A walkthrough is only useful while it matches the screen a customer is looking at. Most of the time, that match slips quietly. A button moves into a menu, a label gets shortened from 'Save changes' to 'Save', or a field is renamed in a release that nobody on the support side heard about. The walkthrough still plays, but the step it describes no longer exists. The customer notices before you do.
This post explains how nightly re-checks catch that kind of drift, what you receive when a step fails, and how to turn an alert into a calm, routine fix.
Why a small interface change can break a step without anyone noticing
A product walkthrough is a sequence of instructions tied to what is on the screen: click here, type there, choose this option. Each instruction depends on a particular element being in a particular place with a particular name. When your team ships a change, that dependency can break in several ways without any error appearing in your product.
The most common examples are small:
- A button is renamed, so the instruction 'click Create project' points at nothing.
- A menu item is moved one level deeper, so the step now needs an extra click.
- A page is reorganised, so the field the step describes sits under a different heading.
- A confirmation dialogue appears in a new order, so the next step happens before the screen is ready.
None of these will throw an error on your side. The developers who made the change may never think of the help content at all. Support tickets are often the first sign, and by then several customers have already been stuck on the same step.
The risk grows with the number of walkthroughs. A single script that covers onboarding might be fine for months. Ten scripts covering billing, permissions, reporting and integrations will each drift at their own pace, and nobody is checking all of them by hand every day.
What a scheduled nightly re-check does
HandHoldly runs a scheduled re-check of each walkthrough every night. The re-check follows the steps in the script against the live product and confirms that each one can still be carried out. If a step can no longer be found or completed as written, the re-check marks that step as failing.
The aim is to find the break before a customer does. Because the check runs on a schedule, you do not need to remember to test a walkthrough after each release, though a release is a sensible moment to look at the alerts in the morning.
A re-check reports on what it found. It does not change your script, your help article or your video on its own. A failing step stays as it is until someone on your team decides what to do with it. That is deliberate, and it matters for the rest of this post.
What you receive: webhooks fired and an email to the owners naming the step
When a re-check flags a step, two things happen. First, any webhooks you have set up for the walkthrough are fired, so your own systems can react. You might post a message to a team channel, open a ticket in your tracker, or log the event alongside your release notes. Second, an email goes to the owners of that walkthrough, naming the step that failed.
Naming the step is the important part. A message that says 'a walkthrough is broken' sends someone off to open the script and search for the problem. A message that says 'step 4, click Create project, could not be found' tells them where to look straight away. The owner knows which screen to open and which line of the script to read.
If you route webhooks into your own tools, keep the handling simple at first. Send every failure to one place that the walkthrough's owner checks each morning. Once you know how often alerts arrive, you can decide whether anything needs to be escalated.
Reading the alert and deciding what to change
When an alert arrives, resist the urge to rewrite the whole walkthrough. Most failures have a small cause, and the fix is usually a single step. A useful order of questions is:
- Open the product yourself and go to the screen the failing step describes.
- Check whether the thing the step refers to still exists. Has it been renamed, moved or removed?
- If the feature has been removed on purpose, decide whether the walkthrough should stop there, skip the step, or point to a replacement.
- If the feature still exists but has moved, update the step to describe where it now sits.
- Play the walkthrough through from the start to check the steps either side of the change still make sense.
If you use the AI option in HandHoldly, it can help with the middle part of this process. With AI switched on, a button that has moved or been renamed can often be found again, and the suggested wording for the step is shown to you. You can save that wording into the script with one click. Treat the suggestion as a draft. Read it against the live product, correct it where needed, and only then save it. AI drafts can be wrong, and the person who owns the walkthrough is the one who checks them.
Write down what you changed and why. A short note such as 'renamed button, step 4 updated after the March release' saves the next owner from repeating the same investigation.
Re-checks flag a problem; a person decides the fix
It is worth being plain about what a re-check does and does not do. A re-check tells you that a step no longer works as written. It does not decide what the right instruction should be, it does not know whether a change was intended, and it does not repair the walkthrough while you are asleep.
That division of labour is what keeps the help content trustworthy. If the tool rewrote steps on its own, a customer could be given instructions that describe a flow you never agreed to. A flagged step, reviewed by someone who knows the product, keeps the decision where it belongs.
The same applies to the outputs that depend on the script. A narrated video, a live guided tour and a step-by-step article are all built from the same script, so a corrected step can be carried through to each of them once the owner has confirmed the change. Check the result, especially where the step includes a screen that has changed visually.
A simple routine for owners of each walkthrough
Most teams do not need a complicated process. A routine that takes ten minutes a week per walkthrough is enough for most products:
- Each morning: read any re-check alerts for your walkthroughs. Note which steps failed and on which screens.
- After each release: open the failing steps first, then play the walkthrough through once from start to finish.
- When a fix is needed: update the step in the script, check it against the live product, and add a short note saying what changed.
- Once a month: read through the walkthroughs you own and remove any step that describes a feature you no longer offer.
- When handing over: tell the new owner which alerts have been open, and which changes are still waiting for a decision.
Ownership matters more than tooling. Every walkthrough should have a named person, and that person should receive the alerts. An alert sent to a shared inbox that nobody reads is no better than no alert at all.
If you want to see the re-check process in context, from the script through to the alert and the update, See how it works on the HandHoldly site. It shows how the nightly checks fit alongside the video, the live guide and the help article, and how each step is reviewed before it changes.