Show HN: I made a tool to create product tutorials
textframe.app
textframe.app
My name is Rahul Sarathy and I posted TextFrame a few months ago on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29234636) as a tool to create animated technical papers. After gathering feedback from the community, I found that the best use case for my tool was for creating tutorials.
I am proud to share my next iteration as a tool to create animated product tutorials. Hopefully you can find use in it to create more engaging tutorials for onboarding and helping out your users.
You can check out some examples I’ve created using the software: at https://textframe.app/examples
Please let me know what you think! You can also email me at rahul@textframe.app if you have any questions or just want to say hello
One question, the orginal demo was amazing in itself, is that technology/source still available somewhere?
Bitcoin demo - https://textframe.app/examples/bitcoin
CockroachDB demo - https://textframe.app/rahul/cockroachdb_serverless_demo
You know how a lot of SaaS has a video of the user story and what their app does and looks like on the landing page? Well, I think this can be way better, less time consuming, and way cheaper than hiring an animation studio to create that video. You can also edit the textframe as the product grows; something that is much harder to do for videos.
A few of small features can make this way better.
1. The ability to put the textframe in an iframe. So users can use it on their landing page.
2. The ability to auto play the steps. (it should stop autoplay if user clicks on a step to view)
3. More UI customizability so it goes with the landing page.
I see this being more valuable as a marketing tool than a tutorial tool, but I'm only one person. Good work and good luck =)
When you say marketing tool, what sort of content do you have in mind?
Also, I do provide the ability to embed in your landing pages, the instructions are at the bottom of my landing page.
Don't misunderstand. I don't think the core functionality of textFrame should change. I'm just saying your users might use textFrame to convince their users how their product can solve their user's problems by showing them around the app without actually going into the app.
It is really helpful for SaaS that requires a sign up before users can use their app. Since registration is a big wall people wont go over unless they have a good understanding of the product. Most SaaS products try to do this now with images and videos.
So what I was suggesting is basically casting a wider net for textFrame. You currently market it as a tutorial solution. Consider marketing it as a "product show off/Demo" solution. Which would also include tutorials as well has any other way your users might want to show off their product.
One quick piece of feedback that I saw right away: Clicking on the next step on the left and then seeing the video update on the right is distracting, so I ended up not even reading the text on the left after a while.
Perhaps you could show "subway stops" on the left to indicate which step you are and how many there are in total, and then have the instruction text above or below the video? The way it works now, your eyes have to dart back and forth from left to right to read the text and then watch the video.
Anyway, best of luck with this.
I'm glad you pointed out the Loom use case. My whole angle was that I thought products are leaning too much into video, when text has some great advantages: skimming, scrolling, copy pasting, etc.
1.If you click on a box with a step on the left side of a tutorial, it should take you to that step. At least that is how I tried to use it initially. Right now, you can only control going forward/backward through scrolling the page.
2. In the landing page the "View Examples" and "View a Tutorial" buttons look off in Firefox (the text overflows).
One of my demo tutorials shows exactly how to embed!
Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information).
How come?