Tips for Updating an Interactive Demo with New UI or Features

Videos are a common way to promote new features. But they have some major downsides:

• They require editors you don’t have on staff
• They’re a pain to maintain over time
• They drain your marketing budget

Thankfully, there’s a better way to show off your product while minimizing the stress on your marketing team: interactive demos.

Interactive demos let you make one-off changes in a few clicks — without bugging the creative team. And if they need to make a new one, it doesn’t take weeks to publish like a new video would.

According to Rodney Rasmussen, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Remote, interactive demo's ease of update has had a huge impact on him and his peers:

“Before, I was redoing videos every week, and that was not good for me. It was not good for the video team. It was taking a lot of extra resources.

We've found Navattic to be an excellent tool for visually demonstrating our offerings while ensuring our demos remain current without the need to constantly reshoot video demos.”

Want to follow in Rodney’s footsteps? Run through these tips to streamline the process of creating and updating your interactive demos.

There are three main ways to adapt interactive demos to new feature sets or UI updates:

1. Swap Out a Few Captures (easiest)

If the basic premise of your demo will stay the same, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Switching out your captures can give your demo a makeover in minutes.

Here’s how:

1. Open Navattic.
2. Head to Product Demos and find the existing Product Demo.
3. Click into the Flow.
4. Click on a specific step, then click “Add Collection."
5. Take new Captures to replace the old ones.

Note that you’ll need to use the Navattic Chrome Extension to do this.

To speed up the process of taking new Captures, consider using Navattic’s Click to Capture.

This feature lets you take Captures as you click through your application — all you have to do is hold down the “Shift” key as you click. You paste the URL you’re capturing into the Flow and then adjust the steps using Navattic’s extension at the bottom of the screen.

If you accidentally made a change or want to reverse an edit, you can use Navattic’s version control to do so.

2. Edit Your Captures

Say a few things changed in your UI, but nothing major.

To reflect those changes in a video, you’d have to reshoot the whole thing.

But with Navattic, you can use our Capture Editor to make edits and slight adjustments to existing Captures, like cropping, blurring, editing text, and locking scrolling.

See an interactive demo of some of the most common updates below:

So if you change the name of a part of your product or are showing outdated features, you can use the no-code editor to change the text or just remove old elements.

These minimal edits help them deliver the most accurate representation of the product possible in very little time.

3. Build a Demo for a New Feature

If you must start over, building an interactive demo is a lot simpler than writing and producing a new video because you can just clone an existing demo.

By cloning an existing demo, you already have the structure and outline of the demo created. Then all you need to do is swap out the captures and update the copy.

For new feature demos, Navattic customer Lokalise recommends leaning on feedback from your sales and customer success teams to decide what to show and not to show.

Senior Product Marketing Manager, Maria Castañeda, says,

“Input from sales and customer success teams is crucial. They are the first to test the product with our real beta testers—our customers.

Sales and CS can provide insights on the primary use cases, highlighting areas where customers had aha moments.”

From there, you can refer to other product demos you’ve created to see what copy and pacing resonate best with your audience.

Here are a few other ways to refresh existing interactive demos and build new ones quickly and efficiently.

1. Create a New Launch Checklist

There’s a lot of marketing that goes behind a new feature launch. That’s why many Navattic customers form a standard to-do list for common marketing assets.

Having all their ducks in a row helps them remember what they need to update and when, reducing the chances of something slipping through the cracks.

Rodney’s team has a comprehensive go-to-market template that kicks in with each new feature, benefit, or product launch.

“This checklist includes tasks like social media posts, email updates, and website revisions. Now, it also prompts us to update or create a new Navattic demo.”

This way, his team doesn’t overlook refreshing their demos and allows them to maintain demos independently without involving creative.

“This autonomy in product marketing to make updates directly is incredibly efficient.”

2. Keep a Standard Demo Template on Hand

Staring at a blank screen can be paralyzing. So, instead of starting from scratch, create a standard template for new demos.

All you and your team have to do is make a copy, swap in new Captures, and update the text.

Rodney from Remote takes this approach to ensure all his demos have a cohesive look and feel. He explains:

“Our template includes an engaging intro, imagery that matches our website, and a clean, clear transition into the interactive product experience. This approach keeps our demos uniform yet tailored to showcase specific features or products.”

Rodney also pointed out another benefit of templates — they help get and keep team members on the same page.

“There are five or six of us on our team who are actively in Navattic at all times building out demos or working on demos, so it's nice to be able to have some sort of baseline template that we can all work from.”

3. Set a Regular Demo Review Cycle

Make a point to review all of your published demos in conjunction with your product update cycle.

That way, you can add any new features or significant enhancements to existing demos as soon as those updates are released.

And keep an eye on their performance.

In most cases, your demo won’t be perfect right out of the gate. The easiest way to find opportunities for improvement is to use Navattic Analytics.

Sydney Lawson, Product Marketing Manager uses Navattic Analytics to:

“tweak pages and tours to make sure that people are finishing the entire tour.”

She also uses Navattic’s dropoff reporting to see where most folks lose interest or get stuck. Going through the demo up until that point herself helps her identify whether there is an issue with the format or structure of the demo and enables her to make changes accordingly.

For more helpful interactive demo hints, check out the best practices section of our blog.

There, you’ll find how-tos for things like:

• Converting an existing video into an interactive demo
• Maximizing demo engagement and conversion
• Using interactive demo data
• Building a demo center