize journey. The platform is made for getting things done quicker, easier and more efficiently.

Therefore, we only use in-platform communication when it helps our users get more out of their Formitize experience.

The future

After rolling out this first interactive user guide, our data shows that most new users were able to set up their profile without additional support.

After the first successful rollout of an interactive user guide in the Formitize platform, we are currently working on a large variety of other interactive user guides that our users can use to set up specific modules or actions, or learn more about a topic.