1. Home
  2. Content Marketing Software
  3. Shorthand Reviews
  4. User Review of Shorthand
It's Shorthand for good content design
September 19, 2022

It's Shorthand for good content design

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Shorthand

We use Shorthand to tell detailed, and highly visual, feature stories on our news website that deserve extra attention and which we believe will help engage our audience for longer than average. We have used it across news, sport, awards and lifestyle areas to give special treatment to a story. We use it to differentiate it from our opposition's approach to similar content. It offers a great way of using images and video to enhance a story.
  • Enabling visual storytelling with multiple pictures
  • Embedding rich media within a story, including video
  • Engaging readers for longer than average dwell times
  • Making it easy to create striking article design without coding experience
  • Additional flexibility in how text is overlaid on pictures would be welcome so that there are more choices on what images to use with particular layouts
  • Enabling users to control the path of text - for example, enabling runaround - could enable some excellent designs
  • Adding additional section templates could speed up design
  • More flexibility in caption placement would be helpful
  • Full-screen beautifully designed templates
  • Flexibility in article design, without need for coding knowledge
  • Ability to tailor for laptop and phone audiences
  • Relative ease of use
  • Helped us create one of our top 10 most-read and most-shared stories in the last year
  • Enabled us to elevate key pieces of content, boosting dwell time on our site
  • But can also be time-consuming to adopt for some stories, meaning you need to choose well what stories really deserve the investment in time
  • Boosted collaboration between teams via its ability to share, including offering the chance for others to preview content prior to publication

Do you think Shorthand delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Shorthand's feature set?

Yes

Did Shorthand live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Shorthand go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Shorthand again?

Yes

Shorthand is ideally suited to visual stories where you have a good number of images and/or embeds or video to include.
It is well-suited to long-form stories, where you wish to keep the readers' attention longer than usual.
It can help to differentiate particularly important or intriguing stories from others on your website - and for this reason, it could be used as a premium content tool, perhaps for subscribers.
It can also be used to showcase stories about awards you've organised, giving them special treatment.
It is less suited to breaking news, or very time-sensitive news stories, as it can take some time to prepare, post or update shorthand stories.
And it doesn't work well for stories with strong accompanying imagery.

Shorthand Feature Ratings

Content Creation
9.0
Content collaboration
9
Content Publishing
6.8
Content hub
9
Embedded CTAs
7
Content distribution
6
Content promotion
5
Content Reporting & Analytics ()
Not Rated

Shorthand Reliability

As a web-based service, it is easy for users to log into from anywhere. Content can easily be shared, as you can set up teams that enable access to each other's work as required. And content can be reviewed by others before publication using the sharing function. You can also view how an article will look on different devices.
I have never known it to be down during my use of it. All you require is an internet connection to log in and you can use it on multiple devices. Adding ease of accessibility, there are simple ways to log in. I've also never known a Shorthand story to go down once live on our site.
Due to the integration with our content management software, there is a short delay on our site while it loads, which may cause some readers to drift away. However, I've seen other sites where it instantly loads articles, so I believe this to be down to the content management software behind our site more than Shorthand itself. Once that brief initial period is over, it doesn't require additional loading time.