What do you like best about Shorthand?
Shorthand is an easy to learn, powerful web service allowing you to create compelling "scrollytelling" narratives without having to use expensive web design software or learn complex Javascript/React/Node.js code. In fact, you don't need any coding experience at all to use Shorthand, and yet it offers a wide variety of ways to customize your user experience, so that it won't seem like you're churning out the kind of cookie-cutter, template-ified output you often see from no-code solutions.
If you'd like to see the sort of combination business case study/historical essay/cultural analysis I put together for my personal portfolio using Shorthand, I think I managed to push the platform pretty hard and demonstrate a lot of the different usage options in my Shorthand story:
https://koreanfood.shorthandstories.com/casestudy/
If you've ever put together a particularly fancy Powerpoint/Google Slides slideshow, you can probably get started on making a good Shorthand story. When you sign up for Shorthand and click "New Story," you can start from scratch, or select from a story template. You can only have one story published for free, but there's no limit on the number of unpublished stories you can have in your account AFAIK, so I highly suggest you add the first dozen or so templates to your account and then, ideally with a dual monitor setup, go through each story within the editor, and from the preview of what it would look like to an end user. This, IMO, is the best way to learn how to use Shorthand - it only took me about 4 hours to go from never having used the system before to having a pretty good handle on it using this method.
Here's my ideal workflow - I wish I'd known this before I started using Shorthand, but now you'll have the benefit of my mistakes!
Okay, so here's the workflow I highly suggest you use:
First, using your image editor of choice (I used Canva Pro, but Photoshop would be as good or better), create the following blank editable project/design files with a solid color background of #222222 (the shade of black used for Shorthand's dark mode) or white (for light mode). Create four projects of the following sizes:
4096 x 2160 for Scrollpoints sections
25610 x 1440 for Reveal sectinons
1080 x 1920 for Mobile
Secondly, enable the guidelines to show the "safe" viewable area for each image. (On Canva Pro, this is "File -> View Settings -> Show Margins)
Finally, add images and text as necessary WHOLLY within the safe margins of the appropriate sized project file, then save the output as a .JPG for uploading to shorthand.
Doing it this way will make it easy to adapt your elements of your shorthand story for mobile, and guarantees it will look right, with text and images synced properly, across any browser or device. I wish I'd done it this way from the beginning, and in the future, this is definitely the workflow I'm going to follow. If you follow these steps, implementing a great-looking Shorthand story will be very easy, and anyone with basic design experience will be able to do it. If I had a design background, this probably would have been obvious, but coming from a coding/Python background, it took me a while to figure this out. Overall, though, I'd say ease of implementation is good. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike about Shorthand?
That said, it is easy to make mistakes in designing your Shorthand story that will be a pain to correct later - I should know, as I made just about all of them. So let me give you the heads up here so you don't make the same mistake I do.
First, I should have realized it when adding a new "Text" section was NOT in the same category as "Synced Media", but while text sections can have up to 3 columns, ***these columns will not necessarily appear sycned with each other on your users' device or browser***, and in addition, on mobile, the text sections will display each column one after the other - so all of column one from beginning to end, then all of column two, then all of column three, for example. If you try, as I was trying to do, to split text and images across two columns intending them to scroll down the screen together, this will NOT WORK. So don't try it.
Instead, here's what I recommend: while Shorthand offers a variety of different "section" styles to use, I pretty much only recommend you use three - "Reveal" (light or dark), "Text Over Media", and "Scrollpoints" (particularly scrollpoints static). In my story I linked to, those are the only 3 I ended up using IIRC.
I'll explain my ideal workflow at the end of the my "Pro" section, but one more thing:
A story designed to look good on a desktop/PC screen will NOT necessarily look good on Mobile right away. "Scrollpoints" sections actually translate to mobile pretty much on their own, but "Reveal" sections do not. Once you know what you're doing, it's easy to adapt your story for mobile, but you will probably need to implement those adapations manually. So, ease of integration is easy if you're thinking ahead, but difficult if you're not. Kind of the same as any system.
The customer support was great - I had some problems with my Shorthand story (because of overuse of unoptimized image files), and Shorthand got back to me right away with suggested next steps that actually worked. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
