Building an interactive learning service

User onboarding is an important aspect of offering SAAS but as apps start to grow and add different new features, it can become a little complex for new users to navigate and discover different functionalities.

At Postman, we actively track feature requests suggested by our users to constantly add different features without hindering the original app experience, which can lead to some features staying hidden for our newer users.

To tackle this issue, we decided to build an in-app learning service that not only allows users to discover new features but also experiment with them in a guided, interactive manner without restricting them to a static path.

This talk would try to encapsulate:

- how we built the end to end service handling multiple variables and constraints.
- the integration complexities of a “user action-driven” service with a native app.
- how we made the end product exploratory without introducing any computation latency.
- how we introduced personalized learning for individual users.

I would also talk about why a dedicated onboarding/ learning service makes sense for SAAS products and things to consider when building one.

Transcript

1. PRESENTED BY January 10, 2019 Building an interactive learning service Deepak Pathania @debugPathania
2. January 10, 2019 Why?
3. January 10, 2019 Inspiration
4. January 10, 2019
5. January 10, 2019
6. January 10, 2019
7. January 10, 2019 Terminology
8. January 10, 2019 Skills • Roughly maps to features in Postman. • Can be acquired by completing “lessons” associated with that skill.
9. January 10, 2019 Lessons • A group of guided steps that walks a user through a particular flow. • Generally maps to common use cases within the app.
10. January 10, 2019 Lesson steps • Each individual step in any given lesson. • May or may not have explicit CTAs to transition to the next lesson step.
11. January 10, 2019
12. January 10, 2019 The first lesson!
13. January 10, 2019
14. January 10, 2019
15. January 10, 2019
16. January 10, 2019 Limitations.
17. January 10, 2019
18. January 10, 2019
19. January 10, 2019
20. January 10, 2019 Rules
21. January 10, 2019
22. January 10, 2019
23. January 10, 2019 Cool, but how do you point the tooltip at an element deterministically?
24. January 10, 2019 Medium article
25. January 10, 2019 Versioning
26. January 10, 2019 API versioning Client SDK version
27. January 10, 2019 What we learnt? • If your service stores information related to interface rendering, always build an abstraction on top. • Versioning should not be an after thought, things would change sooner than you can imagine, and you should be prepared for it.
28. January 10, 2019 Making it resilient.
29. January 10, 2019
30. January 10, 2019
31. January 10, 2019
32. January 10, 2019
33. January 10, 2019
34. January 10, 2019 Personalisation.
35. January 10, 2019
36. January 10, 2019
37. January 10, 2019 Progress computation
38. January 10, 2019
39. January 10, 2019 “All those CS theory classes weren’t completely useless, after all.”
40. January 10, 2019 Dogfooding
41. January 10, 2019 Questions? @debugPathania @postmanclient