How To Preview Your MV Content

Welcome back to the User Experience podcast!

This episode is about the Preview function in MV.

This week we're going to look at all the ways you can Preview your MV account to make sure it looks right for new visitors and returning members.

Enjoy this interactive episode and learn more about using Preview!  

As usual, there's a text Transcript below for anyone who would like to read along with the content.

Thanks for listening.

-Steve

TRANSCRIPT

Steve Knots 00:00

Hey, I'm Steve knots. Welcome to the User Experience podcast where we build fun stuff inside your member vault account. So you can make maximum use of all the new features that we have coming out. And I like to do these as interactive podcasts meaning there are moments where I might pause and tell you to do something where you can follow along in member vault, to actually see how this works in your account. It might help to see my account as a demonstration. But what we really want is for you to do this in your account.

Steve Knots 00:25

So today, the topic is previewing, which is one of the most important things you can do as you're building courses, Products offers and everything else. I remember my fourth grade math teacher, Mrs. Nielsen, we were learning long division, and somebody said, Mrs. Nielson, do we have to check our work? And she had such a cool answer. She said, if you care about getting it, right, then check your work, which was really interesting.

Steve Knots 00:46

She did not say, you have to check your work. And I'm going to come around and make sure you're doing it. Because that would put her in the position of enforcement and trying to look over the shoulder of 20 kids, which she could not do. So she put it on us as a responsibility that says if you care about getting it, right, it's your responsibility to check your math homework, so you get the right answer on the exam. And that turns into a much better life philosophy of us taking responsibility for what we're doing, rather than blaming somebody else for the screen looks wrong, or my graphic designer messed up? Well, no, it's your account. It's your job.

Steve Knots 01:15

So previewing is what you have to do before you really release anything into the wild. To make sure the pictures look good. The videos are playing the textbooks, right? The button is showing up on the right place on the screen, all those dumb little things and typos and stuff, you got to preview it to make sure you know how it looks not only on desktop, but also on mobile. And in this podcast, we're going to look at how do you preview for first time visitors or for your customers who have already bought something, and you want to know exactly what it's going to look like when they log in and start doing your lessons. So to begin with, go to your MemberVault account, open up your admin and get to the appearance section on the left side. I'll slow down talking to give you a second to get there, you want to scroll down to appearance and click Preview account on the left sidebar. Do that right now.

Steve Knots 02:02

And now you have your preview tab open. You can see on mine, there's my announcement bar up top which is screen, I'm going to x out my announcements just to make it super clear that if you're not using your announcement bar, what we see in preview mode is a line on the top it says you're currently viewing your account in preview mode. Alright, bingo. That's where we want to be. Now we have three options. Well, three, three choices. One says options. One says learn more about using Preview, and one says Exit Preview. So first of all, let's exit what do we do, click Exit top announcement bar is gone. And we're back to the basic view.

Steve Knots 02:35

So that's how you get out of preview mode if you're if you don't want to be there. Next, let's look at the learn about you learn more about using Preview, I'm going to click the center button. This brings you to the MemberVault knowledge base with an article where you can learn about how to use preview mode. And remind me I got to update this article with embedding this video. As soon as I'm done with the video, getting a little meta predicting the future. Now let's get to the heart of it. Click on the word options. And what pops up a really cool sidebar, it says How would you like each of your products to be displayed. And if you're following along, click the Options button and see what you get in this window, you'll see there is a list of all my products and I got a pretty big list of a lot of stuff. There are three columns owned, available and invisible. And these show these these are how you pick what you're gonna see. So right now these are all selected as available, which means the product is available to be purchased. Or in other words, I'm previewing as a logged out user who just showed up have not bought anything yet. I'm a cold traffic new visitor. And this preview will show me what I see as a first time visitor. So let's close that sidebar. And what do I see, MemberVault.

Steve Knots 03:42

Well, I got my welcome area up top, there's a list that says available products. And I can scroll down and see these are all the products in the account. And they all say something like buy now or join the crew or something like that, which means I'm looking at this account as a logged out user. But now let's see I want to I've got a freebie up top. So I'm going to click owned for just the freebie. And what this means is I'm going to see my account as a person who signed up for the freebie got their members account activated, but they haven't bought anything else. Make sure you scroll down through this list of radio buttons to click Save Options to tell the member of our system to change the display. Now what do we see in preview?

