How Glide saved six months of content production time with Arcade

Types of use:

• Technical documentation
• Customer education
• Trainings (LMS)

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Results:

• Created and published 316 Arcades in the first four months
• Refreshed & expanded ⅔ of all Glide’s documentation, reducing six months' worth of content (video) production time 

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We spoke with Cait Levin, Education Lead at Glide, about how she led the effort to reimagine what their documentation library (Glide Docs) could look like and why she believed in interactive learning through demos as a new way to educate customers. Here's her story.

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The Problem

As the Education Lead at Glide, Cait Levin oversaw all educational content, including video libraries, documentation, and an LMS (Learning Management System). With over 85,000+ organizations building with Glide, their efforts were pivotal in empowering customers and driving usage. 

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The challenge? Being a no-code app builder meant it was inherently complex, and the education team needed help to scale their content and tailor it to various learning needs. 

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Glide initially relied on documents and videos and placed a strong emphasis on creating custom animations to showcase their product. However, each video took their producer at least a day to make, and Cait and her team had big visions for how they wanted to scale education content across channels.

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The existing efforts were time-consuming and didn’t effectively convey the dynamic nature of the product – especially when it came to live changes. If the product changed, they would have to start over again or leave stale content. Cait and her team needed a faster, more engaging way to educate customers and scale at the pace of their business needs.

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Why Arcade?

"The differentiator for us was that [Competitor] only could adjust still images. We really liked how you could combine image and video in Arcade and create exports with GIF formats, too.”

The limitations of their existing channels led Cait and her team to explore different tools in July 2023. During their exploration, the team searched for a video and image editing tool to preserve their animations and images' high production value and design. However, videos took a day or more to complete, and GIFs looping nature didn’t show where the product experience started.

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Ultimately, they narrowed down their decision to three factors:

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#1 Ease of Use and Speed

Arcade was best suited to meet the education team's growing content demands. The easy-to-use browser recording and post-production process helped her team create and edit content faster and reduced the dependency on costly video production resources.

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#2 More Engaging Experience

Cait was confident that interactive learning would boost engagement and product usage. Therefore Arcade's interactivity provided a new way of teaching for customers, and insights helped the Glide team track engagement.

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#3 Combining Image and Video

Glide required a platform that could edit both images and videos together but found that the other demo platform only supported still image editing. They needed a flexible solution that could easily adapt to changes in their product.

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Revamping Glide Docs

At the beginning of August 2023, the education team started an effort to revamp their docs library - the central hub for all educational content. With 228 documentation pages to refresh, the team quickly got to work.

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By the end of August, Cait and her team had created and published an impressive 165 Arcades! In their previous workflow of creating animations, this would have taken at least 165 working days (or more than 33 weeks!) to complete.

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The team was able to scale quickly by leaning on their existing brand style guides and familiarity with video production and storytelling.

“It was easy for us to say, okay, instead of using this for an animation, we're just going to re-record the workflow and edit that in the Arcade Editor, and now we're done. But because we already had such a solid process for video, it made the migration process seamless.”

Since the pages had a clear structure, it helped the team create the Arcade and pinpoint areas for content refresh.

Fast forward to November 2023, and the Education team at Glide has refreshed 2/3 of their library with no plans to slow down. They have started to expand beyond Glide Docs by creating "lessons" on different topics.

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“We had been looking for a way to show the product that was interactive and alive, and we hadn’t found it, so we just weren’t doing it.

Our Arcades are creating a perception of thoroughness in our documentation that people didn’t have before. Now customers are saying, “This is the best documentation I’ve ever seen,” and the contents are still the same.” 

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The impact of Arcade on internal product knowledge

The impact has extended beyond just customers, as Cait’s team has created more internal conversations around the product and how to improve the customer experience. By creating interactive demos, their work has encouraged teams at Glide to re-experience the product and identify areas for opportunity.

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Additionally, by removing the dependency on their video producer, Cait has begun to reimagine how video can be leveraged for more conceptual and deeper learning initiatives that can help with customer retention.

"Arcade is really, really making people understand how we can be clearer about how our product works.”

Results

• Created and published 316 Arcades in the first four months
• Refreshed & expanded ⅔ of all Glide’s documentation, reducing six months' worth of content (video) production time

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Looking ahead, Cait’s vision is to have an Arcade for every document that explains something in their product and expand into their LMS trainings (learning management systems) – all to provide a more engaging and interactive experience for their customers.