Delivering Results: WalkMe Best Practices

WalkMe offers an extensive set of tools to help accelerate your business practices and allow your team to get their jobs done faster.  Whether automation or training is your goal, WalkMe can deliver the results you are looking for.  The only problem with having such an extensive toolset at your disposal is that people often don’t know where to start.  They worry that if they take a wrong step it could ruin the exercise and destroy their results.  But have no fear, here are five simple tips to keep in mind when you begin down the path of implementing WalkMe at your organization.

1. Keep It Simple

This is great advice throughout life, but it pertains particularly well when incorporating WalkMe’s digital adoption platform into your business practices.  Far too often, companies believe that they need to start with the most complex tasks because they assume that is where they will see the biggest win.  On the contrary, starting small and focusing in on the high frequency activities allows you to get the quickest results for the investment you are making. 

Focusing on the small simple tasks has two main advantages.  First, you will be able to create the content and get it into production much faster compared with more complex walk throughs.  By rolling out your first walk throughs quickly, you can see immediate results.  Second, it will likely affect far more of your employees on a more regular basis, than a complex and infrequent task that they need to perform. 

We have found that by taking this approach, the 80/20 rule tends to apply, and companies are able to get 80% of the results from 20% of the effort.  Shorter, simpler processes also result in less steps.  According to WalkMe research, walkthroughs achieve the best results are achieved by having shorter walkthroughs with less steps.  The sweet spot is to keep it under 12 steps and 120 seconds.

2. Don’t Recreate Your User Guide

Another trap that companies can fall into when implementing WalkMe is that they want to take all the information and processes in their user guide and simply make a digital version of that.  While this is certainly possible, the effort it takes is disproportionate to the results obtained and it misses out on some of the greatest benefits a digital adoption platform provides.  In most cases, users of your systems already know most of the steps they need to do.  Use this to your advantage and create something better.

A better approach is to focus in only on the areas where users are struggling and give them the guidance they need at those critical points.  This means that you can provide aid in long and complex processes while still complying with the advice above of keeping it simple.  Rather than providing guidance through every step of the process, you provide guidance only when the process gets difficult.  For simple parts of the process, you let the user navigate their way through on their own.

3. A Good Design Ensures Results

Beginning with a good design guarantees that you can achieve the results you are looking for.  Start your design by drafting it up on a whiteboard.  Create what you believe to be the ideal process flow and then see how it can be improved.  The process should get a user from start to finish in a simple, straightforward way.  If there are complex paths or points where the process forks, try to come up with ways to modify the process to be more linear and easier to understand. 

Be sure to consider where you will be deploying.  Will you need to deploy across different devices?  Mobile, tablet, PC?  How will the different screen resolutions impact the guidance you are trying to give?  What about different regions of the world?  How will language impact the amount of text you can fit on the screen?  Some languages take a lot more space to convey the same idea.

Don’t focus too much on the exact text of the guidance at this phase.  When you are creating the rough design, the important task is to capture intent.  Where does the user need to go next at each step of the journey?  Once the design is fully thought through, then you can go back and fine tune the exact text that gets the user from one step to the next.  Remember that iterating and changing the text is easy, so don’t stress if you don’t get it exactly right on the first go.

4. Plan the User Experience

It is important that you understand the frame of mind of your users.  Put yourself in their shoes and try to think how they would think when interacting with the software.  Design an interface that is appealing and easy for them to use.

If you have too much information present at once it could easily overwhelm someone.  Keep the text short and actionable.  Make sure you are presenting just the relevant information when it is needed.  If you think there is more relevant information that someone might want, you can provide them a link to an external resource where they can learn more. Don’t inundate them with information they may not be interested in.

The use of colors is important.  For the balloons that you add to a page or text that you highlight, you need to be sure that you pick colors that stand out from the page.  Be cautious of using the color red for balloons or highlighting, implies an error.

5. Involve Users, See Results

Better than thinking like a user, ask an actual user.  It is the users of your business systems and software that need help, so it only makes sense to get their input to help build and design the guides and walkthroughs.

Whether you are using WalkMe for employee training or to help educate customers on your software, it is those users that can tell you where they are struggling and help prioritize which activities should get attention first.  Without their input, it is hard to ensure you will get the results you are looking for.  From the start of the project, be sure to select a few representative users and pull them in as a part of the cross-functional team that you use to build out your deployment plan. But don’t limit user engagement to just planning and requirements gathering.  Once you have a plan, you can begin executing and building out guides and walkthroughs.  After your first walkthroughs are created, reengage your users to test out what you have built.  Get their feedback on whether the guides are helping the way they had hoped.  Perhaps you need to add some additional steps or be clearer with your instructions.  And make sure you have users that are representative of your whole user base.  Users with different types of devices and that speak different languages. This ensures that problems with different languages and screen resolutions can be caught early in the process.