Employee onboarding has never been more critical. Acquiring top talent is costly and time-consuming. So when you find suitable new hires, you must ensure that you give them the best chance of becoming valuable contributors.
However, despite research showing how essential a good employee onboarding experience is to retention, reputation, productivity, and even revenue, too many firms are asleep at the wheel. In fact, around three-quarters of HR executives think their employers don't do enough to ensure effective onboarding.
Employee onboarding software was built to tackle these issues. One of the most important pillars of employee onboarding is showing your team how to get the most from their digital tools. This process can include things like interactive product tours, onboarding checklists, and subtle tooltips to help them get familiar with your entire software stack.
The Usetiful Extension is a powerful tool to help you unlock better onboarding experiences. The plugin supports Chrome and Microsoft Edge, which means you'll have access to a broad majority of internet users.
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| Usetiful extension for employee onboarding. |
Perhaps its most well-known use case for the Usetiful extension is helping users preview their interactive product tours within their browsers. However, it has a few additional utilities.
Let's explore them below in our Ultimate Guide to Usetiful Extension.
#1.👀 Preview product tours
Interactive product tours are essential for both user and employee onboarding. Get them right, and you can improve product adoption, user retention and activation, and reduce training costs and IT tickets.
However, interactive product tours are best used for more complex software. As such, they require a mix of things like checklists, tooltips, and modals. Or, in other words, a lot of different moving parts. The perfect product tour takes time, thought, and extensive testing. That's where Usetiful Extension comes in.
As you build your product tours, you need to see how they will appear to your users and employees in their browsers. Usetiful Extension is one of three ways to preview your product tours. It is, without a doubt, the easiest way to achieve this task.
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| Preview product tours with Usetiful Extension. |
When you preview your content with Usetiful Extension, you don't need to interact with the code. Nothing gets changed or altered, so you can get busy building the most user-friendly way to teach users how to use entire products, specific features, or particular workflows.
Having a way to preview your product tours makes life easier. It allows you to experiment with different approaches before they go live. That flexibility extends to mixing and matching tooltips, checklists, and other on-screen onboarding features. Build a tour, see how it looks, and then edit any of the steps so it's smoother, clearer, or more effective. Usetiful Extension makes all that possible and ensures your product tours are of the best quality possible.
Previewing product tours with Usetiful Extension is easy. Just follow this guide, and you'll have it down in no time at all.
#2.↖️ Page element selector
The following use case for Usetiful Extension is also crucial when you want to build effective onboarding content. It's an excellent option for non-technical users who want to make the most of Usetiful's powerful no-code features.
When you're building a product tour for a website, you'll often need to find ways to highlight particular on-page elements. For example, part of your product tour might be about enabling your users to achieve a task that requires selecting a graphical element. These elements could include a button for a new feature or a particular icon.
Pointers are a great way to highlight buttons or areas of the screen while darkening out the rest of the page. This contrast is a subtle yet effective way of directing on-screen attention without overloading your user with written instructions.
The Usetiful Chrome extension element selector helps you select these elements on your page. You can do this while building interactive product tours and walkthroughs.
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| Select the page element for pointers and tooltips with Usetiful Extension. |
As mentioned above, we built Usetiful as a no-code tool. We want it to be as easy to use as possible for everyone, even if you don't have developer experience. So, instead of going through a page of code that looks like a foreign language, the Usetiful extension allows you to select the element on your webpage and connect it to your product tour.
Users can work within the Usetiful editor and select elements on websites within their browser once the extension is installed. This process allows for smooth and user-friendly workflows.
Once again, Usetiful Extension is the easiest way to select element selectors. You can even use it to choose dropdown or pop-up elements, which is a handy feature for building onboarding materials.
Here is a comprehensive guide for selecting page elements that will take you through everything you need to take your interactive product torus to the next level.
#3.🧑💻 3rd party software and employee onboarding
Digital employee onboarding is an important way to teach employees how to use their work tools. However, software stacks have grown to enormous sizes. Employee onboarding software like Usetiful can help ensure your team knows how to use all the tools in your arsenal.
If you build your own software, you have a few options for creating onboarding content. You can code it yourself, or you can employ Usetiful to overlay product tours, tooltips, and checklists to teach them to use the software and all the features. But what can you do with the 3rd party software that makes up your workflow?
Thankfully, the Usetiful Extension allows any new hire or existing employee to access onboarding content when you send them a token and a link. Sending step-by-step guides as a link ensures you can get the right content to the right employees and even build highly personalized training materials.
As you put together your onboarding checklists, tours, or tooltips, you can target particular browser-based applications or websites. Once you've built your tours, you can grab the token from the installation script and give it to your new hires or existing employees. Then, when they navigate to the desired app or site, they can log in to the plugin with the code and get all the onboarding content. It's a simple and elegant solution.
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| Employee onboarding on 3rd party software with Usetiful Extension. |
For more about using Usetiful for any 3rd party software, read this article.
Conclusion
The Usetiful Extension for Chrome is an excellent and versatile tool. You can use it for a variety of purposes, including:
Exploring and testing your product tours to ensure your content delivers the best experience
Selecting elements in your browser that you want to highlight during your product tours
Build onboarding content across your software stack, including any 3rd party products your teams need to use.
The extension is easy to install, and it's compatible with both Chrome and Microsoft Edge, which gives you access to a huge amount of the market.
So try it out today to unlock various benefits, like more employee engagement and satisfaction or greater user activation.