Category: New Feature Announcement

Comprehensive cross-platform support
Cordova, Phonegap, Ionic, ReactNative, Mobile Web, Desktop Web are now available to add to our Native IOS and Android platform. This gives us terrific coverage of more than 90% of Apps in the Play and Appstore.

Its difficult to predict winners in development platforms and here is 3 examples:
- Ionic [not an environment but a framework for mobile elements in a HTML/JS development environment – typically Cordova or Phonegap
- ReactNative
- Flutter
- Xamarin [now owned by Microsoft]
Ionic had huge popularity from 2015-2017 and is still popular but is under a lot of pressure from ReactNative and Flutter. Ionic was a huge improvement screen elements that made a much better user experience but performance on-screen is an ongoing challenge. ReactNative solved the performance and native component problems.

ReactNative got a huge amount of traction in the startup community because it was invented inside Facebook. It then hit a few roadbumps with their licensing [because it was invented inside Facebook – LOL], fixed it and enjoys good performance and native screen appearance. We find a lot of agencies like it because of the HTML/JS implementation – its main challenge has been some big changes over time – a lot of their sample apps are based on earlier versions so things get confusing at times.

Flutter – Contextual currently does not support and its probably going to have similar teething problems to ReactNative. Introduced by Google in 2017 it has great UI performance because it uses reactive programming method and UI elements are widgets which creates an abstraction from the native elements. We’d expect startups to pick this up but because it uses a new language “Dart” it will be slower to be picked up by agencies and enterprise. The benefits are immediate cross-platform support for iOS, Android and Google Fuchsia [Google’s upcoming OS]. It does NOT support HTML/WebApps.

We are pretty excited about Flutter but will wait for commercial demand.

Xamarin breaks my heart regularly, we have supported it in the past on Android and could support it again – we’ve currently withdrawn support. We just don’t get support from Microsoft. There is huge potential for Xamarin in the enterprise given the amount of C# developers already building enterprise apps but its not translating to momentum.

With the re-tooling in the enterprise from Windows desktops to Surface or ruggedized Androids, Xamarin should be perfectly placed – it just seems that mobile developers want to build their own careers on the better supported development environments. We can support Xamarin again if there is a strong commercial driver.

Contextual is far and away the leader in tips, popups, tours, feedback, surveys and other engagement layer items across all platforms – we had a unified vision that end users will jump from web, to App, to mobile Web and App developers want one platform to target, engage and track – other solutions like Walkme and Pendo have made acquisitions of companies to add these features but only Contextual has a unified vision and cloud solution.
May 2, 2019
Medium’s Tips for teaching new user habits
When Medium replaced “Recommend” with “Claps” great confusion ensued. Here’s how Medium attempts to train us to understand the new feature.

Whats the deal? Medium wanted to reward great stories more than good stories. But we’ve all been trained to Heart, Upvote, Like, and with a simple tap “Un-Like” – but that was too restricted for Medium’s goal.

Medium’s inApp tooltip to educate users on clapping more for more points is a simple cue to get users over the confusion factor about “claps”.

In Contextual this is a very quick process – here is how its done.
1. Add the SDK
2. Screenshot your page
3. Pick the page and select Tip tool, pick a style
4. point at the placement of your tip. Add your own content and style. (colors, fonts, round corners etc)
5. Target at an audience, Save. Set it live – EASY!
If you’ve got a feature that is not getting uplift:
1. consider how user’s might be a little confused about it.
2. check with users to confirm.
3. your tip should describe/or imply the action. Medium hijacks the long-press gesture and explains it: “Press and how to…”
4. your tip should describe the value to the user. In Medium’s case: “show your support.”. Its crisp, clear.
Its easy to under-estimate the power of simple tips to get uplift. Results vary and Contextual allows you to measure the uplift based on your stated “Success Metric” (Goal).
December 10, 2017
The Design of Everyday Onboarding

I never know where to post these days and FOMO tells me I should be doing more on Medium, so over there is a post called The Design of Everyday Onboarding

In the post I discuss a “down the rabbit hole” experience from this morning where I had nested tips from LinkedIn and Google within a few minutes.

September 8, 2017
LinkedIn’s New Feature by targeted tip
Mobile Tips are everywhere.

Just this morning, I had a flashback to the whole journey that started Contextual. I opened the LinkedIn App and there was an article about our good friend (and fellow 500Startups founder) Holly Cardew of PixC.

Holly has always been generous of her time, her advise and is a great entrepreneur – the Contextual team really value her support!

I wanted to see the comments and touched the comment section. As you can see LinkedIn popped up a contextual tip right at the moment of commenting. This is perfect because:
1. I previously had no idea I could add a picture
2. LinkedIn told me about this new feature
3. They targeted me as a regular commenter who had never posted pictures. Segmentation!
4. LinkedIn have been doing this for a while and so you know their analytics are telling them that contextual, segmented tips deliver uplift.
So what was the flashback???

About a year ago, we were looking for a way to add an onboarding tour to the StreetHawk Dashboard. We’d built a powerful product with many features BUT….our session analytics and exit surveys were telling us people were getting confused.

The onboarding solution we selected was open source built by LinkedIn called HopScotch. It lets you do web tips like this.

So that seemed like a cool idea at the time BUT we failed in our deployment. We should have used something like Appcues that allowed us to iterate faster. Why did we fail with Hopscotch?
1. You have still have to program the tips, tours. You need developers and our developers are busy with our product.
2. Couldn’t iterate. By being locked into a code-based solution we’d need to roadmap small changes – even wording!
3. Inflexible. Initially it seems like a simple set of javascript rules and you are up and running. Wrong. If you want to do something not exactly the Hopscotch way, you get into more complex coding – especially on multipage
4. No segmentation. We were spamming all our users regardless of their familiarity with the product.
5. No analytics. Why do a tour if you don’t know whether it improves performance? How far did a user get into a tour?
6. No A/B splits. Just like analytics, we didn’t know if a tour/flow improved engagement metrics.
So we failed to make a success of Hopscotch and learned the characteristics (from a customer’s point of view) of what an onboarding solution should provide.

We were scratching our own itch and we realized along the way that customer’s in our very own mobile sector were experiencing the same need. We went out and talked to a bunch of people with mobile apps and learned their painpoints. They were often that

Contextual was born!

Contextual has a lot more to do and a huge market need to address. Consumers choose to engage with their vendors via mobile Apps – we aim to help deepen that engagement.

Mobile Tips are everywhere.

Just when I was transferring Holly’s image over for this blog post, Google Drive pops up a “New Feature” Tip. Here it is. The big companies know contextual, unobtrusive tips make sense. Your App could benefit from it too!
July 4, 2017