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Ask YC: Feedback From Fellow Hackers On ShowFilter.com

9 points by jgill ↗ HN
I wanted to obtain some feedback on what some fellow hackers think of ShowFilter.com. The goal of the web app is to provide personalized TV show recommendations to one person or a group of people (e.g. what should you watch if your friends and your significant other’s friends/family are all in a room together). The overarching goal for the UI is simplicity (e.g. the user should be able to provide ratings on 150 items in under 3 minutes). I'm curious to see what you think of features like "Who's In The Room", the toolbar for navigation, and the "one-pager" style of the app among other things.

5 comments

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tyohn
If it wasn't for the introduction you gave here I wouldn't know what the site was about.

When I visited the site I had no idea who I am rating the shows for; one person or a group of people or whom? In addition maybe you could provide the YC users with a (demo account) user name and password to test the system? Oh and I tried to rate a show but I got a server error...

Side Note: When I go to the sign up page and I try to go back to the main page by clicking on the logo it stays on the sign up page.

jgill
Thanks for the feedback. Looks like the site needs better introductory material. The initial screen that you see was intended to give the user a preview of the site, then when they try to rate any show, they are redirected to the sign up page.

A demo account wouldn't work for the service because the personalized recommendations would not work well if many different users were using the same account (it would be a strange person). The site allows different users to have their own accounts, then compare how the recommendations would be different if you wanted to watch a show with users x, y, and z by running an algorithm to determine what shows you would like together (or seperately).

thorax
Consider making the sign-up a lightbox. I'm not the world's biggest fan of modal lightboxes, but when I first tried to rate/vote on Reddit and it let me login without taking away my entire screen to another page, it was a good feeling.

Other than that, I have friends in this space and it's ultra competitive and getting tougher. I like the twist of coming up with recommendations for a group, but it's rare for me where that is useful for TV. I'd almost rather it provide recommendations for a video game, movie, or board game than just a TV show.

Having things disappear when I rate them is a little painful. I keep trying to quickly move down the list to rate more things, but then it refreshes (it seems) and I'm disoriented trying to figure out where to rate next.

Maybe it would help if it just said "Rate one of the below shows" and gave you a Thanks! response after you did it? I'm not sure what would improve the experience, but you may want to tweak that.

I'm not your ideal user as I don't watch TV.

Best of luck!

jgill
Thanks again for the feedback everyone! This is a busy time of year for us (we all have full time jobs that are not Showfilter.com) so it might take a while, but your suggestions will intergrated into the site in time.
rksprst
I don't like the one-page style, pages can't be linked to. It's also bad for SEO. It also causes problems with the viewstate, after clicking around a bit I couldn't go back to the homepage (stuck on the login) no matter what I clicked and even if I refreshed the page.

The toolbar doesn't describe what it does. I see some images but have no idea what they do, not text that describes what the image-button does when you mouseover images.

I think you should try to make the design more usable and easy to use instead of making it cool/trendy.