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Hey HN: I made something to add Help to your startups. Thoughts?
- brianlash 17y agoWow. This is really, really awesome. Edit: I'm sure you guys felt the urge to add more features and customization right out of the gate, and I appreciate that you kept things simple. I see myself (and others) using this specifically because it looks so clean and lightweight.
- joshu 17y agoI agree. It's pretty awesome.
- vaksel 17y agoI think the loading animation is too much. It'll be better if it just pops up. Also I think this is taking up too much real estate, it should probably just be a 16x16 pixel image with a ? on it.
- mdolon 17y agoYou should totally make the animation/design customizable too so I can finally have my own talking paperclip!
- pxlpshr 17y agoI voted you back up. HN has been suffering from a flight of noobs that downmod as a sign of disagreement but without voicing an opinion. I agree with the animation bit, it's a little distracting. I disagree about the size of the box because users that need the most help likely won't notice a 16x16 box. Ideally both items are customizable. My first reaction was "oh, the paperclip is back". But I do think this could be useful as long as it isn't annoying, and can be turned off easily for pro users.
- devinj 17y agoNoobs can't downvote. ;)
- codexon 17y agoIt has to be somewhat large and noticeable. If its too small people won't even notice it.
- markchristian 17y agoThe loading animation (aka "the swoosh maneuver") actually only happens on the front page of helpbubble.com -- it's intended to really draw your attention to it, since it's sort of the star of the show. When it's installed on your site, it's much more sedate. Fancy animations are easily added via JavaScript hackery, of course, if you so desire. :)
- palish 17y agoDefinitely communicate that then!
- paraschopra 17y agoIs it specific to a webpage or whole website? Another note: http://www.kissinsights.com/ http://www.kissinsights.com/ is somewhat on similar model, though it is a survey.
- dustball 17y agoEach question is specific to the whole website OR a particular URL match. For example, you can configure a question to /login such as "How do I reset my password?" You can also specify wildcards, such as /users/* etc.
- holdenc 17y agoFirstly, excellent execution of a very useful little tool. I could really use something like this on my site. That said, I think I could probably build a less polished version in about an afternoon, and having something native provides peace of mind and flexibility. That's not to detract from your offering, but my hunch is that you'll find a good customer base in larger companies that have a hard time approving development of anything non-business critical. There's immediate appeal in quick integration and allowing the maintenance to be handled by a non-technical person.
- gibsonf1 17y agoI'm guessing you don't offer ssl?
- markchristian 17y agoNot at this point, but it's definitely on the todo list.
- rksprst 17y agoThis is great. Very useful, but it does take up a lot of space. I actually built something like this for my site, but ended up scrapping it since it was too much maintenance.
- cwilson 17y agoGirlfriend reaction: "Wasn't this in Microsoft Word 10 years ago? It had a cute dog." Take that for what you may. Cool concept, but I don't think this is something I'd ever pay for. GetSat or Uservoice could kill this in one update. There is just something about it that would bug me having it on the page.
- paraschopra 17y agoNever judge a startup by where it is now. Judge a startup where it could be six months down the line. Of course, this equally applies to GetSat and Uservoice too.
- jf 17y agoWhere is the bubble to help Canada assert its sovereignty over Hans Island?
- markchristian 17y agoIt's floating over northern Nunavut as we speak.
- jf 17y agoAre you sure it isn't a spaceship built by a teenage boy with designs that came to him in a dream?
- paraschopra 17y agoQuick additions that you can consider: * A default option whereby a visitor can ask question which isn't listed on a page. * A simple 'did this answer help you' under each answer. Like what Google does on its support pages. * Some basic stats like how many visitors clicked the help bubble and how many got their question answered. The three options above will provide you will insights whether you are answering the right question.
- matttibbals69 17y agoI'm Matt Tibbals, pedophile. http://www.matthewtibbals.com http://www.matthewtibbals.com
- stromhold 17y agoI'd rather the initial animation slide up from the taskbar. and it would really be context sensitive if it could slightly buzz/vibrate/gain users attention in case it 'detects' that the user is stuck. what 'detects' actually is the context and could be configurable by the author based on wait time, scroll up-down, highlights of keywords etc. I can't think of a really fit example for this, but perhaps any web based application that requires specific input for relevant results such as mint.com?