Steve Knots 04:19

Aha, the first thing says my products and I can see intro to session lessons up here says 0% complete view product. This is like a person who has already bought something or sign up for the freebie they have an account on your member vault, they have ownership of one product they can enter and go through. So we'll do that in a second. As long as I as soon as I point out. Underneath that one it says available products and here are all the other products that they have not yet bought. So my products let's click in here and see what we can do. This is really cool. I'm so glad Mike just updated the preview world. Now. You can click into a product in preview, enter the modules and see the lessons all inside preview. It does not add any EP to it out. And it doesn't let you complete any quizzes or anything. But you can go through and see how the presentation is going to look just for proofreading, alignment, layout display players, the important stuff of visually previewing it. So let's go into the module called download here. That's what you get access to.

Steve Knots 05:16

And you'll see the progress bar is not changing. It's not It's at 0%. But I can see Oh, hi, welcome to your first lesson. Now you see how they work, please do this instructions, downloads, blah, blah, blah. Let's go to lesson two, I can click into Lesson feedback. And this is like a miracle for me because I was with MemberVault. Before you could do this, then you had to exit each preview, and click the preview button one by one to see each lesson and it was kind of not optimally fluid. So now I'm in lesson two, notice that there's zero EP up top 0% complete. So MemberVault is not racking up any EP, it's not triggering emails, it's not completing any actions, not doing any of the backend stuff. It's only visually showing you what is in the lesson. And you'll see that this one has a quiz in it, I can see the quiz questions and type in blah, blah, blah.

But I do not get the option to submit the quiz answers. So this is not going to hook up anything in the backend. It just lets you see what's in the product as a person who owns it. Now, let's go back out to the main marketplace view of this account. And I want to just show you what happens when if I want to, hey, I want to preview a product I didn't buy yet, I want to see what a logged out user is going to look like or what it's going to look like to a person who signed up got the freebie, and they haven't purchased anything yet, which is really the user path we want to lead people through, hey, here's my number of all sign up for this freebie, check out these amazing preview things. And now you can buy a product. So let's click into this one called How to EQ your tracks. And I see basically something that looks a bit like a sales page, which is the product. When you're in your product Edit. This is important.

Steve Knots 06:50

Let's go to Content, Products. I'm going to edit how to EQ your tracks. To illustrate what you are seeing in preview mode. Here is the product. I'm previewing, I clicked enter to the product that I don't own. It says snap your mixes into focus. Most people have a hard time blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So where is that text in my edit field? It's not the product overview text because that is what people get after they buy the product. What we're looking at in the preview right now is in sign up options. It's called the promo text see snap your mixes into focus. And if you click the little question mark, this area is intended for your product sales messaging. So in other words, when you're previewing, if you want to know where to edit the text that people are previewing the promo text is what people see as a available product as a logged out user. Here's how to hear your tracks.

Steve Knots 07:43

The setting and preview is available, which means when people click that product, they see the promo text, it's available for them to buy. If I set this to owned, how to EQ your tracks, change the radio button to owned, go down here, save options. Now when I preview it, it's going to show me how the product looks as the person who paid for it and signed up and they come in to do some lessons. Now I enter how to EQ your tracks. I see others a video up top. Hi, preview. Welcome to basics of EQ. So now in the product settings, let's look at product overview text during an interview, and there is a video and that Hi, thanks for joining us instructions and download linker and the top lesson. That is the module welcome area about this course. View this module. And we can click in and see it as a person who owns it, we can click into the modules where to put the presets the golden rule, blablabla.

Steve Knots 08:46

So you get to go through the actual product as a user and experience what they're seeing when they're previewing. So that's my edit window. Now, how do you enter preview mode through other places? This is interesting. We started with the appearance tab on the left side. And we clicked preview account, which gives you the marketplace and you can set how you want to view your products as available or owned or whatever. But when you are in the middle of the thick of editing. Let's go to my edit window here. I'm in content products. You want to you want to preview while you're editing. I mean, sometimes you want to preview your whole marketplace and see all your products and list.

Steve Knots 09:20

A lot of times you're doing the work. You're in the nitty gritty editing text. The question is usually how much is too much text or when I preview this? Does it look like 50 paragraphs that are way too much to read? Or is it short and concise? So I clicked content products and I got into one product you might want to pause and do this to get into a product so you can go through some preview options yourself. Pause, pause, pause. Now we're back. First in the product up top next to the product name there is a little green preview link which I can click and I see the product and I see a welcome thanks for joining us. This product is called free session lesson.

