Guindo. Digital Product Design
StepAlong
AI for effective product instructions that enhance customer experience
For many companies, product instructions have shifted from being customer support tools to becoming an obstacle that reduces brand value and credibility:
- Poor instructions generate returns, increase support costs, and lead to negative reviews.
- Limited language coverage hurts global sales and gives competitors an advantage.
- PDF manuals do not comply with new EU regulations and provide a poor mobile experience.
- In many organizations, instruction creation remains a neglected area, without processes to scale efficiently.
- Using low-quality or third-party content compromises customer experience and risks reliability in AI-driven environments.
Companies that do not understand instructions as a strategic asset are falling behind in an increasingly digital, global, and regulated market. Instructions have become a critical business priority.
- E-commerce drives sales, but poor instructions can trigger returns, negative reviews, and higher support costs.
- New European regulations (GPSR, EAA) make product information more complex and sensitive.
- Scaling languages across all sales channels has become exponentially challenging with manual processes.
- The way users search for information is changing; brands need to control their content to remain visible and trustworthy.
- AI is transforming customer support, but it requires centralized, unique, and accurate instructions as a single source of truth.
The Origin of StepAlong
We are co-founders and product leads of StepAlong, an AI platform for creating effective product instructions that enhance customer experience.
With these challenges in mind, together with Tim Towle and Dimitry Lvovsky, we created StepAlong, an AI-powered tool designed to transform product instructions into clear, efficient, and frustration-free experiences. Our goal: help consumer brands provide instructions that guide and increase customer satisfaction and trust.
The idea emerged during the pandemic. Tim bought an Instant Pot and Dimitry a Thermomix. Both discovered these brands had invested in exemplary instructions: clear, step-by-step, and easy to follow.
This led to a key question: Why do only a few products offer high-quality instructions when a solution could standardize this for all?
From this reflection, StepAlong was born: an AI-driven ecosystem to create, translate, and distribute accessible, multi-format instructions for any brand producing physical products that want to deliver a superior customer experience.
The Platform
StepAlong offers a comprehensive solution benefiting both consumers and companies. For end-users, the StepAlong Player reinvents instruction-following by providing a clear, frictionless experience: accessible on any device, no app required, with visual steps, multilingual support, and the ability to include videos, images, or PDFs as needed.
Customer support with complete instructions
Create and update product instructions from a single dashboard
Meanwhile, the StepAlong Builder allows brands to create and convert instructions with AI, publish across multiple channels and formats (including QR codes and support for 30+ languages), and ensure regulatory compliance in a single integrated workflow.
With StepAlong, product instructions stop being a sunk cost and become a value driver. Better experiences reduce returns and support tickets, increase customer satisfaction, and generate positive reviews that strengthen brand reputation. Its multi-format approach integrates easily with product pages and ensures compliance with regulations, avoiding risks and penalties. AI-driven translations enable fast market reach, better local search visibility, and localized content for partners and distributors. StepAlong not only solves the complexity of instruction creation and management but also prepares companies for a digital ecosystem where product information powers chatbots, intelligent assistants, and new support channels.
Key Features
StepAlong enables faster, efficient, and scalable instruction production by integrating creation, translation, and publishing in a single platform. Companies can generate online and PDF instructions simultaneously, reuse existing PDFs with AI, automatically extract and optimize images, and convert YouTube videos into step-by-step tutorials translatable into multiple languages.
Generating instructions from PDFs
The system also includes automatic supporting text generation for diagrams, complying with regulations such as GPSR and EAA, ensuring accessibility for users with different learning levels and abilities.
Publishing is fully flexible: integrate with Shopify stores, partner websites, or via access codes, using an inbuilt QR generator to simplify distribution. The Turnkey Instruction Center centralizes all guides under the brand domain, with full control from the StepAlong dashboard, multi-brand support, and readiness for chatbots and AI engines, while ensuring SEO indexing.
Analytics on instruction usage
Collaborative interface for reviewing translations
AI-driven translations are fast, context-sensitive, and collaborative, allowing review of changes and maintaining multilingual consistency across all products. Bulk management tools enable duplicating instructions, translating multiple versions simultaneously, and downloading PDFs in multiple languages with a single click, reducing repetitive tasks and optimizing resources.
Overall, StepAlong transforms instruction creation and management into a strategic process that enhances customer experience, ensures regulatory compliance, and accelerates international brand expansion.