Overlay101: Contextual help for your webapp

http://www.overlay101.com

by casenelson • 14 years ago

8 8 14 years ago

casenelson3• 14 years ago

This is my first product, I'd be really interested to hear what the community thinks about it.

We built this because as web developers we're always asked to implement an in app context sensitive help system, but maintaining that help system and keeping it up to date really calls for a crm like functionality. FAQ pages and knowledge bases are rarely visited and users shouldn't need to context switch to find out if there's an answer posted on some subsite.

masukomi• 14 years ago

honestly my first though was "Pricing?.... Pricing!!!" WTF?!

To me this really seems like it ought to just be a library on github. Just tag the elements you want highlighted, associate them with text, write some js to calculate their bounds and put an overlay over everything else...

It looks good, It's something i'd consider using, but I'm not seeing anything that makes me feel I should pay a monthly fee, or risk my help system going down or needing to be recreated if a 3rd party goes out of business or has an outage.

ssebro3• 14 years ago

I have to agree. When I saw pricing, I laughed and said to myself: "Here's someone taking patio11's advice.".

I think it would be an easier sell if you 1) stop talking about "overlay" as a feature (only talk about BENEFITS. Also overlay makes me think I can make this myself in 5mins) 2) instead talked about walk throughs/product tours, and explain how NOT doing a product tour is leaving tons of money on the ground.

I commend your effort and that you actually got this out the door.

Now go forth and charge.

casenelson3• 14 years ago

Thanks for the feedback. You're correct, we're definitely trying to follow the popular advice on here.

Yeah, getting the benefits across is going to be the only way people will see the value of the app. We tried to do that on the front page. Is it the name "overlay" that is throwing you and masukomi off?

Time to go reread copyhackers.

readk• 14 years ago

Hey guys, I'm another one of the creators of the site.

This is great feedback. One of the goals was to save developers time, or even let support teams, product managers, or other non-techies manage the entire help system. That's a big reason why we hosted it.

Do you think we could do a better job of making that clear?

We know that developers can always make their own bespoke system that will be customized to their own needs. But that takes developers, and time, that could be better spent on features or bugs...

Thoughts?

What if the free version did more...?

ssebro3• 14 years ago

NO! Your free version is fine. Don't change the product, change the marketing.

Overlay101: Contextual help for your webapp

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