Nudges overview

Have you ever received a helpful nudge? Maybe a friend telling you the door says “Pull” when you’re pushing. Or your mom telling you have food stuck in your teeth.

Nudges form one half of CommandBar's set of experiences. They exist to proactively, non-annoyingly nudge users in the right direction. That might be directing users to a feature you think they will find useful a walkthrough video when it seems like their stuck.

The key to wielding nudges like a masterfully crafted katana to slice through user friction is to (1) design engaging, high-signal nudges that clearly communicate their usefulness to the user, and (2) create targeting conditions that ensure users see nudges when they care, not when they don't.

When you should use nudges

CommandBar has two product suites: Nudge and Assist. We lovingly refer to experiences within the Nudge suite as nudges. Nudges are best used when you want to direct users to something before they have clearly formed their own intent to do so. Here are some common scenarios:

• You want to intercept user confusion
• You want to point out a path through your product that the user seems like a good candidate to take
• You want to announce an event or opportunity that you think the user is particularly likely to be interested in
• You want to capture user feedback after a particularly positive, negative, or high-leverage experience

Creating a nudge

To create a nudge, head over to the Dashboard. Here you'll see the 4 types of nudges in the top left:

• Product Tours
• Announcements
• Surveys
• Checklists

Select the one you want and click New. From there, you can create a nudge from scratch or use a template.

Step 1: Add your content

Next, add your content. This includes a title, body, and any blocks or items. Note that markdown is supported in here.

Step 2: ▶️ Test your nudge

You can preview your Nudge directly in the Dashboard as you edit it, but to test a Nudge as an end-user within your app, you'll want to use the CommandBar Editor extension. With the extension, you can click ▶️ to Simulate the nudge - interacting with it just as an end-user would. "Simulate mode" also displays the handy Simulate toolbar which lets you visually test out all the conditions for Who/Where/When your Nudge will display (more on that below!).

Step 3: Add targeting

Nudges use the same targeting conditions as other CommandBar experiences:

• Who: which group of users is the nudge relevant for (most commonly used with Audiences)
• Where: where in your product is the nudge eligible to be shown
• When: at what moment are users most likely to find the nudge useful

Step 4: Ship 🎉

You can place your nudge into production by selecting Published on the dropdown menu.

Another cool thing you can do is to schedule the release of your nudge by choosing Scheduled... and then toggling the Start Date, for which you need to provide a date and time. You can also set the End Date, so the nudge will automatically be unpublished at that time.

Note that you’ll need to have installed CommandBar first to make the nudge available to your users.

Step 5: Watch it go

You can track how users are interacting with your nudges at Dashboard -> Analytics -> Nudges.

Nudge settings

There's several ways to customize each nudge in that nudge's settings:

• Dismissable - Allows a user to close a nudge without completing it
• Snoozable - Adds a **Snooze ** button that will close the nudge for 3 days at which time it can be re-triggered (checking all the conditions, of course)
• Start Page - Navigates a user to a specific page before displaying
• Suggest in Copilot - Allow Copilot to suggest this nudge anytime a user asks for information that match the description