November'20 Product Announcements

For the November product update, we will introduce several product usability enhancements. We have always been very focused on providing the best user experience, and since the initial release, and throughout our product growth, we have been measuring the UX performance. As the Layerise product becomes more powerful, certain usability needs arise and become essential for the first-time usage and throughout the feature advancement. For the November update, our focus has been on introducing contextual how-to guides, powerful sidebar assistance, usability design updates and Assistant social sharing.

How-to guides

Regardless of the need, we want to make it super easier and efficient to get how-to guides. As a usability philosophy, we want to provide guides and assistance in the most user-friendly manner with the following key targets:

Context-aware

Visual guide driven

Side-by-side product and guides usage

Support connected

Sidebar

To achieve the key targets above, we are introducing a powerful guide driven sidebar feature. The sidebar is available for all and is accessible through the main navigation.

A sidebar is particularly powerful when used to display information based on user need or a particular need driven event. As evident above, the Layerise sidebar will be displayed on the right side and will be slid out upon request. The sidebar will always take hierarchical preference allowing for a side-by-side engagement with the guide and a Layerise product features simultaneously.

Contextual guides and assistance

The sidebar guides, assistance content and features will be dynamic depending on several factors:

The product page/section the sidebar is requested from

The user product onboarding stage

What features are available or enabled

Account plan

The contextual prioritisation will enable an easier guide overview and provide a list of guides that are particularly interesting or important. Moreover, depending on the user advancement level, certain advanced guides will take the priority against entry-level information.

Search for particular guides

Regardless of what you need to do the guides will be presented to help you out. However, some times it's necessary to search for a particular guide.

For this use-case we have included an always present search option, allowing you to find the content you need. In the case where no guide is to be found, you can with ease request a guide or assistance from our team.

Visual assistance

Guides are only as good as the support they can give. To establish patterns for easy learning it is crucial to provide a visual guide. This is essential in establishing visuals cues and support while learning how to achieve something particular. Due to this, our guides will be including a lot of visual assistance. This will in most cases be presented as captioned or audible video, and in other cases, use of GIF's and JPG will be applied.

Learn and apply

One last important feature of the sidebar is the cross usage support. The sidebar will follow you around as long as you need guidance. Therefore, you can with ease move between pages or flip between the guides, as the sidebar will remember your progress.

In certain cases where you are working with advanced features, and are moving around between multiple pages, having the sidebar to help you through a specific process, without you have to switch tabs or windows, is very handy.

Design enhancements

With this release, we are also introducing several design enhancements. Improving the user experience with constant design tweaks is something we enjoy doing a lot, and it is with a lot of pleasure that we are releasing updates to a wide range of features.

Easier settings

We have decided to spend some time in making our settings much easier to understand and use. All settings are now consolidated on one page with dedicated navigation. Moreover, regardless of what kind of account type you have, the new settings page will include all the available platform, feature and plan settings.

Other design changes

Other design changes included in this release cover a lot of minor details with the biggest changes found on:

Team page

Customer list

Editor

Social sharing

One of the features that have been often requested by end-user is the ability to easily share specific elements of the Assistants with other product owners.

As evident to the above, we are now ready with a social sharing feature directly from the Assistant.

Release date

The release will be rolling out over the next week and is expected to be done by Monday the 7th of December 2020. All features, mentioned in this post, will be available for all plans.

As always, do not hesitate to reach out to us if you have any questions or need a helping hand.