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Ask HN: Is there a tool / product that enables commenting on HTML elements?

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Re: Ask HN: Is there a tool / product that enables commenting on HTML elements?

#41

Post by onion2k »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #39
onion2k wrote: post #24

If you have concerns about UX I'd have thought you should be commenting at the design level rather than leaving it until things have got to the stage where they've been developed to the point where there's HTML to talk about.

In my experience, this doesn’t work. It’s always in everyone’s “In a perfect world” plans, but no one ever seems to have much to say, in the beginning. Even technically-proficient major stakeholders (for example, managers and testers) seldom offer much in the way of feedback, early in the project. I have learned to write my applications in a manner that affords “hands-on” testing, as early as possible, and I use tech…

I have learned to write my applications in a manner that affords “hands-on” testing, as early as possible

I think we agree in principle. I prefer using design tools that offer 'interactive' previews like Figma, but the idea is the same - get feedback from stakeholders as early as possible.

Re: Ask HN: Is there a tool / product that enables commenting on HTML elements?

#42

Post by solardev »

onion2k wrote: post #24

If you have concerns about UX I'd have thought you should be commenting at the design level rather than leaving it until things have got to the stage where they've been developed to the point where there's HTML to talk about.

Nobody really knows this stuff. If you're at huge companies, you have the luxury of having several rounds of UX testing. But it's still largely trial and error.

At smaller outfits you just have ramshackle processes that sometimes include user feedback, sometimes not. The stakeholders rarely know all the applicable personas and journeys and such right off the bat, especially for greenfield features...

Not disagreeing with you, since that would be really nice, just never really seen it in practice. Every org I've ever worked for had made UX a low priority.

Re: Ask HN: Is there a tool / product that enables commenting on HTML elements?

#43

Post by solardev »

unilynx wrote: post #3

What if the element moves or is replaced in the next design iteration ? I’m not sure you want to be merging and splitting tickets on individual DOM elements to keep the comment history sane.. Though I would be interested in tooling that allows clients to simply create issues by clicking an element and then saving full context (dom, screenshot, url, form state, browser and session) with that issue. Something important…

Most of the good tools like that do capture the context like that, while still making it easy for the end user. Even just a paragraph plus a screenshot plus the url plus the console is a great start, and that's all easy to capture automatically but hard to get from users manually.

Then there is a pipeline from that into your issue manager. I've sent them into jira, Airtable, etc. for further refinement and work.

Re: Ask HN: Is there a tool / product that enables commenting on HTML elements?

#45

Post by solardev »

metadat wrote: post #2

How is this your biggest problem? Emailing an annotated screenshot or attaching to a JIRA seems better because it's more consistent and blends with other processes. What should happen when webpages content changes or goes defunct? Now you're also creating an archive.org... and on and on. Don't get stuck and sink your time into a local maxima. Maybe you'll find a market [of fools] willing to invest time into this exac…

Actually, this an ecosystem of visual bug reporting tools that already exists and it's very useful when your other testers/stakeholders are time constrained. These days people talk about user experience, well, this is the equivalent of that for tester experience. It makes it a lot easier to submit useful big reports.

When you mandate jira (which is slow even on its fastest day) you then a big report from a 2 second click in an on page tool to like a 10 minute process, filling out all the fields, cropping the screenshot, copying over the url and console log and any network errors and all that. It takes forever and people eventually just learn to slack you a sentence instead, or just don't even report things anymore because it's such a hassle.

Jira is the absolute worst tool for user facing interactions. It's designed for management, not devs, testers, or users.

There are much better tools to make your life easier if you fall into the latter groups.

Re: Ask HN: Is there a tool / product that enables commenting on HTML elements?

#48

Post by felixboet »

flyinglizard wrote: post #20

Yes, we used Pastel https://usepastel.com and it was very nice overall.

+1 … I used Pastel on a web project with multiple non-technical stakeholder writing comments on design and texts. Worked great. It also saves screenshots of the annotated area, so no confusion if the HTML changed. Absolutely recommend

Re: Ask HN: Is there a tool / product that enables commenting on HTML elements?

#49

Post by thedg »

When my cofounder Irtefa and I were PMs at Cloudflare we actually searched for a tool like this and when we couldn’t find one we liked, we went out to build it ourselves.

Our first attempt was a product that let product teams leave feedback as annotations tied to DOM elements, but what we learned is that product teams have a hard time trusting those comments as the underlying DOM does change (screen & viewport size, os/browser, geo/language, recent deploys, logged in account).

From there we went on to build Jam (https://jam.dev) - letting people quickly comment on what they see in the DOM and send a perfect snapshot with way more context than a screenshot (with even console logs and network requests attached) to a link to share or even a Jira ticket.

If you give it a try, I hope you find it’s much faster than screenshots and feedback the old way (we used to do feedback in a spreadsheet as PMs ), and would love to hear what you think! :)

Re: Ask HN: Is there a tool / product that enables commenting on HTML elements?

#50

Post by westurner »

Hypothesis/h is a (Pyramid) web app with a JS widget that can be added to the HTML of a page manually or by the Hypothesis browser extension, which enables you to also comment on PDFs, WAVs, GIFs: https://github.com/hypothesis/h

From the W3C Web Annotation spec that Hypothesis implements https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/ :

> Selectors: Fragment Selector, CSS Selector, XPath Selector, Text Quote Selector, Text Position Selector, Data Position Selector, SVG Selector, Range Selector, Refinement of Selection

> States: Time State, Request Header State, Refinement of State

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