Understanding Launcher Items

Discover what items you can add to a Launcher and how to configure them.

Pulkit Agrawal avatar
Written by Pulkit Agrawal
Updated over a week ago

Launchers are a great tool to empower your users to access information at their own pace through targeted checklists, release logs, help menus, and more.

You can add different types of items to Launchers that users can access at their own pace to learn how to use your product or provide direct feedback that you can incorporate into your guidance and flows.


With each Launcher you create in Chameleon, you'll be able to fully customize what items you add and how they behave. The items represent the content of your Launcher, either the link to a helpful resource, another Experience, a video explaining more, a chat with your team, and so on.

You can add a title and a description to each Item to present your guidance with clarity; as well as a search component, to allow users to find specific Items in your Launcher.

To ensure these powerful menus have all the resources your users may need, you can add any combination with these types of items, which we'll cover below:

Aside from adding individual Items, you'll also have a few other components to help turn your Launcher into a useful onboarding list or the place to get the latest exciting updates.


When you create a new Launcher, you will find it empty. You can add a new item from the Items section of the Builder. Once you select an item to add (In the gif below - a URL item) you will get the configuration options for it - options to redirect, if it should have a title, or completion criteria. These vary from item to item, depending on their type, but you can configure them in a similar way.

Clicking on the item directly in your Launcher will also open up the Builder's configuration panel for that specific item and you can easily customize it πŸ˜‰

πŸ’‘ You can add as many items as you want - e.g. you can add multiple URL items if you wish to link to help articles, blog posts, or something else). Simply click the item type and a new one will be added to your Launcher for you to configure. It's easy to keep up with your Launcher's configuration from the Builder.


With Chameleon, you can create. interactive Launchers that provide a lot of value. You have options to create personalized experiences that cater to different user needs. Below you can find an overview of each item type and its corresponding settings.

You can include Chameleon Tours or Microsurveys in your Launchers and allow users to learn more or provide feedback whenever they're ready. This way, they control their experience and you are a guiding hand that they'll feel thankful for!

When you add a Walkthrough or Microsurvey, you'll get the full list of Experiences created on your account (including Drafts and Inactive ones). But your users can launch only live Experiences from your Launchers. Make sure you go in and set all the Experience items as 'Live', before publishing your Launcher to your users.

πŸ‘‰ The Tours and Microsurveys you pick to trigger as part of Launchers will ignore the first Step URL, Element, and Triggers Rules. Add a redirect URL if its anchor element is on a specific page.

Both Tour and Microsurvey items have the same configuration options, explained in more detail below.

  • Title: This will appear in the Launcher for your end-users.

  • Redirect on click: Having this option toggled on will enable you to redirect your users to the specified URL as they click the Launcher item. This is particularly useful for redirecting users to the URL where the Experience will start.

  • Description (optional): You can add a description below the title to describe what the item represents.

  • Segment: This works as a subset of your Launcher's main audience. This way you can have a single Launcher with different items for different user Segments (e.g. by restricting the items of a 'Feature Updates' Launcher by rights or access to those features).

  • Completion Criteria: You can define here what deems the Launcher item as completed. It can either be the event that's fired when your user completes the Experience (Tour completed or Microsurvey completed) or any other event that you're tracking in Chameleon.

  • Hide when complete: Choose whether to have the item removed once it's completed. You can decide what to display if all items are removed by defining an Empty State.

Allow users to access your HelpBar from any Chameleon Launcher to enable a deeper search experience whenever they encounter blockers in your product. The HelpBar supports your help documentation, blog article, or developer docs, as well as product navigation and actions.

For any query you received over the years and documented, think of all the new users who won't go through support, but will be able to find their answers in your app.

You have the usual Experience configuration options to set up the HelpBar:

  • Title

  • Description

  • Segment

  • Completion Criteria

  • Hide when complete

Leverage your tool stack to drive self-serve adoption by allowing users to launch chats, videos, prototypes, and more from your Launcher. You can include multiple Additional Actions in your Launcher, to complete the guidance you offer.

πŸ‘‰ Make sure you enable your integration in the Dashboard first, so it will show up in the Builder as you configure your Launcher.

You'll find the usual Experience configuration options to configure them:

  • Title

  • Description

  • Segment

  • Completion Criteria

  • Hide when complete

And depending on the Additional Action you add, you'll find specific options to fit them. For example, in the case of Typeform surveys you can pick how you want them to display. Or with Chili Piper, you'll select a scheduling type.

Including a JS Code Script in your Launcher gives you more flexibility to execute a custom action when a user clicks that Item.Β 

This can let you open a chat messenger, using Intercom or Zendesk for example. You can also create a customized wrapper for any in-product widgets and Experiences using the Chameleon Launcher.Β 

πŸ‘‰ Discover all the possibilities for using code scripts in Chameleon.

If you employ a Content Security Policy (CSP) then you must add an exception to allow this functionality to be used. Learn more about CSP.

Example: Have an Item open a different Launcher
​

You can leverage the JS code option to open a different Chameleon Launcher by clicking an item in a first one.

πŸ’‘ If you already use the chmln.show(Experience_ID) command to run Experiences, you'll notice that in the case of an open Launcher, it gets in the way of another one opening. We need to close the first one first, and here's what we end up with:

chmln.show('CLOSING_LAUNCHER_ID', { close: true});
setTimeout(function(){ chmln.show('OPENING_LAUNCHER_ID',
{ open: true}); }, 0);

β„Ή Keep in mind that the open: true option is only used to open a Launcher that is already shown on the page, and won't add it to the page and open it.

You can add any custom URL to your Launcher as an item that will provide more value, context, or help when your users need it. With Link Items, you have the same useful options to customize how they appear to your users

  • Open in a new tab

  • Description

  • Target Audience

  • Completion Criteria

  • Hide when complete

Below is a collection of other items that you can use to enrich your Launchers.

  • Divider: Add a horizontal divider to separate your items. You can customize its color and thickness.

  • Title: Add a Title to your Launcher. You can customize its Alignment, Color, Font size, apply markdown styling, and personalization variables.

  • Search: Include a search bar in your Launcher. You can change the placeholder text.

  • Checklist: Transform your Launcher into a checklist by marking completed items with a checkmark. You can change the checkmark color.

  • Welcome state: Show a welcome message the first time a user sees your Launcher to provide more context and make a good first impression. You can customize its Title, add a Media component, customize its body text, as well as the CTA button.

  • Empty State: Show an Empty State instead of hiding the Launcher when all your items are completed by your users. Here you can leverage markdown styling, and personalization variables for your text, as well as customize its Alignment, Color, and Font size.


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