In-app feature announcements

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I am looking at adding in-app feature announcements to our app to quickly explain some key new features at every release of the app. I looked a bit around in the app store and could not really find something that suits my needs. It seems that the wizard steps comes closest. I’ll probably try to build it with that one.  Did someone else already build this or does anyone have suggestions?  Underneath a sample from Facebook so that you get what I mean:
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I would go with a wizard as well.  You might want to associate a runOnce boolean with each User so that when an update occurs, they are prompted on their first login

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I’ve also done this before, and used an approach similar to Tim: a configurable ‘Content’ section for the message, and a boolean on the User (or associated object to keep your model clean) which is evaluated on/before the Homepage to determine if the popup should be shown. When you want to show a new message/update, just reset the boolean for all users that should be targeted! 

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I have a first implementation now using the React Carousel widget: https://appstore.home.mendix.com/link/app/107158/

It works and has the advantage that I can add features including title, description and image to the database...

What I do not like is the typical carousel behavior. It of course keeps on switching between the images. In this particular case I do not really want that. 

Did you guys also manage the new features dynamically or did you just add them to a static wizard like control every release?

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What I ended up doing to implement this so that I got the user experience I wanted…

I really wanted to be able to dynamically manage the new features instead of having to change the screens every release. So my requirement was that I needed to be able to upload an image with a title and description for every new feature and also indicate the order in which they needed to appear.

Then I still wanted to use a wizard style of presenting this to the end user. 

So I created a NewFeature entity and a NewFeatureHelper entity to start with. Both are specializations from System.Image.  The NewFeatureHelper contains the same properties than NewFeature (title, description, order) and 1 additional property “TotalAmountOfNewFeatures” Then I created a dialog with a dataview based on the NewFeatureHelper and when the user clicks the “Next” button I update the NewFeatureHelper with the data of the next NewFeature. 

When the last new feature is shown the “Close” button becomes visible and the “Next” button is hidden.

Of course I do this in combination with a RunOnce property on the user account.

If anyone has suggestions to improve this implementation, feel free to comment.

 

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