To get five star reviews on the WordPress.org plugin repository you either need to plan the plugin perfectly (hint: that's impossible) or have an effective feedback loop to continuously improve your product. After a product is out in the wild you have to see how people are using it; study what they do right, what they do wrong, and what they can't possibly do but try anyways. You can make tweaks, add new features, and improve documentation. This is what I've been doing for the past 11 months at WooThemes and I love it.
Support isn't a problem you can solve but it is fun to see how much of it you can eliminate with good documentation and self serve tools for your users. With 100,000+ customers at WooThemes every little tweak we can make to our products affects how many tickets we get. That's why when I heard about SIDEKICK I jumped right in.
SIDEKICK Makes Awesome Walkthroughs
So what does SIDEKICK do? Well they make awesome walkthroughs. You're probably thinking about a blog post with screenshots and arrows. That's not what I'm talking about. And I'm not talking about a video on YouTube either. I'm talking about an interactive walkthrough on your WordPress site. It's really slick.
You select a walkthrough from the menu and then a voice over with on screen indicators will appear on your site and tell you exactly what menu item to click, field to type in, or button to push. It's hard to be confused when there's a giant orange arrow pointing to the button you need to click.
An Example Walkthrough
If you install the SIDEKICK plugin from WordPress.org it will automatically download all of the relevant tutorials for any plugins you have and include them in your library. Look how nice it displays just two of the steps for creating a new post:
SIDEKICK telling you which menu item to click on
SIDEKICK prompting the user to enter a title for their post
Walkthroughs for WooCommerce
SIDEKICK is already awesome with a ton of free WordPress tutorials but now it's even better since they just launched 30 walkthroughs for WooCommerce. I was able to guide them to the most commonly support requests and clarify a few points for them to make a truly beautiful and informative product.
If you want to understand exactly how to create variable products, configure coupons, properly set up https on the checkout pages, properly set up flat rate & free shipping, or so many more things I highly suggest you download the SIDEKICK plugin. It's free, informational, and intuitive; what more could you want? 🙂