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CommandBar Manifesto

You’ve made it to our docs. Hello! Thank you for checking out CommandBar.

You probably have some idea about what we do. Maybe you’ve seen us in another product (the best way to discover CB!), or read a blog post that mentioned us, or you’ve seen some of our elaborate marketing.

Before we dive into the details of how to achieve specific missions with CommandBar, we wanted to take a few moments to explain some core concepts that will make it 100x easier to understand our product.

What do we do, exactly?​

CommandBar is a User Assistance Platform. Ok now you understand it perfectly and no further explanation is needed.

CommandBar Customer Logos

Just kidding, we know that doesn’t explain the nitty-gritty of what we do, so here’s a more verbose version.

CommandBar’s User Assistance Platform allows teams at forward-thinking companies (that’s you!) to leverage their company’s product (aka web or mobile site) to improve user experience and achieve their goals, without engineering support.

Ok, let’s address these pieces one-by-one.

Teams at forward-thinking companies​

You might be wondering, is CommandBar the right tool for me? Here’s how we think about who can get value out of us.

What types of companies?​

CommandBar is a tool that embeds into web apps (also known as “websites” or “portals”), desktop apps (apps that users install on their computer), and mobile apps. So if your company has people showing up to one of those things, and you think their experience there could be better, we are relevant to you.

CommandBar Customer Logos

What types of teams?​

CommandBar has solutions for many types of teams, because a company’s product is the storefront that teams operate in.

  • For product teams: CommandBar can help melt away friction that is frustrating users and preventing them from getting maximum value out of the product.
  • For marketing teams: CommandBar can help advertise value-additive announcements like user events or new feature launches.
  • For customer success teams: CommandBar can help communicate with specific users or groups of users to eliminate problems that a specific group is facing.

Leverage their company’s product​

CommandBar embeds into our customer’s products, which means that users interact directly with our tools. Think of the product as the storefront, your users as the customers, and CommandBar as really helpful life-like robots that interact with your customers according to objectives that you set.

Some of those robots will proactively usher users towards products we think they might be interested. Or drop by with a helpful comment when they seem confused.

Some of those robots will wait patiently for a customer to say “I have a question” or “How do I do this” and will then sprint into action with a helpful answer or perhaps a personalized walkthrough of the store to help customers get their bearings.

Improve user experience and achieve their goals​

At CommandBar, we believe that the previous generation of tools that embedded into products annoyed users. Too many pop-ups at inappropriate times, too little personalization. We believe there is a huge opportunity to help users use digital products by transitioning from the old-school way (often called “digital adoption”) to the new-school way (what we call “user assistance”).

There are lots of different ways to improve user experience, and usually our customers will focus on improving user experience in a manner that supports a specific goal, at either the company or team level. Here are some common goals that are supported by CommandBar:

  • Engagement
  • Activation
  • Conversion
  • Retention
  • Ticket deflection

Without engineering support​

Your product was probably built by engineers (unless you’re using a no-code tool like WordPress or Webflow, which CommandBar also supports!). But we believe that assisting users is usually best achieved without code, because it allows different teams to help users in the ways they know best, with a quick feedback loop.

Every company, has a mountainous garbage dump of good ideas that could have helped users that got stuck in the engineering backlog — because they weren’t prioritized, the relevant team didn’t have enough engineers to take them, they weren’t properly spec'ed (we suspect you are familiar with these problems).

In CommandBar, you’ll design and launch experiences from our Dashboard or Extension. When you’re ready to deploy to users for the first time, you might need an engineer to install CommandBar (usually a 30-minute exercise). After that, you shouldn’t need any engineering support at all.