Built by Paul

Salutations!

Welcome to the world's best changelog, an award bestowed upon Commandbar by the guy who writes that exact changelog. If I had to describe the past two weeks of product updates with one word, it'd be... nudges!

Here's some cool stuff we've built:

🎯Behavioral targeting

Paul built a way to target nudges based on previous nudge interactions. This makes it easier to offer personalized experiences:

• Positive NPS score? Ask for a G2 review.
• Onboarding survey role = engineer? Show code integration guide.
• Customer searched/asked about “CSV”? Show a Nudge when this feature is live!

And many, many more.

👀Previews

Mike made previewing nudges inside your product (or anywhere else) easier than ever: Just click this button, enter a URL and let the Chrome extension work its magic:

⬇️CSV Export

Want to brag about your CommandBar results in meetings? Thank Shannon for your next positive feedback—because you can now download analytics as a CSV with this little button:

📍 The Detail Dungeon

👤 Copilot avatar reset

It's really funny to upload Danny DeVito as your Copilot avatar, but you don't want to ship that to users. That's why you can now reset Copilot's avatar to default (ty Shannon):

✅ Checklists²

Thanks to Maggie, checklists can now trigger other checklists, meaning you can trap users in an infinite checklist gauntlet. Or you could do the way-less- fun-but-way-more-useful thing of using a general checklist to launch a feature-specific one.

That's it for this installation of the changelog. As always: Keep it user-friendly!

CommandBar is not an analytics company, but today we're doing our best impression: announcing our completely overhauled analytics system.

Every single dashboard is new. In addition to being new, they are also much better:

1. More actionable summary statistics

2. Real-time (less than 1 minute of latency from your users' browser to yours)

3. Non-annoying graphs to measure non-annoying assistance

Spotlight

See what your users are searching for and understand points of confusion so you can tweak and improve the Actions used in Spotlight. 

HelpHub (and of course, Copilot)

Check out how your help content is doing. Are users reading the articles? Are they opening up resource links? Are there any popular searches you don't yet have content for?

Announcement (and all other nudges) 

Are users seeing your nudges? How are they engaging with them?

Believe it or not, between launching ShipLog (where you're reading this right now) and putting together our first-ever session of CommandTalks, we managed to ship some pretty cool stuff you should know about.  

🚢 The ShipLog has sailed

Last week was all about ShipLog, the new tool we launched to help you write beautiful changelogs quickly. If your 2024 resolution was to revive that changelog you haven't touched since 2014, this is your chance. 

🙂 Don't sleep on Spotlight 

Thanks to Thomas, you can now use Spotlight inside CommandBar to quickly jump to any Nudge (product tours, surveys, etc) or piece of content (answers, files, etc).

🎯 More targeting?

We just can't stop. 

Paul is pretty serious about our quest to obliterate annoying nudges. We know how showing everything, to everyone, all at once, no longer works. So we want to let you be as specific and intentional as possible when showing a nudge to a user. 

This means that you can now use user properties (not just metadata) to target CommandBar experiences. If you're familiar with analytics tools, you'll probably know what these are. If not, you can think of them as attributes unique to each user. Things like roles, activity, preferences, or any specific information you know about your users. By using these, you make CommandBar experiences more relevant and less intrusive. 

We're excited to announce ShipLog 🚀

A beautiful changelog that celebrates the makers behind the features you ship, is effortless to update, and of course is optimized for SEO and social. We've reimagined what a changelog could be – simple, fun, and human.

Things you're going to love:

• A lightweight editing experience
• Markdown and rich media support
• Schedule entries in advance
• SEO and social optimized
• Spotlight the builders behind each release

And of course it's free to try today:

shiplog.commandbar.com 🚀

The first CommandBar updates of the year are here.

You might know about our obsession with easy-to-use, non-annoying software. Many of the features we ship are built with your users in mind. But that's not to say we don't care about you (we do 🥹). 

From time to time, we want to make sure that how you're setting up experiences in the CommandBar app is as clear as possible. So as a follow-up to our dashboard decluttering from December, we've done some more cleanup to help you find things easier.  But first... 

🥸 Let's talk atrocious product tours

We're doing a deep dive into real-life examples of great and not-so-great product tours (we promise not to name and shame... much). Join us to learn how to build tours that your users don't dismiss immediately (or drop off before step 2).

Sign up here.

Now, onto the...

Product Updates

💫 Content, content everywhere

Traditionally, content you were bringing into CommandBar lived in many places (you were able to add stuff from HelpHub tab, Integrations, etc). This caused confusion. And we hate user confusion. So Maggie and Thomas brought everything together, in one place, under the Content tab.

Why should you care?

This makes it easier for you to find where to upload and sync things like help docs, website scrapes, answers, videos, and custom docs.

It also makes it easier for you to edit, sort, or filter this content (such as making a source available for training only or making it private).

🎯 When targeting nudges, you can now trigger “On event tracked” based on more detailed properties of the event. For instance, if a user clicks a button, instead of just responding to any button click, you can target the response based on specific properties of that event, like whether the button was for "checkout," "start now," or "pay now." Shoutout to Paul 👊 and keep your eyes peeled for more hyper-detailed tracking coming soon.

⏳ Wes added a new trigger for nudges: after time on page lets you define a period of time before you nudge a user with an experience (i.e. Show your shiny new feature 10 seconds after your user opens the app. You know, so you don't startle them.)