Matthew on our product team posted a fantastic Twitter thread with some videos showing what carousels look and feel like in a real app. Make sure to check that out too 👀

Cool videos! I'm keen to hear from anyone who's using these and how they are going - also, what are you mainlky using them for.

We don't have integration at the moment to our iOS app, just to our web app. We don't want to open up messaging from the iOS app at this point, but carousels would be a great feature to have. My initial question - can you have the carousel active but hide messenger?

Thanks,

Brent

Hey Brent! You sure can use carousels without having to show the Messenger in your app. Instructions on how to do that are here for Android and here for iOS.

We're seeing some really great uses of carousels in our customers' apps at the moment, covering onboarding, lifecycle marketing, and one-off announcements use cases. We're speaking to a few people to line up a blog post showcasing their successes.. I'll post in the channel when that comes to life 😉

I can definitely show you how we're using them in our own apps, though! We're using them for three things at the moment; onboarding new users, announcing new features, and recruiting folks for research.

Here's our onboarding carousel. It's three screens; a list of high level features, a spotlight on a specific feature, and a request for push notifications. We've tried a few versions of this over the last few months, and this one is having a really positive effect.

Here's a Mobile Carousel that we used to announce some changes to the article inserter in the iOS app. Just a single screen this time. This was targeted to appear only for people who'd just upgraded to the new version of the app.

Here's a simple message we sent last week to a group of people we're interested in doing some research with.

Hope that's helpful/interesting!

hey @Mathew Cropper​ that's great! Thanks for that information - very helpful and great to see what you're doing with it. Would be keen to chat more on how you can instigate the carousel. I would want something quite subtle (ie. not a popup on the app while my customer is in full swing serving their guests with our app.)

Looking forward to seeing what your other customers are up to when that's ready too. Very cool!!

😎

Sure. At the moment, we check for carousels when you initialise the mobile SDK (so, 99% of the time that'll be when your user opens the app), or when you send a user update or event via the SDK. If there's a carousel waiting for them, it'll show then. They won't just randomly pop up at any time.

One thing we've heard a lot of feedback on is wanting to open specific carousels programmatically. For example, from a button on a page. We're planning that right now 😉 When that's ready, we're probably going to use it in our own app to add a small list of tutorials that people can open whenever they wish.

Is it possible to customize the font on carousels? We'd like it to match the font on our app.

Not at the moment, no. Thank you for the feedback, though! I'll take a note of it 🙏

If you have a link to you app(s) that you're happy to share, I'd love to take a look at your font choices and how they're used?

We use Muli on the app. Hoping we can get that or something similar. - https://apps.apple.com/ng/app/kuda/id1467373738

Thanks for sharing! It'll be really useful to have examples like this when we eventually come to think about this kind of customisation 👍

Thanks for your response on this @Mathew Cropper​ I'm talking to our devs to get our mobile SDK updated so I can take a looksee on the test site. Ideally we'd love to work it from a button but could definitely see how it goes in the meantime. One question, is there also a way to display a link the help centre on a mobile carousel (without displaying the Messenger/conversations)?

Hey! Sorry for the delayed reply, Brent.. I was out of the office last week. It's not possible to open an article directly from a carousel yet (something we'll think about adding in future). For now, you could use the URL action or hyperlinked text to open an article by URL. That'll open the device's default browser, so will take them out of your app. Not ideal, but depending on the use case, might be acceptable.

Yeah, that would be all I'd need actually. Thanks!

I do not get a warning message about SDK needing to be updated but still my carousel is not opening on my mobile app, any tips on what else to check to make it work?

Thanks ​