Nudges manifesto

You’ve made it to our docs. Hello! Thank you for checking out CommandBar.

You probably have some idea about what we do. Maybe you’ve seen us in another product (the best way to discover CB!), or read a blog post that mentioned us, or you’ve seen some of our elaborate marketing.

Before we dive into the details of how to achieve specific missions with CommandBar, we wanted to take a few moments to explain some core concepts that will make it 100x easier to understand our product.

What do we do, exactly?

CommandBar is a platform of multiple products. Specifically, we are a User Assistance Platform. Ok now you understand it perfectly and no further explanation is needed.

Just kidding. Let's spell that out further.

First, let's talk about what we mean by Users. For us, users are anyone using a digital product -- a web app, a desktop app, a mobile app, or a website.

Next, let's talk about Assistance. Assistance means helping them get more value out the product. If they're new, that might mean helping educate them about the product. If they have a specific mission in mind, it might mean helping them achieve it quickly and fully.

How do nudges fit in?

We believe in helping users in two ways.

• Responsively: when the user has a question or an ask, give them personalized help expeditiously
• Proactively: intervene tastefully when the user would benefit from a nudge in the right direction

Nudges handle the second part.

Are nudges just popups? Aren't popups annoying?

Popups are annoying, yes. As internet users, we've been inundated with many, many popups. 99% of these popups are annoying. They show up at inconvenient times. They show us irrelevant stuff. They irritiatingly reappear if we don't engage with them.

All this results in most users closing most popups they see.

At CommandBar we don't believe that there is anything inherently annoying about the popup formfactor. Some of our nudges aren't technically popups because they are embedded within our customers' sites. But some are popups in the sense they are ephemeral and appear over the UI.

But unlike most popups, our whole schtick is that if you annoy users, you can't help them. So you'll find lots of goodies in our Nudges product designed to avoid annoying users. Things like:

• Behavioral triggers: show nudges to users at times when it seems like they could use some help
• Strike detection: measure how often users are rage closing nudges
• Air traffic control: smart rate-limiting to prevent users from seeing too many nudges
• And much more

Are Nudges for me?

Typically Nudges are used by anyone who cares about the user journey in a digital product. Specifically that looks like:

• Product teams: folks who think about onboarding and the holistic user journey
• Growth teams: leveraging product to drive improvements in zones of the user funnel
• Product marketing teams: owning customer communication, including the in-product channel
• CX teams: focused on preventing issues and helping users before they think to open chat (and when they do)