Record a Guide

Who can create a new Guide?

Any user role can create a new Guide but only Moderators and Admins can publish or edit active Guides. If you are new to creating Guides, we recommend that you review our best practices and have a clear plan of the tour or process that you want to capture. 

Step types

You can record two types of steps when recording: Explanation steps and Interaction steps. We recommend explanation steps for simple product walkthroughs and navigation tours and interaction steps for more complex navigation or process flows.

Explanation steps

The simplest Guides are a path of Explanation steps where users click Next in your Guide to proceed.

Interaction steps

Interaction steps require user interaction with your app. These are particularly useful for deeper product tours, learning processes, or where input validation is required.

Record modes

The Editor provides two record modes: Classic and Extended

Classic 

Classic offers two capture actions. Use the left mouse button to record an interaction step, or the right mouse button to record an explanation step. Press `Esc` to exit the recorder at any time.

Extended

The Extended record mode allows you to capture additional user actions.

Actions

• Right-click: record a right-click interaction step, e.g. to display an Options menu
• Left-click: record an interaction step
• Double-click: record a double-click interaction step
• Ctrl+left mouse click: record an explanation step
• Press the `Esc` key to exit the recorder at any time

Record a Guide

To create a Guide:

1. Open the Editor in your application. 
2. Click Create in the top bar. The recorder mode displays. You can use the default Classic mode or switch to Extended mode.
3. Click Start Recording. The recorder captures every click you conduct and automatically creates a step. You can easily add steps to a Guide later if required.
4. Click through the process you would like to guide your users through. You can add the text and change other options later. 
5. If you need to pause the recording to make any adjustments to your screen between steps press the ALT key (or the Option key for Mac). Click the ALT button again to resume recording. This option works also when re-selecting elements. 
6. Once you have recorded the steps, click the Stop recording button. Your recorded step sequence is displayed with the last recorded step selected.

Step options

You can change the example title and text of a step directly in the window of the recorded step. You can also adjust the settings of this step. The available options for the step are located right next to the step box.

Reselect Element
Here you can reselect an element. This is useful if you have selected the wrong element by accident.

Alignment
Here you can change the preferred alignment of your step box. This is where the explaining text box should be shown. You are selecting a preference only, as the optimal position can differ depending on your users' screen size or visible elements.

Code Selector
The selector gives you access to the technical description of the selected element. You can adjust it manually.

Skip
The Skip option allows you to make specific steps of your Guide optional for users.

Next
This determines how a user proceeds to the next step of the Guide. They can either press the "Next" button or interact with the highlighted element. If you select the Next button, you can then define whether interaction with the element is allowed or prevented. To define a user interaction with a highlighted element, see Defining step navigation for your Guides. 

Page Reload

When a user does a full reload page, the URL changes or you move on to a new browser tab you can set the option to ‘Yes’.

When moving on to a new browser tab, Userlane closes the Guide in the current tab without triggering an exit or an error and opens the Guide in the new tab.

Delete
This deletes the selected step.

Add Media
Click the + icon to add a link, info box, image, or video to a step. See Adding media to your Guides to learn more.

Add a step

If required, you can add one or more steps at any point in your Guide.

1. Select the step before the point you want to insert the additional step(s).
2. Click Record.
3. Capture the addition steps then stop recording.

Element Status

Next to a step you are seeing a dot:

• green dot - The element is currently visible on this page.
• orange dot - The element is currently not visible on this page.
• red dot - This step needs your attention and indicates that at least one warning was triggered due to multiple errors on the step. The step needs your attention.

Preview

To confirm that you have captured the correct elements and that your Guide flows in a logical sequence, click the Preview button. You can preview your Guide at any time to review changes and language versions or to test links. Learn more about the different ways you can test your Guides in How to test your Guides.