Launch HN: Toybox (YC S18) – Communicate changes to sites without writing code

1,2: Awesome, excited to see the updates

3: Cool, sounds like you are thinking about this in a similar way. The one place where there might be issues is when using opacity, i.e. the color is defined in hex in one place and as rgba in another. I am not sure how to solve it, but might be something to keep an eye on. :-)

4: I did notice the history tab, and I think that is very helpful for seeing where an edit went off the rails. I was more meaning 2 completely different edits for the same page side by side. For example, here is what a page looks like with new-font-x vs new-font-y. Thinking about it more, maybe you could just import the page into your system twice? Not sure if you are preventing dupe URLs.

I find this interesting, but feel like there should be a "less developer" focused version for non-dev communication. IE: Product manager, stakeholder, etc. Give them an easier way to annotate parts of the page with notes, versus the current way: screenshots and highlighting things with paint, powerpoint, etc

Edit: I see the screenshot view is sorta closer to what I am getting at. Either way, sounds like you guys are solving an interesting problem and should be easy to communicate the value if you clean up the UX. I just was overwhelmed at first.

So, overall I think given the problem you are solving, there is a LOT of thought that could be done in regards to UX. So, ignoring that you guys are probably keeping that in mind, I have a few smaller comments that seem like immediate thoughts.

1) It isn't clear what is clickable and what isn't, I feel like I should be able to click on the blue comment badges and see related comments (or is that # related to requested change count?)

2) Secondarily to this, when I click on a dom element, it automatically defaults to the inspector tab, when I feel like this gets too deep for a product owner just wanting to make comments on a section

3) I am not clear on what the difference between a red highlight box around elements and a blue one means

After looking at it a few minutes more, other than the comments above, I think you are thinking about it in the right way. I feel like there are levels of depth/advanced features that should feel more progressive -- right now it seems like feature overload on that first view. Maybe the default view is just something where you can click on dom elements and add comments, the second "tab" is "Request Markup Changes" where there are no comments -- when you select an element you can make markup changes with the advanced inspector and there is a history of those, and then you might could even get rid of the "screenshot" view. Or maybe mix the screenshot "highlight area" functionality with the first/non-dev oriented commentary tab/view

Sorry if that last paragraph isn't concise, I can rewrite it better if some of it wasn't helpful. Also this is all obviously just my opinion

Edit: I made edits above ^ Edit: Last edit. I also notice the UI/UX seems a bit different on your landing page demo vs what is present in the demo link. I personally kinda like the comments having their own dedicated space to the left of the page, then you could toggle the advanced inspector tab on the right, in and out cleanly. Not sure if there is a way to change the comments to the left currently, or that was a previous build. But I feel like it addresses some of my commentary above.

1) That # is currently the order of the comments made. Can see how that can be pretty misleading. Going to be playing around with that more :)

2) Agree with this as well. Trying to think of ways to make this work for multiple personas.

3) Another great point. Red highlight box means you have either selected that element or someone has made an edit to that element.

4) Love the ideas in that paragraph. We're thinking about removing the screenshot and bringing more of that functionality into just one screen to reduce cognitive load. We'll be playing with this in the next coming days so would love to hear what you think then!

And yep that's how it used to be designed. We recently changed it because our users (and us internally lol) we're having difficulty making sense of the page when there was so much going on. Will definitely keep that in mind though and maybe make it optional if you want the comments to show on the right-side!

This would be super cool. Could even do community-based upvoting on what a leading website should look like.

Curious as to how the legal end would work re: IP. If you have 1,000 people redesigning Reddit and publishing it for all to see, there's bound to be some serious design overlap (whether intentional or not) when said company eventually goes through a redesign.