How to Build High-Impact Interactive Product Demos

Documentation. Does it have to be static and dull, or can it be interactive experiences that truly engage users?

If you’re used to writing your documentation, then you may not have considered the possibility of interactive product demos. These can be embedded in your documentation using particular software to help your users get to grips with your products.

While written documentation can be an excellent source to work back through, interactive product demos are best suited to teaching your users how to use a new product or process. They can be highly educational and provide direct instruction for your users. Documentation creators relish the opportunity to build a demo that quickly shows users how your product works.

The interactive demo feature lets users engage with a product simulation or walkthrough rather than watching a static video or reading text instructions. It provides a hands-on experience where users can click, type, hover, and explore the interface in a guided environment.

Customers and prospective users can get their hands on a version of your software within the documentation without ever having to buy it. They can understand how it works and what it’s a best fit for, persuading them that your product is well adapted to their needs.

Interactive product demos drive product-qualified leads, increase engagement, and build transparency and trust. You’ll certainly want to consider interactive product demo software that integrates with your existing knowledge base to create smooth and appealing demos for your users.

TL;DR

Interactive product demos are a surefire way to engage your customer base and educate them about your product. When you create an interactive product demo, you’re offering a step-by-step guide that lets customers interact with your product – even if they don’t have a subscription yet.

Ideal Scenarios for Using Interactive Product Demos

There are multiple use cases for you to ideally deploy an interactive product demo, where it will be best suited to help your users. It’s essential to identify a need within your business, and then you can use interactive product demos to meet it.

• Onboarding New Users – onboarding guides can include an interactive product demo that will teach users how the product works. Users who are brand new to your product have the opportunity to learn more about its features to ensure that they can become knowledgeable users of your product. Providing an interactive way to educate users about your product drives better product adoption and more satisfied users.
• Complex Workflow Guidance – how your product works may not always be self-explanatory, and interactive product demos can be used to explain complex workflows that require guidance. No matter how complex your product is, an interactive product demo can help make it clear to users. You can break it down with multiple demos that guide users towards an understanding of your processes.
• Feature Release Training – every time you release a new feature, you have to ensure that customers engage in product adoption; otherwise, you’ve completed all that development work for nothing. Use interactive product demos to teach them about new features that you want them to learn, right from when the feature is released. A demo can bring your feature to life and help your users understand how to use it so they can continue to get the most out of your product.
• Self-Serve Troubleshooting – even with the best product in the world, customers will occasionally run into trouble. Using interactive product demos for self-serve troubleshooting is a way to handle multiple customer tickets without requiring active intervention from support. Using interactive product demos is completely user-driven, and users will appreciate more resources to help them troubleshoot problems.
• Internal Team Enablement – don’t underestimate the need for internal team training to get them up to speed with everything product-related. Interactive product demos work great for team enablement, with the result that everyone in your company can become an expert in your product. Demos ensure that your team is well-educated in your product and able to represent it at all levels.

How to Create High-Impact Interactive Product Demos

While you may be convinced of the usefulness of interactive product demos, there are still a few steps that you need to go through to make sure you are building the most high-impact interactive product demos. Product demos that are well executed are far more effective than demos that are poorly thought out.

