To celebrate the launch of the platform, we’re running this competition. All the details are in the article, but worth mentioning the £1,000 prize. Look forward to seeing your entries.
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First impressions:
The very first thing shown on the linked page is (presumably unauthorized) copyrighted material.
Nothing on the page explains what the service is.
Click through to the home page…
The home page has a popup box with no close button that obscures some of the content on the page. I don’t want to click either of the options on it, but eventually I do just to see what happens. Nothing happens except that the box closes.
Nothing on the home page explains what the service is.
One of the content panels says Hogwarts, which is (presumably unauthorized) copyrighted material, but ok, I click it.
It shows me a page with a video file that doesn’t play and no other content. Nothing on the page explains what to do or what the service is.
Click the news button. Nothing on the news page explains what the service is, what it’s for, how to use it, or who made it.
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I tried to view one of the example stories, but the AI-generated background images are constantly flickering in and out, making it very unpleasant to read the text in front of them.
Is there any documentation (text, not video) that explains what the authoring platform is capable of?
All very fair feedback. We are embarrassed by our platform, and that’s deliberate. We could polish it behind the scenes for months until it’s perfect, but then we lose out on early feedback like this, and the opportunity to show you that we listen and we actually want users to drive the direction of it. So yes, we launched in early stages… as you can tell we have focused on features (not branding), and the next priority is content (hence the competition)… polishing the UI/UX is important but we need this feedback to do it 
So in direct response to the above feedback:
- The hogwarts story is removed (that was the first test by Jim who is a huge HP fan)
- We added an about/guide here.. (Buried in the news atm, needs better discovery - will get to it)
- The welcome popup is better structured now - just info/links and “got it” to dismiss.
- We published the interactive tutorial which was in the works already
Regarding the “flickering” I haven’t seen that, but maybe it means the images fading out and in… that works for the video but maybe we need to give creators the option to fade or cut between scenes when very short image-only scenes are used. Will look into that too.
Regarding the text documentation - we’re not really planning on that because “show don’t tell”. We will work on more advanced templates, but at the moment it’s just a very simple one. The canvas allows you to drop sticky notes anywhere, so we use that to explain the nodes and how to use them - this is 100x better than any written documentation because you can clone the template and try it out, drag it around, re-connect it right there in the canvas yourself. Part of the issue is of course that you don’t know that yet, until you sign in… but you need to be signed in to create/play with a canvas. We could do some anonymous saved-in-local-storage thing, but that becomes confusing to non-technical users and creates all sorts of support issues. Maybe a “just have a play” option that makes it clear it won’t be saved? If anyone has an elegant solution I’d love to hear it. Maybe an article with a list of all features we can update as we extend would be useful?
We want to make this accessible to wider audiences, and also move beyond IF to interactive tutorials, training, educational content with checks-of-understanding, museum explorations/tours, tourist-information helpers, etc.
I think something like this is a good idea if it wouldn’t be too difficult to implement. Right now, it isn’t really clear (at least to me) what the platform can do, because you can’t see that unless you create an account… but there’s not much really motivating me to create an account, since I can’t really see what the platform can do so there’s nothing to excite me about it.
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