Steve Knots 09:58

Notice that in the Options list I opened up the radio buttons. This product, the free session lesson is marked as owned, which means preview is still applying I'm still previewing it as a person who owns the product. So the first place you can preview is on the top. 

Another fun one is in the list of modules, you can go to the right side, under the word action, there's a little gear, click the gear icon icon and what do you get preview module, which is kind of cool. So I can click that. And I see the Module Overview text with the list of lessons. So you can preview exactly what people are going to get when they enter that first module. And if I click into a module here, this one, this module is called download here, I click the Edit button under Actions.

Steve Knots 10:41

Now I see a list of lessons within the module. Again, I can click the gear icon, I get a button that says preview lesson, right under right under the lesson link one click link preview lesson. Don't click the red button that says Delete lesson. And now I can preview the lesson lesson feedback, blah, blah, all this stuff, there's no option to submit the quiz, just like we saw before. But that lets you preview the lesson from within the list of lessons. And the whole point of that is just to tell you, there are many places you can enter preview mode that go along with whatever action you're doing, whether you're creating a product, editing a module, editing a lesson. And while we're on the topic, let's go back to the list of products.

Steve Knots 11:23

you can click the list of products and get to all of them. This also has a gear icon on the right side of the screen underneath the word actions, click the gear, and you'll get a preview product that's at the bottom of the pop up window. You see preview, copy, export and delete. We just want to preview hopefully, you don't want to delete it if it's that bad. And again, the preview mode opens up and you can see, you can see what's going on with your list of modules and product and how it looks on the marketplace and everything. So those are the main places where you can enter Preview Mode and choose what you are seeing whether that's the product for a logged out user who was a new visitor, or seeing the product as a logged in user who has bought it signed up for it owns it, and you want to see what you are showing them.

Steve Knots 12:04

For the welcome screen you want to have you know, this is a great place to check the personalization tags with a little percent first name. And you want to see hey, does it show up with the correct name? Is it displaying the EP correctly if you're doing percent EP percent. So that's how we preview I'm going to look at my list of notes here. We previewed appearance, content, oh pages, posts and links. Haha. All right, now let's go back to the Content menu on the left side. So click Content and go to the sidebar for pages. Now we have a list of new pages which are always available to be seen for logged out users. I just noticed that when you click the gear icon, you do not get a preview button. I'm hopeful this can be added soon. This is the newest feature, I think that's probably an oversight. So I'm going to tell Mike to add a preview button on that little gear list just so it's consistent with the rest of the site. And when I click into edit up top pages edit page, I get the little green preview word, which I can click, pop open the page. And I preview it. And again, pages are things that are available to everybody whether they're logged in or logged out. So you can just preview that now I don't know if I'm when I opened the the radio button Preview tab for options. I'm looking to see if the list of pages is in this pop up. And I don't see it. I think pages are not listed in the preview Options menu.

Interesting. All right, cool. So point is you can preview your pages and see how they look on display. So let's go down to the next one posts. This is for if you're using the MemberVault blog feature, we have a list of posts, we have radio buttons or gear icons on the side underneath action click icon and you get preview post. That's why I'm hopeful that we're going to get a button for preview pages. And then it opens up a page. And here is a preview of Episode Four. These are just um, I'm not using the blog in my real account.

Steve Knots 14:00

So I made these posts as demonstrations when I was doing the blog, podcast. But the point is you can preview those and get a look at what your blog posts are looking like before they go live. Now the Links section doesn't give you a preview, because the only way to preview a link is actually just copy the link and paste it into a new tab and see what you get. So this is more like a section to just make sure the links are correct and working. page links action. Yeah. And links are links so test those to make sure they're going to work. Now we previewed appearance, the branding the welcome area.

Steve Knots 14:37

Now it's unbarred footer, you want to take a look at those the marketplace as logged in logged out main Preview button. This really just brings us down to previewing on mobile and desktop. So let me show you one of my favorite tricks for previewing when you're working at your computer before you move to your mobile device. Remember, we can go to the list of products up at top there's a little link that says the word marketplace. So I'm just going to click that One, you can do that too in your account, click on Products.

