Glossary
Tell-show-tell.
Tell-show-tell is a demo narration technique: say what the audience is about to see and why it matters, show it, then say what they just saw and what it means — every feature gets a frame before and a conclusion after.
The technique exists because unnarrated showing fails quietly: the presenter clicks through something meaningful, and the audience, lacking context, registers motion. The first 'tell' primes attention ('watch how long this takes — most tools need a report for this'), the 'show' delivers, and the second 'tell' locks the conclusion in ('that was one filter, no export').
In an interactive demo the viewer narrates for themselves, so the structure moves into the tooltips: the stop's sentence before the click is the first tell, the screen that follows is the show, and the next stop's opening line closes the loop. Tooltips written as labels ('Reports page') skip both tells; tooltips written as claims ('See which deals stalled this week — no report needed') are tell-show-tell in one line.
In Tellane: Write each stop's tooltip as the first 'tell' — what the buyer gets, not what the button is called. The editor's stop list is where the narration lives. See how →
FAQ
One more question
Does tell-show-tell make demos longer?
Live, slightly — and clearer. In an interactive demo it costs nothing: the tells are the tooltips you were writing anyway, done properly.
Related terms
Often confused with
Comparing tools?