SAP Companion for SuccessFactors - Authoring Advice and Best Practice

[Andrew86]

Dear Community,
We are presently looking at building out our SuccessFactors Guided Tours and Help Tiles yet what we are trying to determined if there is any good authoring advice and best practice on how to build content?  Some queries we have are also on:

1) Where should Guided Tours start from i.e. from the SF Home Page or to Specific Screens/Forms?  We are concerned that if we load the home page with Guided tours there will be too much for the user.
2) On Guided Tours, how do we balance out the presentation of guidance against multiple steps i.e if a task involves 50 actions (field changes) is it wise to build 50 actions or do we build 5 guidance steps
3) What Standards do authors have in terms of Steps and the related Hotspot types (date fields, text fields, list fields, buttons, labels etc?
4) Guided tours can not be manually ordered, what naming convention do authors use particularly when the space available is minimal?

Any thoughts would be greatly appreicated
Kind regards
Andrew

[ShaneLipke · Accepted solution]

Hi Andrew,

This is must my personal feedback but I would love to see other perspectives as well.

1. From my perspective, the starting point for Guided Tours will depend on the number that start from the Home screen.  If you have more than 30-40 starting from the Home screen it's going to be difficult for users to locate the one that is most relevant to them, unless you use Conditions or Business Roles to limit access to the Tours.  Definitely start the high-priority, heavily-used Guided Tours from the Home screen but maybe start the lower priority Tours from the first screen in the process.

2. You are correct, it is definitely a balancing act between not providing too much information so you make individual Tours too hard to use Vs not providing sufficient information so users cannot successfully complete the corresponding Transaction.  My only advice here not to combine multiple scenarios into a single Guided Tour.  For example, if the steps that are necessary to Terminate a Full Time Employee are quite different to the steps used to Terminate a Casual Employee, I would build two different Tours.  Also, in some SF screens, you open a dialogue box to complete a set of fields.  If the fields on the dialogue box are pretty easy to understand, just provide one instruction that tells the use to complete the relevant fields.

3. It's sensible to define a set of guidelines for the way that you provide instruction for different field types but the standards that are used vary by organization.  If your organization doesn't have a set of documentation standards and guidelines, you might need to make the first version and build on those standards and guidelines as you start to develop content.

4. The simplest way to reorder Guided Tours is to add a two or three number code as a prefix to the name of each Guided Tour.  For example, 03 Terminate Employee.  Given that Guided Tours are sorted alphabetically, this will help to order them in the Guided Tour tab on each screen.

Hope that helps.

Regards
Shane

[Andrew86 · Accepted solution]

Thank you Shane, really appreciate your feedback on this. We ended up starting the Guided Tours at the Start Pages for our Managers and Employees. At the end of the Guided Tour we would often guided users back to the home page. The ability to jump into a Guided tour made things easier. For HR Admins we are still to do Guided Tours but these can start at other points within SuccessFactors and we will use a Business Role to restrict the visibility of these Tours. In terms of order we created ones call E01, E02 for Employee based GTs and M01, M02 etc for Manager based GTs.

[Andrew86 · Accepted solution]

Second set of comments: We did generate a GT and would duplicate and amend when the steps were similar but needed some amendments. This did save quite a bit of time.