The DIY micro-guide platform HowDo, which we last covered back in October last year, has just launched on the web. It was previously only available on iOS.
HowDo is an intriguing little startup. Based in Berlin, the company’s platform offers a very simple way to create instructional storyboards: you just take a series of photos with your phone, make a slideshow out of them with a voiceover, and post the result. It’s very much geared towards the maker movement although, as I noted last year, the same mechanism could also plausibly find an application in citizen journalism.
And now it’s on the web too. You can’t create HowDo guides on the desktop — that’s still an iOS app-only task — but you can now embed them in blogs or websites, or search through profiles from the browser. It was previously possible to view HowDo guides on the web, but only if someone had sent you a link, and even then the guides were in no way interactive.
In keeping with the original app, HowDo’s web player interface is quite simplistic: you can click forwards and backwards through the frames, and that’s it. It’s enough to do the job, though, and I can see it working well in the context of Tumblr or Pinterest embeds.
In terms of users, HowDo won’t say much beyond “tens of thousands”, though that’s fair enough – it’s targeted quite a specific market at launch, and iOS specificity is another limiting factor. An Android version is planned, but development hasn’t started yet. At least making the guides more easily viewable by those outside the HowDo community should help the platform grow.
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