Ordering guides

Beyond basic eligibility criteria, Knock provides ordering and throttling settings to control how active guides are displayed to users. When a user is eligible for multiple guides, Knock's ordering rules enable you to control the order in which guides will render to the user.

Throttle settings enable you to further customize the user's experience by controlling how many guides are shown simultaneously and how frequently they're displayed. Together, ordering and throttling ensure you can prioritize notifications without overwhelming users.

Guide ordering and throttling are essential for:

• Preventing guide collisions. Control how many guides appear simultaneously.
• Prioritizing important content. Ensure critical announcements or onboarding flows take precedence.
• Managing content sequence. Control the sequence of educational content or feature announcements.
• Creating better user experiences. Deliver content in a logical order and at a pace that makes sense for your users.

The default behavior of the guide provider and the useGuide and useGuides hooks is to return eligible guides in chronological order, with the oldest created guides returned before more recently created guides.

You can change this behavior by manually ordering your guides in the Knock dashboard. This order overrides the default behavior and determines the order in which guides will be returned.

You can set the order of a guide in the Knock dashboard:

1. Navigate to the Guides page in your Knock dashboard sidebar.
2. Click on the "Edit order" button in the top right corner.
3. While in "Edit order" mode, drag and drop guides to re-order them. Guides positioned higher on the page will be prioritized over guides below it.
4. Click the "Save order" button to apply the new order.

Configure a guide throttle window to control how much time elapses between two guides rendering. By default, Knock shows guides one at a time, meaning each new guide appears immediately after the previous one is dismissed. If you set a guide throttle window of five minutes, then five minutes will elapse between one guide being dismissed and another guide rendering.

You can change this behavior by configuring throttle settings to delay the next guide for a set duration (e.g., "show 1 guide every X minutes/hours/days").

1. Navigate to the Guides page in your Knock dashboard sidebar.
2. Click on the "Throttle: .." button in the top right corner to open the throttle settings modal.
3. Set a display interval by its value and unit. Clear out the inputs to unset it.
4. Click the "Save changes" button to apply the new throttle settings.

In some cases, you may want to always render certain guides immediately regardless of any throttle limit that is being applied. For example, you may want to consistently render a banner regardless of whether or not other guides are displayed.

You can opt one or more guides out of the throttle limit by moving them to the top of the page, above the throttle bar. You will need to be in ordering mode to make these changes. Any guides you move into this section will bypass any throttle limit applied. They will also be returned ahead of other throttled guides.

Note that unthrottled guides still have a priority order. These guides will ignore the throttle, but still render one after the other when they share the same component.