HN Explorer

Ask HN:Review my quick app for the socially awkward

11 points by FreeRadical ↗ HN
This is a very basic app to help you converse with people you work with or loosely know but never know what to talk about. I'm interested in hearing your thoughts, any feature requests, any issues etc

www.chaikar.com

15 comments

[ 28.6 ms ] story [ 716 ms ] thread
pvg
You probably want to make registration email-free or better, require no registration so people can take a look at it easily.

Also, Comic Sans?

FreeRadical
yeh i need to add persistent login, the reg literally takes 5 seconds. email validation hasn't even been addded

regarding the comic sans, i wanted to go for the simple and light hearted look, maybe i missed it :/

pvg
Comic Sans has built up such a reputation for both ugliness and misuse (just take a look at its Wikipedia page for a brief summary and links about the kind of passions it raises) that using it non-ironically and without it being a distraction is probably impossible.
Tichy
It's just a mostly empty web site with a login form. Not even screenshots.
FreeRadical
I kept it simple to load quickly on mobiles
Tichy
Yeah, but to give at least some idea what to expect might be good?
ErrantX
this seems.... odd.

No features, nothing working - just a login screen

EDIT: Ah. I see... I missed the last line of instructions

FreeRadical
there's a register page (only need email and password), takes 2 seconds to join. then the homepage where you login and make notes.
dustingetz
I was interested, saw i had to register, didn't bother.

note that i did bother to leave a comment.

lesson in usability.

alttab
Good start. A couple things:

1) If its a password field, make it a password field. Typing in a password and seeing the text is a little weird.

2) When typing "@name likes blah," it becomes obvious when viewing the topics that you use @ as a delimiter and just take whatever is before it for the note, as the note was empty.

3) Try to make the input more robust - such as allowing name first, most of the time people will want to type in the topic (in this case, the person) first.

4) I'm sure you are working on it but a more informative interface about the notes you've kept would be nice. If a person is socially awkward they may not even remember names - much less who they've put in the system.

5) I'm not sure what your proficiency with HTML is or if you were just lazy because this is a throw-away app, but I'd look into doctypes and W3C validation. You use an xml style line break so I get the feeling you know a little about it, but for such a simple interface there shouldn't be any reason to have 25 errors on it.

I hope this criticizing wasn't too harsh - I aim for it to be constructive.

Neat idea too, I know a guy I work with that could totally use this.

jayliew
I'll add one more:

* Can you support Twitter OAuth, or FB Connect, OpenID, clickpass .. ?

We're all tired of signing up for yet another site. Usually if it's a rather prominent site whose value I already understand and I know the value will be useful to me, I don't mind biting the bullet and registering. I forget where I read this, but there was this speaker once who said "Customers don't just pay with money. They pay with their time and angst" (paraphrased).

For more obscure sites I don't want to register because I don't know what they'll do with my email address, plus mentally I am trying to figure out if my annoyance of having to sign up for yet another site is going to actually pay dividends back to me at all. I don't want to waste my time.

Basically the registration part is barrier to entry for me, and I think it will help if you remove that friction from the sign up process.

Kind of like http://CofounderGoogleDocs.com - the Google Docs spreadsheet for co-founders I posted here on HN recently. Many people jumped in because there was no friction. You just go to the page, and start adding your info (or start grabbing info)

spokey
This is quite minimalist but interesting. I think you might get more traction if you spent some time writing up the "methodology" or workflow you're proposing here.

That is, if I understand it, I think what you're suggesting is that people use this app to take simple notes on acquaintances (e.g., "wife's name is Jane", "has three kids", "went to Penn State", etc.) and then use this app to recall those notes when you are about to meet these people (say, at a party or business function). A little writeup on this approach may help you clarify the value proposition for potential users, and should help you get some inbound links from productivity blogs.