Usetiful Review – Build product tours and checklists for your customers

Churn is something we all want to minimise. The lower the churn, the better. But how do we do it? With Usetiful you can build product tours that take your visitors and your customers through an entire journey of your product. Let me show you.

This is the Usetiful platform where we have a quick overview of what we have going on at the moment with our checklist, smart tips and our tours. Then we can see our trends down here and some inspiration if you need in order to build your product tours. In the menu here we have content, we have reports, themes and a marketplace. But let’s start out with the tours. The main functionality of Usetiful. I’ve made one tour here already which has been running for some days now.

1. Features of Usetiful
2. Usetiful Pricing
3. Alternatives to Usetiful
4. Future of Usetiful
5. Pros & Cons using Usetiful
6. Last thoughts on Usetiful

Features of Usetiful

Right now there are three steps, the welcome step, the Sign up for beta and the feedback step. And this is how you build out a tour. So let’s go back and try and build a new one from the beginning. So up here I will add the tour, and then you can see we have the same welcome screen as you just saw before. The buttons are Start Tour or close.

Let’s call this one Skip Tour instead. So here you can see we have some different options we can choose from, but I will show you that in the next steps. So let’s add a step and this is going to be a pointer. So on my website I have a button called Open Beta Programme as a class and that’s what I want to point this one to. So I will say Open Beta Programme.

This is the element that this pointer needs to focus on, so you can see the type is pointer, the title here let’s call this one Beta step instead. And then over here is where we can write the content. So here I can write something like: Sign up for, and now you can see that it can progress in three different ways. Except for the click of a button, it can be click on element, it can be clicked anywhere on the screen, or it can be the next step trigger.

So, if I choose to click a button, then whatever element that I have pointed my current model to will be the way that they will move on to the next step. You can also choose the next button. Let’s say it’s just a text element they need to read. Then you decide on the next button. But in this case I will choose the click of button and here we have our alignments of the buttons that’s just whether you want them on the left or on the right side or in the centre.

And then we have down here the buttons that we can name previous or next. I will add one more step, so I will keep these previous and the next Down here you can see that we can choose the trigger and the trigger can be multiple things. It can be the URL that it equals to, it can be an element. And then you decide whether the user should click on the element, whether the user should hover on the element and a lot more different options.

You can really customise this. You can also auto skip this specific step, and you can collect feedback. So this is just a happy, medium, sad faces that you use to gather feedback for you, which is very valuable. And that’s what we’re going to do in the last step. So you can see the first step is the welcome step, the second step is the beta programme.

And now the third step is just going to be a model where I ask for some feedback. So I will call this step feedback. The alignment was fine, and then we went down here to collect feedback. Over here, I will ask a question regarding the feedback. And now I will change the next button to submit feedback, because now they will finish.

You can see we have three steps over here, the welcome step, the beta step and the feedback. Now what do you do if you have a lot of elements which are basically the same, but you want to only track one of them, They have a Chrome extension for this. So let’s try and go to the website where I have the tour right now. So here you can see the tool we’ve just built. I can start it now it is pointing at my beta button, I can press next, and then it’s asking for feedback.

I will give feedback, and then I will finish the tour. Now I want to show you this Chrome extension. So at the bottom here you can see that we have all the smart tips and checklists here that we can show all the published content or all the smart tips and checklists. And then we can also start the preview. Then we can restart the preview and then here we can navigate, but we can also select elements.

So with the selector, you can see that we get the different routes to the specific buttons and elements that we want to track. So let’s say I want to track this button right here. Then I hover over the button, and then I just click. So now it’s copied. So if I return now to here, and I change the step two point at this specific button instead, you can see now it has been added and that’s how you do it.

You can also go through here where you saw I just clicked enter your URL and then find the specific button. Let’s try that for a moment. So now you can see that the Chrome extension is already enabled. And then let’s say I want to track this one again. Then I click, then it automatically goes back, fills out the path to the specific button.

And now I’m ready to save this specific tour. So I’ll save and exit, and now you can see that it’s ready up here to be published. I’ve already published this one down here, so I’ll just keep this one as it is. That’s how easy it is to build a tour. Now let me show you the smart tips.

Because a smart tip is basically like a tool tip where you can just control everything within Usetiful. So let’s try and create a smart tip. Again, we have an element up here where we can choose what button or what element we want to track. So I’ll just open the page, and then I’ll go down and say, I want to track this specific headline right here.

I will use tip as the headline and then here in the text I’ll write it’s so important you read this. Orientation, I will use automatic. That means whether you want the box to be on the left, the right, the top or the bottom, I will always recommend you to take automatic unless you really want it on a specific side. Here in the hotspot beacon, you can choose whether it needs to be pulsing or just normal. So you can see we have got a little hotspot beacon here. Let’s try and save this one.

We can also preview it, go to the website, and now you can see that there is a little hotspot. That is to show that behind this headline there is something specific that you need to see. And by hovering you can see the tip that we just made. But this tip is not styled properly. So let’s try and take a look at that.

If I go back to the tip here, I can edit it. But up in the settings is where we choose the theme. I have made a theme called YouTube video and if I choose that, then you can see that the tip has now changed. So the styling is more relevant to my website and the themes we control over here. So you can see within the theme, we can control the colours, we can control typography, and then we can control the button position.