Steve Knots 15:04

Up at the top, in italics, there's a word marketplace, that'll take you to your overview of your member vault. Now, here's the trick, if you want to get an idea of how this is going to look on mobile, take the right side of the screen, and just stretch it all the way across to the left. And you can see it hits a minimum, it doesn't go down to like super, super mini, it just hits a minimum, that's approximately the same proportion as what you're going to see on your mobile device. So once you can do that, you can see it condenses down to something like a single column look. And you can scroll down and look at things like how does my cover graphic look, how about my product title, about my product description, sometimes I see people's product description is 500 words. And on mobile, that's going to be a whole screen that people have to flick through. And it might cover up the button to buy the product, which could be, you know, a problem. So now you can scroll down and get a single column look at what your MemberVault marketplace is going to how it's going to feel to people who are previewing, especially get down to the bottom and take a look and say about Hey, does that about field does that describe you? Does that feel like what you want it to say? And this is really funny, you know, when you're previewing, if you look at other websites, you're online, you're kind of looking at news and stuff. And then you just go to your member vault without being in edit mode. Without thinking about editing or without spending hours on your editing. Just go to your member of all site and just compare and say how does a site feel after I've been looking at a major news site or you know, Facebook or whatever.

And then sometimes that gives you a really good comparison of where you have too much text, where you have something that's not flowing, and what you need to change to keep it simple and make it easy for people to navigate your site and find what they want. So you got your links, you got your socials, that kind of thing. Up top, a number of times, I've changed my welcome area to make sure that the buttons are above the fold. So I'm going to exit preview right now to get rid of that header. And now on this little preview screen, as soon as I minimize my browser tab all the way to the thinnest default setting. It looks like I can see Welcome to mixer texture, I see a video with a play button, short amount of text and two buttons, the video is self adjusted to fit within the frame. So this is looking good up top I can find the icons for login, that kind of thing. And that that we're seeing on screen right now is exactly what I want people to see on mobile, where they go on one screen of their phone. And there's a video, a little bit of text, a welcome message, my face kind of smiling, and a button, they can press to get some and get involved. For me, that's the gold standard, you have a button above the fold call to action, something personal, make a connection, it's branded, it looks smooth. And hopefully it looks some something like all my other social media posts and whatever else people have seen before they got here. So that's about as much as we can do in this podcast, the next step for you is going to be to take out your phone, open up a browser, open a tab, navigate to your MemberVault subdomain or your custom custom domain link. And first, go through your marketplace as a logged out user, see how it feels, enter some products, read some teaser messages, that kind of thing.

Steve Knots 17:55

Make some notes on a separate notepad of what you want to change. So you don't forget. And then log in maybe with a test user account and go through with your test user maybe have one freebie access, and then some other ones you have not purchased yet. And kind of pretend it's your first time and think Alright, well if I if I sign up for the freebie, I got one email, the email took me here, what's my experience? What do I see? What do I do? What's gonna be my next step? Or is there something that I want to do that I can't do? Or is there someplace I get lost all these user experience, things that I think about all the time, I want you to do in your account, to make sure that you know what your people are going to come into when they find your member vault.

Steve Knots 18:31

And finally go through the products as a logged in user for your courses, your offers, whatever people are paying money for, you definitely want to log in as a paid user and see exactly what they're going to get to make sure they're having the best possible experience and that you look professional, consistent, and easy to work with. And that's what's going to make people feel good and go through the whole product to get the result. So they're happy. Ultimately, we want them to do the lesson to get the result. I'm not sure if you're aware of this. But I guess in the online teaching world, one of the big problems is just people abandoned courses all the time. I mean, there's a huge abandonment rate, especially since it's a relatively new field. And there's a lot of adjustment going on. And how do we deliver content, however the platform is working, it's getting so much better.

Steve Knots 19:14
And I love that MemberVault is constantly working on updates to the platform to make it better and better and better as a user experience. So that people do engage with your product and come back in and collect more points and earn fun stuff and finish the lessons. But more importantly than just finishing the lessons. We want them to experience the transformation, get the result, change their lives, show you what they did give you a testimonial, become part of your community, give other people in your community advice of how they can get over their humps. And and that's what the end result is. So I know you know that.

Steve Knots 19:44

Thank you so much for listening. I'm Steve Knots. If you have any questions, you can find me in the Facebook collab. And as always, thank you to all of you in our MemberVault community for being so awesome. And doing what I just said, which is finishing your lessons using your MemberVault getting results and sharing it with all of us. We'll see you next time. Thanks for listening