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Actions

If Content are the most common building blocks in CommandBar, Actions are the coolest 😎

Actions represent things your users can do with your product. For example, if you work on a sales product, it might mean creating or updating an opportunity or modifying an existing customer. It might be something boring-yet-important like resetting your password.

How are actions used in CommandBar?​

CommandBar uses actions to make them easily available to users, when their intent seems to match up with an action.

  • Copilot: users can initiate access directly from Copilot. This lets them achieve things in your product without having to use your UI.
  • Spotlight: certain actions can be triggered by name in Spotlight.
  • HelpHub: actions can be recommended in HelpHub recommendation sets

How do I set up actions?​

You can add actions at Dashboard -> Actions.

There are two types of actions: callback and API request. You can read more about these in this accompanying doc.

Which actions should I add?​

We recommend adding as many actions as possible to CommandBar. The more actions available to Copilot, the more scenarios in which it can help users. Also, if you work on a team, having actions available can allow your team to use CommandBar in more ways. For example, if you wire up an “Upgrade” action, someone else on your team could nudge that action on a page where users are especially likely to experience a magic moment and want to subscribe to a paid plan.

In general, we recommend starting with:

  • Actions that are most valuable to your users
  • Most frequently used Actions
  • Actions that users have the most trouble with
  • Actions that users often write into support to achieve (this way, they can achieve them without needing to talk to a human!)
  • Actions that do good things for your business (like letting customers upgrade or add seats)

How do I control when actions are available?​

Some actions are available all the time, and some only make sense in certain situations. CommandBar provides Who/Where/When targeting to restrict actions to situations in which they make sense. For example, maybe some actions are only available to users with admin privileges. In these situations, you could create an Admin Audience and restrict the actions to users who fall within that audience.

Note that for callback actions, CommandBar will automatically disable the action if the provided callback hasn’t been provided to CommandBar in the user’s session. This prevents situations in which Callback Actions will unexpectedly fail for users. (If you didn’t get this section, just know that this is a good thing, and we care about giving your users the best experience possible 🫶. Broken actions are annoying and our purpose is to be non-annoying!)