• Identify the Workflow You Want to Teach – it’s best to work with one workflow at a time. If you identify one workflow that you want to teach, that makes it much easier to create your demo in a way that is most helpful to your users. With this technique, you can clearly label your product demo and include it as part of a library of information, allowing users to work systematically through your product at a rate that best suits them.
• Record or Outline the Steps – record every step that you want your user to understand and that you want to be included in the interactive product demo. Ensure that each step is clearly distinguished from the next. Make it detailed enough that users can follow along, but not so information-heavy that users’ attention wanes and they start to consider other products. Highly impactful product demos follow a clearly logical order to guide users through the process.
• Use Floik AI in Document360 to Generate the Demo – if you are already using Document360 knowledge base software then it’s an excellent idea to adopt Floik AI to generate the demo within the software. Floik AI allows you to capture your product and create an interactive demo that looks highly professional and is embedded well in your knowledge base.
• Edit and refine the demo – take some time to edit your demo and make it more appealing to your users. Cut the unnecessary fluff and ensure you can tell a seamless story that not only demonstrates your product but has your users excited to use it. The editing experience is what makes an average video into an exceptional video.
• Embed the Interactive Demo in Your Document360 Article – Interactive product demos shouldn’t live in isolation. They need to be accessible right where your users are looking for answers. With Floik AI, you can seamlessly embed interactive demos into your knowledge base articles. This means your demo library is hosted inside Document360 itself, ensuring that users discover and engage with product walkthroughs in the exact place they expect: your knowledge base. By combining Document360’s structured documentation with Floik AI’s interactive demos, you deliver a richer, more engaging self-service experience.
• Test the Demo with Real Users – before you make your interactive demo live, test it out with a sample of users and get their feedback on whether they find your demos useful. Do they know more than they did before using the demo? Interactive product demos should be easy to use for the average user, not requiring a highly technical background to make sense of. Ensure that your users are highly engaged by forming focus groups to test them out.
• Publish, Share, and Measure Engagement – make your demos live! Share them far and wide so all users can become aware of their existence. When your support team handles a query, make sure they share any relevant demos. If users are running into a common problem, make a new demo. Measure the engagement of your live demos so you can guarantee a return on investment for your new type of documentation.

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Best Practices for Educational Interactive Demos

Once you’ve started implementing your educational interactive demos, you might want to think of these best practices that will help you get the most out of your documentation. While your demos will be unique to your organization, best practices ensure that your demos are performing well and reaching your intended audience. Best practices ensure you place your energy where it is most productive.

• Keep Steps Short and Clear – there’s nothing worse than users getting lost in a tangle of steps. Trying to pack too much information into your interactive product demos will be off-putting to users who just want a simple solution to a problem. Keep it short and clear, allowing users to understand your product through a step-by-step, interactive demo.
• Break Complex Flows Into Stages – avoid overwhelming users with long processes, break into smaller demos. Each demo should contain a discrete process that can easily be explained in a few minutes or less. Using stages means you can more easily identify the right information for users and present it to them in logical steps.
• Use Highlights, Notes, or Callouts to Guide Attention – the right interactive product demo software will allow you to highlight certain aspects of your products to bring them to the attention of your users. Note and callouts ensure users don’t miss important information when watching your demos, and provide a visually impactful feature that makes the demo more effective.
• Update Demos With Each Product Release – never just forget about your product demos. Each time you release a new version of your product, ensure you update the product demos and keep them in line with the latest features and functionality of your software. Don’t be afraid to retire old demos that have served their purpose in favor of new interactive product demos that showcase your product at its best.
• Host Your Demos on the Right Software – choosing Document360 lets you integrate with Floik AI to create interactive product demos that you can easily host in your knowledge base. This means users can find your interactive product demos where they expect to find your documentation. Using the proper software improves the usability and findability of your interactive product demos.
• Follow Your Company’s Brand – like any asset used to represent your company, your interactive product demos must follow your brand guidelines. Please speak with one voice when publishing your interactive product demos and produce resources that sound like the same brand created them.

Conclusion

When you make use of interactive product demos, you unlock the power of documentation to educate and inspire your users. Bringing your product to life is much easier when users can actually see how it works, and understand the value it can bring – all without having to spend a penny.

Customer education involves using interactive product demos to perform what they do best: teaching customers about your product and its use cases, whatever stage they are at in the customer journey. Take customers step-by-step through the process of using your software, eliminate friction, and create a highly exciting portfolio of resources.

Making interactive product demos is a process. You must follow the steps of conceiving a workflow and then creating it with interactive product demo software such as Floik AI so you can create a resource that will be hosted in your knowledge base. Customers are already using your knowledge base to obtain self-service support, so they won’t be surprised to find your demos in there.