Help hotspots provide contextual help for users as they gain a deeper understanding of your product. They reduce the friction around learning a feature and reduce the potential burden on your support team:

The final product of your hotspot will look something like this when we're done:

Building the hotspot

Create a new flow, giving it a name to describe where the hotspot will be (you may build a few of these), and Tag it with Support or something similar. 

Select the Hotspot pattern from the menu and the Descriptive options from the templates. 

Attach the hotspot to an element on the page. Note: for a hotspot that will include multiple help articles about the whole feature you should place the hotspot in header location, for a hotspot about a specific feature it should be placed next to how someone would begin using the feature. 

Pro tip: you can move the hotspot after placing it on an element by using the 'fine tune' feature in the hotspot settings. 

Pro tip: you can be specific about the element you're attaching to by using the Manual option in the Target element section of settings. 

Update the headline of the hotspot. 

Pro tip: if you'd like a horizontal rule you can add one with the HTML content option.

Add a Text content area, write the name of the link, highlight that text, select to add a link, insert link, and (optional) choose the 'Open in New Window' checkbox. 

Repeat adding text content areas for each link, this makes ordering them more flexible. 

Select a Theme

Choose a theme from the hotspot settings sidebar. Need to create a theme? Open the Themes page. Want to get your designer involved? Invite a teammate.

Targeting the correct users

Let's cover both how to target to your Beginners segment as well as how to make the hotspot persist for multiple views if you would like.

For a hotspot with general help articles and content, you'll want to set it to show when the user reaches the page and to show every time. If the hotspot is about a single feature, showing once will work well.

We ensure it only shows on the correct page using a combination of sub-domain targeting (the "studio.appcues" portion) and resource path (must contain "/flows").

For your audience, show it to your Beginners segment. You may also want to make sure it shows after another piece of onboarding content for that page/feature. 

Pro tip: if you would like the hotpot to immediately reappear after it's closed, use the Trigger Appcues content option in Actions and have the flow trigger itself. Note that other Appcues flows will be prevented from showing while this loop is in place. 

Additional Information

Within Appcues, hotspots appear for beginners on each of the major feature pages. The content in the hotspot is specific to that portion of the product. 

Hotspot Analytics

The scoreboard will take capture the counts of users just seeing the beacon without ever having to interact with it. However, the step breakdown will count it as ‘Shown’ when users click on the beacon, and ‘Completed’ when they click on the beacon and somewhere else on the screen to close it.