Right now they only have six different fonts you can use, and I know they’re working on adding Google fonts, so we will get a tonne of different fonts. But what you can do until now is you can use custom CSS and in here you can import the Google font and then use it this way. But it’s not so convenient. So it’ll be good when they change that. Let’s try and go back to the content because I also want to show you the checklists.

The checklist is also what you see down here in the right corner. There are specific items that the visitor or the customer needs to go through, and you are sure that if they go through this checklist, then they have understood your product. Let’s just try and close this one and close the panel down here. Let’s try and add a checklist. The design is the same as we saw before.

We have different items out here. We can add as many as we want and then here is where you choose step one this one. And then the action is in this case to start a tour, and I’ll just start the untitled tour here. You can also open a URL that can also be the checklist point and as soon as they click, and they start the tour, then they have checkmarked that and that is what you can do at the moment.

So you can open URLs and you can start tours. I really want them to elaborate on this so we in the future can get them to click on specific forms. They need to fill out a form, they need to read a specific element to understand something specific about a feature that we have. We just need more actions for this specific checklist because, overall, the idea is great. But if we can open a URL, and we can start a tour that’s just too limited of the functionality.

So now let’s move on to the reports and the reports are also very simplified because we can see how many assists has we had in the last 30 days, how many have started the tours and how many completed the tour. So out of everyone who visited the website, 50% started the tour and out of those 50%, 50% completed the tour. And down here you can see that we have one view on the last step and five views on the first step, which is pretty normal because a lot of them just click the tour and close it. So here you can see the different steps. You can see that we have three on the first step which doesn’t really align with the graph up here, but we have three.

Then we have one on the sign-up for beta step, and then we have one on the feedback step. Down here the user feedback, we can see what feedback they give us. And even though I clicked on the feedback we can’t see it down here at the moment. So maybe that’s a bug they’re working on, but that’s the very simple reporting module. The last thing I want to show you is the marketplace. And the marketplace doesn’t bring so much value to me.

But what they have done is that they have just gathered different products to bring more value to Usetiful. So you can see that they have partnered up with Survio. Of course, they have their own product, then they have IMG vision, they have Unsplash and some more that you can use. And this is to bring up the value of your product tours. You can take a look at it, and you can even offer your own app if you want to.

Before we move on to the pricing model, I just want to show you how you install it, because when you install Usetiful you can choose whether you want to identify users across devices. You can see then you need to add the user ID. You can even segment the users. You can see here we have trial users, maybe new users, churned users, etc. You can target specific languages, user roles, and you can personalise your content.

So here you can see that if the first name of the user is John, in your steps you can write Hi John, This is the first step you need to go through in this checklist just as an example. And when you have chosen what you want to track on, then just copy the code and insert it into your head element just like we know it from Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics. You can also enable this via Google Tag Manager.

Usetiful Pricing

The Product tour industry is quite expensive normally, but with Usetiful you can get started completely free, and you get 2000 Assists and one Product Tour in the free plan and that should be enough for you to test it out. And then when you’re sure whether you want to use Usetiful or not, you can later on upgrade to one of their paid plans.

Alternatives to Usetiful

But now let me move over to the alternatives that I want to talk a little bit about, the top alternatives as I see it is AppCues and Walkme. Both of these products have been in the industry longer than Usetiful and you also see it in the pricing because they are a lot more expensive. And this is what we usually see in the Product tour industry that we see these high prices on the products, and it’s because they bring a lot of value.

But it does also require a lot of server power, and it is just expensive to build these products. But if you want a solid product that just works every time, has all the features you need, then go with Walkme. Otherwise, try Usetiful out because it is cheap, and they build features all the time. So maybe in the near future it will be for you.

Future of Usetiful

Now, as Usetiful is not mature yet, they are still working on a lot of features and I want to highlight some of them for you. The first one is an assistant they’re working on. This assistant will pull in content from your website and showcase it to the user to help them better understand your product. Then they’re working on some technical APIs, so you can really build it into your system and to your workflow.

Then they’re working on an NPS score which you can also enable. And then, overall, l they are trying to improve the entire product tour system with announcements. Now one thing I wish that they focused more on is the Product Tour, because the Product Tour is the main product that they have, and I still feel that they have a long way to go. Let’s take their Chrome extension for instance, it would be so much easier if I could pinpoint my entire product tour only using the Chrome extension.

Right now I have to shuffle between the platform and the Chrome extension. That’s just one point and just more customisation would also help a lot.

Pros & Cons using Usetiful

Now, moving on to the pros and cons. Starting with the pros you get a lot of value for what you pay, and they have a great checklist module whereas for the cons I’m really worried about the roadmap because it’s all over the place. They’re focused on an NPS score, an assistant and I really just want them to focus on one thing, building the greatest product tours that they can then the customisation options are very low, and the analytics is just not extensive enough. I don’t know what step the users are falling off in the product tour.

Last thoughts on Usetiful

Even though Usetiful is new in the market, they have really come far. The functionality is good, but we just need more customisation options to build gamification pop-ups and tours. That’s why I want to give Usetiful three stars. Thank you so much for reading. Let’s catch up on the next one.