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Rate my startup: Holono, showcase your projects and build a portfolio

4 points by ozziegooen ↗ HN
http://holono.com/

I'm a EE college student and realized that I needed a website to show off all my projects. After talking with some of my friends I realized that it was an issue a bunch of people had.

The site is quite simple; you make pages to showcase all of the projects you have done or are doing. A "project" could be electrical research, a startup, an adventure, or anything else you are proud of. As you add things you'll make a pretty portfolio of your accomplishments.

I've been working with two other Harvey Mudd students to build the site. None of us knew rails until we decided to give it a go about 4 months ago. So far we've debuted it to our college, but are now opening it up outside of that.

We'd really, really appreciate some feedback. The website has taken quite a bit of work but I think could be very useful.

9 comments

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codeslush
I like this - good job on your first Rails project. Similar to about.me, but actually much more useful (in my opinion).

Very well done!

jsavimbi
This is good, I like it.

Feedback:

- Lose the hippie on the front page. - Even-off the weight of the login options. Consider making the Fb login less prominent and equal in stature to the "normal" login and also consider enabling Google and/or Twitter auth as well. - The registration form needs to be a little bit more preemptive like the facebook link being facebook.com/(html input follows text) - get thee to gravatar - you need some visual design help, but that can come later (tone down the reds, bigger fonts in forms, etc.) consider a theme. - I love the random button

Good work, I hope you get a lot of users.

ozziegooen
Thanks!

I've gotten a fair bit of negative feedback on the homepage and am looking to re-do that completely soon. We'll work to add Twitter auth soon, and maybe Google soon after.

I would have changed it before submitting to HackerNews, but was afraid of never submitting. This is great encouragement, thanks.

codeslush
Interesting - I REALLY like the homepage! I like the orange/red -- it gives me a good feeling.

I agree with some of the fonts and field sizes - but these are actually relatively minor things to fix. I think you are on to something with this and wouldn't go changing too much until you've had a lot of feedback to support it.

I really think you are much further along then most people who submit for feedback. Pat yourself and your team on the back and iterate as needed/warranted.

EDIT: Also, I'm a conservative professional, but I actually like the hippie! :-) I also think that will fit the demographic of your visitors too! Just my opinion!

jsavimbi
Don't worry about it, you guys are fine. The app works as expected and also has the added benefit of the random button, and if you're using any type of metrics (hint) it would probably be a well-used feature. The UX is probably something you guys don't have a lot of experience with but as long as you can consistently provide the functionality you have and scale it accordingly, I think people will like it and find it a lot more interesting than waiting for others to bubble the content up.

Something I forgot: GitHub. it' a great resource and you can add value by listing the user's projects from there. That will give you an easy-import option to seed the app in its early stage. Seeding is important.

ozziegooen
That's a good idea.

We were trying to decide between importing content from Github, scraping PDFs/word Docs, or importing from another site. Right now we were going to try to figure out who the first users were going to be (and what they want), but I definitely would like to add the functionality sometime, especially if coders start taking a liking to it.

You are very right about us not having a lot of experience. None of us have ever had any design or UX experience, and are kind of making it up as we go along while making numerous revisions.

As for metrics, do you mean us using Google Analytics and such, or us giving the users metrics about how many views they are getting to their user & project pages?

jsavimbi
My reasoning around Github is that you guys are engineers and are obviously going to gravitate easier to your brethren and make it easier to develop/refine your featureset. Making it for everyone is hard as we all have competing interests. The thing about having immediate content available from my past makes it easier for me to contribute without having to come up with something to make the app immediately useful for me. The first engagement is the most important and will help the user decide if the app is worth it or not. That's why I always use gravatar yet allow the users to add/edit their photo in my apps. It's a personalized welcome, like they do at nice hotels.

Don't worry about the UI too much. A good one requires a professional to focus on that alone for awhile to get it right. A good one costs money. That can all come in time.

Google analytics are fine, there are some other packages out there that you can slip on, but when I do usability tests, I measure exactly how many clicks each button/action receives and valuate their purpose to the app based on those metrics, so yes, some internal metrics will be very valuable to you in order to dole out resources to the app, and if you're so inclined, give some light metrics to the user to show them how many times their particular project was visited. It's a cheap trick (like karma) but people are people and they enjoy validation.

Also, if you think of it, listing the number of active projects in your app on the homepage is another easy come-on and helps conversion, just like McDonald's has been doing for decades now.