Getting the Word Out: Promoting New Features Inline

When you're designing a few feature or mobile app, at some point you'll need to promote it as part of the rest of your site or product. You might have a "News" page or some other type of promotional space, but here are some clever promos that promote new features to visitors in context.

Not only are these approaches more interesting, they are much more likely to get visitors to notice all the hard work you've done. Here are a couple of examples from Facebook's design team.

Facebook Messenger App

Facebook released a new app that makes it easier to send mobile messengers to friend. When a Facebook user visited their Messages page, this promo was inserted at the top:

If the reader clicks Get the App, they get the usual links to the Apple and Android stores, but also a very clever feature to text a link for the app to the user's phone. Slick.

Facebook Messaging Privacy Controls

A while back Facebook added more explicit controls to their messaging interface, in response to concerns about how much control their customers had over the privacy of their messages.

They could have left visitors to discover these new features for themselves, but of course they wanted people to understand and use them right away. The first time someone experienced this new interface, Facebook presented a short "tour" of the new features.