
Launch HN: Toybox (YC S18) – Communicate changes to sites without writing code - bmaho
Hi HN! We&#x27;re Jono and Brendan, the founders of Toybox (YC S18). Toybox lets designers, marketers, and copywriters communicate changes to developers on any website, without having to write code. These changes get annotated as CSS edits so engineers can understand, reply, and implement the fixes (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.toyboxsystems.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.toyboxsystems.com</a>).<p>For years Jono and I have struggled to communicate changes with one another during the development cycle. As a UX designer and Jono as a full-stack engineer, we spend hours going back-and-forth, trying to make small but important tweaks to sites. This was by far the most frustrating part of our jobs, driving us to try to solve this age-old problem.<p>While learning about the development to design handoff, we’ve come across some common challenges teams face. First, not all companies have sophisticated or easy to deploy staging environments to quickly share works-in-progress. Second, some designers make tweaks using Chrome Inspector, but these changes don’t persist and are recorded nowhere near the relevant web page. Lastly, the majority of these conversations are happening in unofficial and unformalized spaces, making it easy to dismiss and disregard.<p>The first problem we attempted to solve was creating a way to share web pages without a staging environment. To do this, we built a chrome extension that collects and sends the rendered DOM of the current page to Toybox. People write HTML and CSS in creative ways, so making sure we accurately re-render the captured page within Toybox has consistently been a fun and difficult challenge (looking at you CSS in JS...).<p>We built Toybox in a way that doesn’t require prior front-end knowledge to use. We created an inspector that makes any page feel like Squarespace—a universal WYSIWYG of sorts. As you make tweaks, those edits get saved as CSS allowing a developer to contextually review where on the page a change was requested and the relevant code required to resolve that change. To see it in action, we made a demo of Hacker News here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;app.toyboxsystems.com&#x2F;share&#x2F;Zodzjmzhpx3w" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;app.toyboxsystems.com&#x2F;share&#x2F;Zodzjmzhpx3w</a><p>We&#x27;re excited about the possibilities of having a rendered web page within Toybox. We’re currently testing the concept of style and component linting. Instead of the rules being tabs vs. spaces :) we can lint for incorrect uses of color, accessibility, typography, button styles, and so forth by using design files or style guides as inputs. With the rise of component libraries and design systems, we’re excited to further automate these QA efforts and make this communication channel even smarter.<p>We’d love to hear your feedback and personal experiences when it comes to this phase of the development process. You can try Toybox for free here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.toyboxsystems.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.toyboxsystems.com&#x2F;</a><p>Thanks, Brendan &amp; Jono
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soared
Your hn demo is super interesting. It would be cool to see designers fix
popular websites ( _cough_ reddit) and then be able to release those changes
to the public.

~~~
hamslamwich
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.

~~~
bmaho
Oh that's awesome. And yea - not sure how the legal end would work either.
Will ask around and let you know what we hear!

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hfourm
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.

~~~
bmaho
Agree with you there.

We've been thinking about having an "advanced" toggle which would hide the
"developer focused" inspector and just leave a comment field. Wondering if you
have thoughts on how we could do this better??

~~~
hfourm
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.

~~~
bmaho
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!

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uxamanda
This is cool and solves some of the issues around staying organized when
creating a final polish punchlist that come up, even when I'm doing the design
and dev myself :-).

Couple thoughts -

When adding a new comment, I was surprised that mine became "1" which reflowed
all the numbers. Seems like it would be helpful to append the comments so that
the numbers stayed static.

Also, it would be neat if I could change the styles of all the similar
elements at the same time. For example, when editing the .storylink class, it
would be neat if I could choose to edit all similar elements or just that
specific instance (like I can in the normal inspector). That would make it
easier to preview my changes and make what I am trying to change clearer to
the developer.

Another feature this brought to mind would be a way to preview all the colors
in use on the page, kind of reverse engineering SCSS color variables. That way
a designer could preview what changing orange --> green across all uses might
look like before committing to it. The designer could also suggest a new color
be added to the palette. In a dream world, this would also work for all font
styles in use. Basically creating a reverse style sheet so you could see and
consolidate minor differences. Maybe this is what you mean by style and
component linting?

Finally, it would be cool to have "versions" or "groups" of the edits. We
often debate whether we should go one direction or another, and being able to
flip between a few options without fully coding a solution would be neat.

Cool project and good work!

~~~
bmaho
1\. Can't agree more with the numbering issue. We're going to be fixing that
ASAP :)

2\. We're currently working on adding the ability to edit just one element or
all that are associated with that class. Should be live in a few days!

3\. Yes and yes. We're super interested in this idea as well. We've been
testing out showing all the style elements in use on any given page ( i.e. on
this page you're using these 5 grays, 4 type styles etc.). With that
information, we can allow users to "add" those elements to their saved styles
and see if something on the page doesn't match. For instance, the red we use
is #C8080A but I can now see that in these 8 places we're using a red that
doesn't match. Would love to hear your thoughts around this!

