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Air traffic control

If your goal is to assist users, one of the worst possible things you can do is inundate users with popups. Doing this will:

  • Cause your users to develop pop-up blindness; they will start to instinctively dismiss popups, rendering them useless tools for you to shape their experience.
  • Undermine your credibility with users. They will start to think of your product as messy, un-personalized, and disrespectful of their time.

That doesn’t mean you can’t use pop-ups. In fact, finely targeted use of our Nudge experiences is a key piece of how we believe User Assistance should work. Air traffic control is the safety net of targeting: it's an advanced rate limiting system that ensures that no matter how you configure your targeting rules, your users will never see too many nudges competing for their attention.

Just know

We'll only show one Nudge (maximum) to a user at a time! Except...

  • You can display any number of tooltips, since they are subtle and require user engagement to start
  • Checklists are also independant. You can only have 1 checklist at a time, but you may also have 1 checklist and 1 nudge at the same time.

How rate limiting works​

Rate limiting has two components:

  • Limit: the number of nudges you consider “too much”, relative to the period.
  • Period: the period of time during which rate limiting is calculated. You can choose between days, weeks, and sessions.

Exceptions to the rate limiting​

Both tooltips and banners will ignore the global rate limiting since tooltips are quite subtle and banners are announcements that a user shouldn't miss!

How do I configure Air traffic control?​

You can configure our rate limiting rules from the Command AI Studio in the Settings tab of the different Nudge types pages (Tours, Announcement, Surveys). Air traffic control is not yet supported for Checklists.

What if a user switches device or browser?​

Rate limiting does not depend on the user using the same browser all the time. We observe users across venues and ensure that rate limiting rules are not exceeded. If you want rate limiting rules that are specific to different venues (for example, different rate limiting rules for your mobile and desktop products) we recommend setting up tenants for each of these venues.