Alvin Lai

I saw Hiten Shah of KISSMetrics tweet about this useful tool that helps create diagrams with sentences you type.

Watch how easy it is:

1. First, type in a sentence along like:

   

2. After hitting , you get this diagram

   

3. Try typing another

   

4. Easy yeah?

   

5. Now try to link 2 items together with a verb

   

6. Awesome, it resizes itself nicely!

   

Try it out for free at http://diagrammr.com

Created by Freshlog Storyteller

Jen noticed some weird characters in text in her browser, while mine looked ok. It turned out that Western encoding was the culprit.

Use UTF-8 instead of Western encoding in Firefox

1. Previously I was using Western

   

2. After switching to UTF-8 unicode, it worked

   

With Storyteller, it’s so much easier to tell stories! I’m loving my own product =)

After I finished developing an AJAX feedback form that would send the company an email when our users used it, I wanted to show my team what to expect from this new feature.

Rather than typing tiresome bullet points of text and expecting my team to predict and imagine what it would look like, I just told my story with step-by-step screenshots.

1. Click to send feedback

   

2. But user’s not logged in

   

3. So login..

   

4. User tries clicking again

   

5. Facebox appears with feedback form.User fills up, clicks “Send feedback” without entering any feedback

   

6. Alert, telling him that he needs to enter feedback

   

7. User fills out feedback description and hits send feedback

   

8. Feedback successful.User can close the facebox

   

Isn’t this descriptive and fun to look at?

I realized that Storyteller’s handy for creating changelogs:

Storyteller 0.1.1 (6) updates

1. Number of screenshots you’ve taken.

   

2. Tooltips for image viewer

   

3. A little description where the body and conclusion will appear in your final story

   

Let me know if there’s stuff you’d like to remove. Yes I said remove.

Pictures speak a thousand words.

Puzzled that I wasn’t getting any feedback for the past 2 days, I went through the new user signup flow, until I realized that the Login button for Beta users was barely noticeable:

1. Previously the login link for beta users was so small it was barely noticeable.

   

2. Now it’s bigger

   

Sorry for the confusion, as soon as I ran through the flow I immediately felt very very bad

Do yourself and your users a favor and review your flow!