- waleedka 17y agoVery nice. It doesn't work, though, when you open the website inside an iframe. You might be referring to the top window in your code rather than the current window object.
- FluidDjango 17y agoJust curious: what guided you to use Prototype rather than, say, jQuery?
- FluidDjango 17y agoFYI: With FF & Safari/4.05 I find that long Help questions expand beyond their containers (in the actual help response). Just a cosmetic issue FWIW. PS: Do you know whether your pricing model will be 1) Per site? 2) Per traffic? 3) ___________?
- Murkin 17y agoThis is great ! BUT, as with other 95% of the tools out there. I cannot use it. Because it does not support localization. Can you allow for changing the text in buttons & captions ? (Moving the box RTL will be great too)
- ggruschow 17y agoBusted left and right on Opera (10.51 on Win7). I assume you can update it as you please since you host it, so maybe it'd be better to just disable it on untested browsers.
- clusterfu_k 17y agoBusted it is. Opera 10.51, Windows 7.
- Tichy 17y agoCouldn't you provide a demo without me having to change the source code of my web site? Not sure what it is yet, but I don't think I would open up my site to external JavaScript just for popup bubbles, to be honest.
- yungchin 17y agoThe demo is right there on their website - bottom left corner. Edit: apologies, that was such a short reply that it's at risk of coming across as snarky, but no such intent!
- Tichy 17y agoJust checked - it seems it doesn't appear every time I load the site, therefore I missed it the first time. Try reloading the site a couple of times.
- dabent 17y agoExactly. I had to reload the page to see it. Once I tried it out, it seemed like a pretty cool idea. It just needs some smoother execution. The reload was one thing and others have mentioned the confusion of the "try it" button. Maybe a "Try It" arrow pointing to that lower left corner would help? Then change the original "Try It" to "Sign Up". Edit: To note that the overall site seems pretty cool! Keep going...
- _Lemon_ 17y agoThis really confused me too, I could only see the "Try it" button and presumed it would give me a demo. I am not seeing it at all on the front page but do get this error: Error: $("#haas").offset() is null Source File: http://www.helpbubble.com/ http://www.helpbubble.com/ Line: 33 Edit: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.0.15) Gecko/2009102814 Iceweasel/3.0.6 (Debian-3.0.6-3)
- JBiserkov 17y agoWebpage error details User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0;) Timestamp: Sat, 27 Mar 2010 17:51:55 UTC Message: 'offset().top' is null or not an object Line: 33 Char: 7 Code: 0 URI: http://www.helpbubble.com/ http://www.helpbubble.com/
- SteveC 17y ago"Your website visitors are really confused." No, your website visitors are really confused. i.e. me
- rrhyne 17y agoOffer a few helpful points with that and I wounld't have voted you down. You could have said: TRY IT should open a help bubble. Add a GET IT button to get the code.
- hartror 17y agoYeah that's what I expected. It didn't load for me first time (must be a bug, that's fine we all have bugs) so I clicked on the "Try It" button. I like it but would not use it as software as a service, but I would buy it especially if its API supported <insert favourite big web framework here (Django for me)>.
- covenant 17y agoI love it, and would happily pay money for it (please, tell me you are going to charge for this). I was pacing around my apartment late last night trying to figure out how to quickly integrate help into my new product. I was convinced I was going to spend the time in rolling my own system rather than launching. Thanks to this, I'll be able to launch much sooner. It's easy to say "I could write this in a few hours" (which I doubt), but why? Why would you waste cycles on something that is not core to your product? Anyway, great job, and I can't wait to see where this goes.
- djb_hackernews 17y agoI have no use for it but a way to close the help bubble besides clicking the icon again would be helpful. Like an [X] where there is normally an [X] on these kind of popups.
- bravura 17y agoWho did the design for your site? I really like it.