Auto-Steps: Getting Started Guide

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Brief Overview

Why make your users complete repetitive tasks when you can simply automate them? With Auto-Steps, you can easily automate numerous tasks for your users, saving them time, and improving their user experience. This way, your employees and end-users can focus on what really matters, instead of where to navigate to get to a feature.

With Auto-Steps, automating multiple steps or an entire process is fast and easy to do. You simply capture the steps as you go. Best of all, there’s no coding, API, or backend integration required!

You can add Auto-Steps anywhere in a Smart Walk-Thru (see how in the Steps To Add Auto-Steps section below. Auto-Steps complete actions on behalf of the user, like clicking on a link or button, typing into a field, or hovering over a menu. You can even quickly toggle between regular Steps and Auto-Steps as you record a process.

A Smart Walk-Thru that is made up entirely of Auto-Steps can be played as an Automation Process, which allows it to run simultaneously with visual Smart Walk-Thrus.

Use Cases

Action-Step use cases include the following:

• Automatically perform the following element-oriented tasks on behalf of your users:
  • Click an element;
  • Right Click a custom Context (“Right Click”) Menu;
  • Hover over an element;
  • Focus on a field (put the cursor into the field);
  • Fill Text into an element;
    • Pro-Tip: Supported HTML input type attributes include numerical/text values (i.e., <input type=”time”> will be supported by Fill Text Auto Step whereas <input type=”button”> will not).
  • Select a list value from a dropdown menu.
• Quickly capture multiple Auto-Steps;
• Eliminate routine navigation steps with a Smart Walk-Thru;
• Completely automate an end-to-end repetitive process.

How To Add Auto-Steps

1. Sign into your WalkMe Editor account;
2. Click the WalkMe apps dropdown triangle and select the Smart Walk-Thrus app:
   
3. Either hover over the edit (pencil) icon on one of your pre-existing Smart Walk-Thrus and click Edit, or click the “+” icon in the upper right to begin creating a new Smart Walk-Thru;
4. Hover over a “+” icon in the Smart Walk-Thru’s path and click Auto-Step to enter Auto-Step capture mode:
   
   • You will now enter Auto-Step Capture Mode.
5. Capture an element with the element inspector;
   • A capture box will appear with a pre-set action setting per the element-type you captured (e.g., for a clickable element, the Automatic Action will be set to Click by default):
     
6. If you wish to change the step’s Automatic Action setting, click the Advanced tab:
   
   
   • You can select such action-types as were mentioned above, e.g., Fill text or Select list value:
     
   • If you’re auto-filling a search bar, you can have WalkMe hit Enter to complete the search.
     • To enable this, complete the auto-step element selection, go to the AutoStep in the Editor and select both: Keep the cursor in the text field and Automatically press enter after filling the text.
   • Please Note:
     • The ‘Automatic Action’ shows only available options depending on the element you have selected, meaning, a button will not have the option of ‘Fill Text’.
     • Use the Re-select option, to re-capture an element.
     • Text length is limited to 65K characters
7. Context Menus can be captured with the Right Click action;
   • 
   • Only custom Context Menus are supported, default Web Menus like the below can not be captured:
   • 
8. When finished with the step, click Next Step to return to Auto-Step capture mode;
9. When you’ve captured all the Auto-Steps you want, simply click SAVE per usual.
10. Auto-Steps appear as part of your normal Smart Walk-Thru interface, but with the orange Auto Play icon.
    All orange steps are invisible to your users.
11. By default, a ripple effect will show when an Auto-Step has been clicked. This can be disabled in the Interaction settings.
    • Automatic actions:
      • Clicks
      • Hover
      • Focus
      • Fill Text
      • Select List Value
      • Right Click
      • Remove Text

      

12. It is possible to add a Popup, which will remain on screen and notify users that an automation is in process. Learn more.

How to Convert Existing Steps To Auto-Steps and Vice Versa

To learn how to convert current steps, read our Convert Smart Walk-Thru Steps to Auto-Steps article.

Tip Tuesday Videos

Add or Removed Elements Using Auto-Fill Steps

Limitations

Fill Text limitations –

• Only supports filling the text of an element, and does not trigger any site functionality that is usually triggered when a user types in an input field.
• Text length is limited to 200K characters.