Create and activate Announcements

With Announcements, you can communicate anything you want to your users directly in your app. 

What are Announcements?

An Announcement is a push message announced within the external application via the Userlane Assistant.

With Announcements you can

• Get insights on the actual users’ needs, verify initial concept and goals
• Fill the gap within the content concept phase with relevant information and involve your audience at an early stage

When to use Announcements?

Before Rollout of Userlane:

• presenting and promoting Userlane as additional resource for support

After Rollout of Userlane:

• promoting specific Guides 
• sharing resources, e.g. link to release notes, new URLs, best practice articles
• Share generic application-related information, e.g. downtime, responsible person shift, updates
• Share generic information, e.g. company news, reminder 

Who can create Announcements?

Admins and Moderators can create, save, edit and publish Announcements in the Userlane Portal. Contributors can do almost everything, except that they cannot publish the announcement.

How to start?

• Understand how to create your first Announcement.  If you have already an account with Userlane and you are based in Europe ⇨ Start this Guide to learn how. Or if based in the US ⇨ Start this Guide to learn how.

• Activate Announcements for your end-users to make already seen Announcements available to them after they have seen them. Once you activate the Announcements for your end-users, the Bell icon appears in your Assistant. Through this bell, they will be able to reach the Announcement menu to find older announcements. If you are not seeing the Announcement button within your Assistant, make sure to enable it in the Portal.

Let's dive into the details

Now that you know how to create and activate Announcements for your users and you are a pro, here are the nitty-gritty details: 

Announcement Status

• If you publish an Announcement, set it to private, and publish it again; it will only pop up for the users who didn't see it the first time.
• Once an Announcement pops up for a user it is considered as pushed. It won't pop up again for them. 
• "Draft" refers to an Announcement that has never been published, while "used" refers to an Announcement, that was public once but not anymore. 

Pushing more than one info at a time

• When a user is targeted for more than one Announcement for the first time they will see the last published Announcement first. Then they can click through the rest.
• Announcements vs. Promotions: Announcements and Promotions will never get mixed up. Announcements have a higher priority than Promotions.
• Announcements vs. Welcome Slide: the Welcome Slide is seen as an introduction element into the overall Userlane offering. When enabled, it will always be shown first when the user is targeted with any Userlane content (including Announcements) for the first time. 

Adding and linking different content

• Images should be a maximum of 8 MB with a 4:2 ratio, and a recommended resolution of 326x160px. View more details on image requirements for your different content types in Working with images.
• If you link a Guide to an Announcement, we'll inherit that Guide's segment (yes you can also segment your Announcements!). However, you can change it. 
• For users who can see the Announcement, but should not actually play through the linked Guide (e.g. not segmented for the user to see), we won't show the link button.

Translating Announcements

You can use the export/import text option to translate your Announcements. 

Pay attention to: 

• Not deleting any of the original text. If you upload empty fields in a published Announcement, it won't show any text.

• "Used" Announcements don't get exported.

• To export Announcements, you have to go to "My account" to export the texts for the whole property.

You can also manually translate your announcements by switching to a different language. You can also copy one existing text to all languages.

Only after text was added, the language becomes available for publishing.

Considerations

Don’t activate too many Announcements in parallel for your users, especially not for the same page segment. The more Announcements you stack, the less your users will interact with them.