Show HN: Interactive “how to” guide and tutorial builder | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Interactive “how to” guide and tutorial builder

whatfix.com

35 pointskhadim25 comments

I really wanted to try this out, but when I went to install the plugin, it asked for all data on all the websites that I visit. As a general rule, I won't allow plugins that much access unless they do something truly amazing.

If I were you, I'd improve the messaging on the page a to let people know they are about to download a plugin, and what kinds of permissions you are going to ask for (and why).

"All data on All sites" access needed for us as we try to show help inside any website.

You are right about messaging on permissions. We need to figure out a place for explaining rights requirement to user.

The end product is great. Very clear and unambiguous tutorials. I think you've definitely hit on a pain point.

Making it easy/quick to create walkthroughs for any screen in my product would be very useful. Right now we are making one-off Javascript based tours, which work well but are time-consuming to produce and brittle.

Suggestion: as an alternative to the YouTube-style embed, perhaps there could be a small tab on the bottom of the screen (like a Live Chat or Feedback widget) that says "Help With This Screen". When clicked, it could reveal a ribbon with several tutorials for the current screen.

This would be helpful for complicated screens, which might have potentially several tutorials. For example, GoDaddy could make 10 interactive tutorials to go with the 1 screen DNS manager - one for changing an A record, one for nameservers, and so on - and have them all available on the DNS manager screen without taking up a lot of space.

Nice work!

:) we hit upon whatfix due to pain we felt while working with users in our previous product.

we are trying to keep flow creation simple, so that anyone can create new flows within minutes. you can try creating flows for your product and use embed option to add them.

suggestion on alternative embed style sounds good. we will surely consider.

On clicking 'Run', whatfix provide instructions inline to websites.

Here's 3 mins video: http://youtu.be/xm2ly9qTXkM

"whatfix is community website, where anyone can create, share & execute interactive guides on any website or web applications."

We think whatfix can be used to create howto's, some initial traction reflected as good tutorial builder, what can be best way? Any suggestions. Any comments/feedback on whatfix greatly appreciated!

If anyone is interested to try out private beta, you are most welcome, just add your email id to http://whatfix.com/ & you would get invite in couple of days.

Have a look at the 99 responses on HN for Iorad, a tutorial builder from India I think. I'm sure they will help. (tip: no plugin required) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4202941

Thanks for the link, we have gone through iorad before. "RUN" is the key in whatfix.com. It is not only the builder for snapshots. By RUN, help is shown inside actual webpage & drives you through to complete the action/guide.

Thank you. I was surprised to see Firefox asking permission to install a plugin at first. (So I denied access). What about a little firefox plugin icon or a little visual hint what to expect?

yes we realized, most of the site visitors are clicking on 'run' but not installing plugin. we are adding & also changing existing message. you can "run" & see now.

Now, for chrome users we are displaying a video when they choose not to install extension. Yet to do something for Firefox users.

This is good. If the video were the first thing on the page I would have watched it first anyway, and then not been confused by the "run" button asking to install a plugin.

@tedmiston, we will try putting video on landing page directly & measure the improvement.

edit: we added video on landing page.

Cool concept. Given the quantity of programming/tech tutorials out there I can definitely see a tool like this being useful. Kind of a midway point between text and a screencast. Good luck.

we want to provide interactive help inline to websites/webapps, unlike screencast or verbose howto's. Any guide in whatfix can be made interactive to get inline help by installing browser plugin and running the guide.

pretty cool idea, but would be even better if there is no need to download a plugin. I can imagine, without the need of a plugin, that there is a great userbase in short time. Reminds me a little bit of [1] just with the tutorial information from outside...

Keep on!

[1] http://foundation.zurb.com/files/zurb-joyride-2/demo/demo.ht...

we want anyone to create interactive guides on any website, like Gmail, facebook, so to run over such sites, plugin is necessary. Same plugin is also used for creating guides, so encouraging plugins, will help in more contribution of guides.

How do you intend on keeping track of change to sites? Eg, Gmail tutorials for the old compose interface will soon be rendered obsolete.

How will you deal with aging, increasingly inaccurate content? The rot will be slow and correction will be tedious.*

Ranking also seems relevant if you choose to go the 'social proof via up votes' route.

A content community (which I believe something like this is trying to create) is great. A content community that curates itself is just awesome.

*edit, previously: "How will you deal with aging, old, inaccurate content?" [added content rot as an after thought, 'aging' describes the reason for the 'inaccuracy' (rot) ]

Disclaimer: this is posted from mobile. Haven't had a chance to give the plugin a spin.

Yes, we are trying to build content community which can curate and update. we have reputations like stackoverflow.

We have also implemented failure tracking mechanism to check when guides don't execute correctly. Failure tracking feature is pre-mature as of now, once tracking improves, we will mark it for community to improve the guides or discard them.

A thought: one way to do this might be having a service diffing the HTML of whatever page guide X is for. For things like Facebook your diff would have to be smart enough to differentiate between 'content' and 'structure'. You could then flag guides based on that. But I imagine most guides are written/maintained in-house so this isn't a problem at this point.

Where do you guys work from?

We collect lots of information about the element that we need to highlight (text, depth, siblings etc). When we fail to identify element accurately, we try to find best one with highest score and highlight. We mark flow as a failure and exit, when we hit score below minimum. This algorithm is most crucial one & i guess it will be evolving ever. By this mechanism, we are trying to overcome page changes to good extent.

Very few guides are in house and mostly are contributed by early adopters. we are expecting users to contribute.

We are based out of bangalore, india.

any user with more than 500 reputations can edit any guides, with more than 1000 reps can delete the guides. so such users can edit any other user's guides and help in keeping them upto date. User's can get reputations when other's run their flows or vote up.

That coinage is sweet! 'run a flow'.

The users of the future will not browse anytjing. They will run flows, and it will be natural :-) Content about content! It's so meta.

Comic Sans?

helvetica. comic sans just one place while trying to get attention on "run". Didnt like it?

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