What’s new in Skavelo

Most of the time Skavelo helps when a user asks. Some moments are worth helping with before anyone does: a new user opening Broadcasts before adding a sending domain, or someone who has just created their first project.

A walkthrough offer shows a short card above the widget at that moment, such as “Before your first broadcast, add your sending domain. I can show you how.” Clicking it opens an introduction with the walkthrough’s name, what it does and how many steps it has, then Start or Not now. Nothing starts on its own.

Walkthrough steps appeared in the widget at the bottom of the screen, away from the highlighted button, so users looked back and forth between the two.

Each step now shows on a small card beside the control it points at, with Back and Next, and the widget folds down to its launcher. Ask on the card opens the widget on the same step, for a question partway through.

An instruction like “Click Continue” says what to do, but not why, or what to have ready.

Each step can now have a short title and a sentence or two of details, shown on the step card. Learning drafts them where they help, and you can write or edit them yourself. A walkthrough’s description now introduces it when it starts without a question, as with offers.

When a step’s button was inside a window the user hadn’t opened, or the user skipped a step with Next, the widget said the item wasn’t visible and left them to work out why.

Now it points at the way in. If an earlier step’s button is on screen, such as Add customer for a field in the window it opens, the card says “First, click Add customer” there, then moves to the field once it appears. With nothing to point at, it says what it can’t find and offers to go back a step or ask about it.

The widget could only be added with a script tag. In apps built with React, Next.js or Vue, that tag sits outside the code your team reviews and ships, and passing in the signed-in user meant reaching for a global.

Skavelo is now on npm as @skavelo/sdk. Install it with your other dependencies and start it in code. For React and Next.js, SkaveloProvider starts the widget safely with server rendering, and hooks like useSkavelo and useSkaveloEvent let your components open it or react to what users do in it.

When a user said “why won’t this save?”, Skavelo answered like any other question, from what it learned, and often couldn’t say more than where the setting lives.

Now it looks for the cause first, the way your support team would: the error on the user’s screen, the request that just failed and what its status means, switched off buttons and their reasons, and the user’s own data through your lookups. It explains the likely cause in plain words, then the fix. When it can’t find one, it says what it checked and offers a person straight away.

Your team knows how to troubleshoot your product’s common problems: which setting to check first, what an error really means, when to escalate. Skavelo couldn’t know any of that.

A playbook writes it down in plain language: when to use it, what to check in order (something on screen, a lookup of the user’s data, or a question to ask), what each finding means and what to do, and when to hand off. Skavelo follows it when a user reports that problem, in its own words.

Some markup makes controls hard to name: an icon button with no label, a label that isn’t tied to its field, a clickable box that isn’t a button. Skavelo copes with most of it, but walkthroughs are more reliable without it.

Each learning run now lists what it found, grouped by kind, with the screens and examples, why it matters and the code change that fixes it. The same fixes make your app easier to use with a screen reader.

Lookups let Skavelo answer questions about a user’s own account, like which invoices are overdue, and actions carry out tasks once the user approves them. Until now both needed Growth, so a small product that needed one or two had to pay for 10,000 conversations to get them.

Your first lookup or action is now free on every plan, Free included, and Starter includes up to 5 switched on. Growth and Enterprise stay unlimited.

Trying Skavelo in the dashboard shows its answers, but walkthroughs point at buttons in your own app, so you couldn’t see them working until someone installed the widget.

Now a bookmark puts the widget on your own app, signed in as you normally are, before anyone adds the install code. Walkthroughs highlight your real buttons, and clicking the bookmark again hides the widget.

A user who opened your app in a second tab used to start a new conversation, losing their earlier questions and counting again against your plan.

Now the conversation carries on in every tab, and when they come back within 30 minutes.

Questions Skavelo couldn’t answer and answers users rated unhelpful were spread across the conversation log.

Needs attention collects them in one list per agent, with the question that was asked. Add the right answer as a note and Skavelo uses it from then on, then mark it handled.

Testing an agent used to mean going back to setup. Now a Try it button on every agent page opens its widget right there, so you can check answers after changing notes, files or learning.