You will probably recognize these lies, I’ve heard them over and over again in the web community:
“A great product should be so well designed that it doesn’t need documentation. Just look at Apple, you don’t need a manual to use an iPhone…”
or
“We work agile, we don’t need documentation”
Because of these lies documentation has become the stepchild of the software industry. I see a lot of technical writers that have a hard time making enough money, and very few people are getting the budget they really would need to do a proper job. The Internet has turned its back on documentation and it’s non-technical users that are paying the price.
Today most of the tutorials you will find online about web applications are outdated or outright broken. The Internet is changing too fast and the video or screenshot tutorials that we use to document the Internet are just not right for the job.
This is exactly why we built WalkHub an open source tool specifically designed for documenting the Internet. With it you can record your browser interactions instead of what you see on your screen, and then describe what happens in text. The resulting step-by-step Walkthrough plays on top of a website, so if a site changes, Walkthroughs adapt, or when they break they can tell you so that you can go in and fix them. WalkHub even generates automatically updated screenshots…
“With it we believe that we can build the ultimate user guide to all of the Internet (yes really).”
Our dream is to make an open platform, like GitHub, that makes it so easy to collaborate on documentation for web applications, that it will be stupid and expensive not to do so. Documentarians are amazing people, with a little help we believe they would love to start a new wave of open source collaboration, this time for documentation.
We believe we can make affordable, comprehensive error-free documentation a possibility again for web applications. So that documentation for the Internet could get the respect it deserves.
Want to help us explain how to do things on the Internet? Back our crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo or help us spread the news!