4\. There is actually a "History" tab located on the side-panel where you can
view the changes made to that page over time. Let me know if that's what you
meant and how we could improve the visibility/usability of that!

~~~
uxamanda
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.

~~~
bmaho
3\. Totally hear you with regards to opacity. Will have to think about how we
deal with that :)

4\. Ohhh I see. Yea that's an awesome idea. Basically showing a diff between
different design decisions? We'll definitely play around with that and see
what we can do!

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lee101
I built something similar: with [http://WebFiddle.net](http://WebFiddle.net)
you can see what any site would look like with custom CSS and JS applied, its
like an editor for changing the web/plugins/extensions ect. Used by technical
types.

~~~
bmaho
Thanks for sharing that. Took a quick look and looks really cool!

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everdev
My clients (VPs of Marketing and CEOs) would never provide feedback in a tool
like this.

It's Email or a phone call every time because they don't have the time it
desire to learn a new tool for what to them is a one off design project.

~~~
bmaho
Totally hear you there. Thanks for the feedback!

We've seen freelancers and agencies record feedback themselves while on the
phone with their clients but appreciate your honesty - super helpful for us.

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sgrove
Definitely like the HN demo!

Few questions:

1\. Is there a way to set different CSS for different breakpoints? It seems
like if I tweak it for desktop size, it also applies to the mobile screen.

2\. Is there an output that shows the full CSS diff so I know the extent of
what I have to change, as a developer? Ideally you'd even be able to pull in
source maps and generate a patch file for me to just apply.

3\. Could you even make it so that this just generated a PR on the GitHub repo
with the changes in the CSS/LESS/SCSS? Seems like that may require a lot more
integration with the tooling, so might not be worth it.

~~~
kolnik
Thanks!

1\. Breakpoints are definitely something we’ve heard and are actively working
on!

2/3\. Another great idea - would love to hear more about what you hope to
extract from the full css diff, versus change by change? The patch file/PR is
an awesome idea and something we definitely want to push on as we integrate
more with the chrome dev tool api :)

\- Jono

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newscracker
I thought I'd check the demo site, but it's spinning the loading animation for
more than a couple of minutes now. Perhaps there's a big traffic spike with
the launch news. I'll check it out some other time if I remember.* But this is
one of the most important things to address quickly.

* Don't trust users to remember and go back to a site that seemed interesting but wasn't working or loading.

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wsul
Really love this concept, awesome job guys. Do you think marketing and growth
teams will use to surface ideas for copy and layout changes? I could
definitely see a future feature that let teams vote too -- would be super
valuable for growth teams that are moving fast.

~~~
bmaho
We've started seeing some Marketing/Growth teams use the product to
communicate copy changes etc. so we're interested in how else we can provide
value there.

Love the idea of upvoting edits. Will definitely test that out more :)

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raving-richard
Great to see Toybox getting some attention. While I'm still not convinced that
BSD-0 is the best license, it certainly encourages innovation in the space.

Wait, you're not Robert Landley!

Naming stuff: one of the hard problems of computer science.

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sueders101
Wow! This looks awesome. After signing up and playing around with it; I can
actually see this fitting in to my real workflows. I see you guys have
integrations coming soon, and the only request I would have is Asana support.

~~~
bmaho
Glad to hear that!

Just added that to our backlog :) Wondering how you envision those changes
within Toybox being displayed/integrated in Asana?

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anacleto
Nicely put. It's been a while since I saw a product so nicely curated.

Well done.

~~~
bmaho
Thanks! Let us know if there is anything we can do to make it better :)

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JohnDotAwesome
Wow this is really neato! Often times, I find myself not only changing CSS,
but editing the HTML. Does that work in Toybox?

~~~
bmaho
At the moment, our WYSIWYG allows you to edit the CSS properties of any
element. The only HTML element you can edit via Toybox at the moment is
changing text.

Would love to hear how you'd envision editing the HTML? Wondering what types
of edits you're currently making to the HTML via the console?

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Yoric
That sounds interesting. Do you plan to port this to Firefox? I'd love to test
it :)

~~~
bmaho
Right now, you can view and edit any web page in Firefox but to capture it,
you have to use our Chrome Extension.

We’re looking at other ways to “capture” pages i.e. js snippet, firefox, etc.

Let me know if you have any preferences or ideas there :)

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Kagerjay
How do you differ from Webflow and zeplin/figma?

~~~
bmaho
Zeplin and Figma help teams in the handoff from design to development. They
take design files and automatically translate the vector-based shapes to CSS
without having to manually redline.

We go the opposite direction - from development to design. We capture web apps
or sites (not design files) and allow non-technical teammates to make edits
and communicate those changes with developers.

Webflow allows anyone to create and host a website from scratch using their
robust WYSIWYG.

Unlike Webflow though, with Toybox you can capture any web app or site and
make edits using our WYSIWYG (don’t need to have originally built it using
Toybox).

