Thursday 22 September 2016

Interactive walkthroughs: What are they and how to create them?

From teaching to training, from softwares to technologies, from anything to everything, the world is progressing towards being more user friendly. A giant leap in user friendliness and interactivity came in with the advent of ‘interactive walkthroughs’ aka ‘interactive guides’


In-app interactive walkthroughs are guided tours that help users navigate through the right places in a website or a web-app. They appear as tooltips or balloon tips that highlight particular elements on the web-apps that prompt the user to take an action. These walkthroughs handhold the user till the completion of any task at hand.


There is a huge demand for the companies that provide the above mentioned solutions with the help of interactive walkthroughs. Some promising companies providing these solutions are:






  • Provides solutions for a variety of products, industries and use cases
  • The pricing is high compared to others. One can avail the same functionalities at reduced costs using  WalkMe alternatives.
  • Provides free demo

Walkhub:


  • Combines a Javascript frontend that records and plays Walkthroughs with lightweight backend built in Go with a PostgreSQL database that stores Walkthroughs centrally.
  • A certain number of publicly shared walkthroughs can be created free of cost. After the limit is reached, pricing comes into play. Also, creation of  privately shared walkthroughs is charged for.

If you are comfortable with bit of coding, you can use javascript libraries like Hopscotch or Joyride and build it yourself. But, If you want a ready fix, then you can use the above mentioned UI based walkthrough builders.