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Ask HN: Feedback on startup, Fol.io

20 points by cilliank ↗ HN
After months of development and testing we released Folio last week and would love your honest feedback on our concept and platform. Any feedback in relation to: - what you think of the concept in general? - would you be more interesting in buying or selling? - what strikes you as positive/negative about the platform? - would you use it? If yes/no, why/why not? - what type of content would you be most interesting in selling?

All thoughts, feedback and opinions greatly appreciated!

25 comments

[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 79.5 ms ] thread
mondras
I've been an early user and I think it's a genius idea, I love the fact that it is integrated with my OS, the memory footprint is a little high in my opinion but that's it! Loved it!
cilliank
@Mondras - thanks for the quick response!

You're right the desktop app is definitely a little memory intensive, something we're working on but really appreciate your feedback. Anything else is really appreciated.

mmayernick
The OS integration is really interesting and compelling - sort of a Dropbox + eCommerce. I wonder if more services will start to look like this (at least those that involve files).

Do you have data on desktop vs web engagement of the product?

davidandgoliath
Genius idea re: os integration, I can see this gaining traction quickly if executed properly :)

Enjoy!

cilliank
@mmayernick - that's exactly what we're trying to achieve as I believe that the need for assets is specifically part of the production workflow (whether it's design/development, etc) so it's very action driven (i.e. I need something I search, I'm selling something I post). So we believe tight integration with IDE's is vital.

Right now it's about 30% of our overall traffic which is probably higher than we expected but certainly not what our vision is yet.

cilliank
@bmelton - thanks, for some reason when I tried to submit it with a URL the post wouldn't submit!

@davidandgoliath - thanks for the support. We're working hard on version 2 already, hence hunting for more feedback :)

Cheers.

Quiark
I find the landing page overcrowded and thus confusing. The two slides on the blue background change too rapidly and the download button is ill-placed and looks somewhat ugly. Viewed on a 1366x760 notebook display which may be responsible for most of the bad feeling, but it's still probably something you may need to look into.

I have never used a service like this before, but that can change in the future. Still as a Windows user, this service does not stand out from the others for me.

Hope you find this useful.

cilliank
@quiark. Again, really appreciate the feedback. I'm actually on a similarly sized notebook right now so seeing the same issue you're experiencing. It is a little cluttered and I suppose in honesty because we'd had feedback in the past that users wanted to see as much content as possible we focused on squeezing in a lot.

The download graphic was a last addition so absolutely something we need to address.

Really useful, again thank you!

bobwebb
When I scroll the page, it lags slightly. I'm using a reasonably fast computer on Linux and this kind of thing doesn't happen all that much. I can only assume it's because of all the elaborate javascript, CSS, etc.
cilliank
@bobwebb, thanks for this - can you advise what browser (preferably with version number) you're using? You're right, it's likely the large amount of Javascript but also at present the infinite scroll rapidly loads a lot of quite high quality PNG preview images which we've found has a direct affect on some browsers. We're working on both refactoring and image optimization to correct this.

Cheers!

jameswyse
I haven't looked at your code but I encountered a similar problem on a site I was building, the scrolling was fast in every browser except firefox. Turned out that firefox doesn't dispatch scroll events as quickly as the others, but I found a function which fixed the problem:

http://blog.keithclark.co.uk/faster-scrolling-parallax-websi...

Might be irrelevant but I thought I'd drop this in, in case it was useful.

cilliankieran
Thanks James - will certainly take a look. I'm not sure if this is related or if it's simply the number of assets being loading are struggling on different browsers.

Cheers.

loevborg
Fast enough on (what feels like) a hellishly old computer running Linux and Chrome 19.
cilliankieran
Thanks Loeveborg - good to know it works on that setup as we're currently testing on a limited range of platforms. Cheers.
mnicole
Much like I noted in my comment yesterday about Creative Market, I think that services like these need to be quality-controlled if you want repeat visits from buyers and worthy sellers alike. At first-glance, the content looks pretty tacky - what differentiates this site from its equally-cheap competitors?

Another question I asked Creative Market: how do you plan on moderating resources (ensuring people aren't selling tutorial pieces or files they got/bought elsewhere) and as someone that would sell content, how do I ensure that someone doesn't just tweak my pieces and resell them (or are you equipped to handle disputes)? This sort of site seems ripe for ripping people/styles off that they see on Dribbble/elsewhere for a quick buck. Is there any incentive to bring higher-caliber designers on board while being able to keep the prices competitive?

Also from a UX standpoint, clicking a filetype should highlight it and darken the rest of the choices whereas it does just the opposite right now.

Interested to see where this goes.

cilliank
@mnicole, I've been thinking a lot about your feedback and if you have time would really appreciate if you elaborate on your views on attracting worth sellers. Do you think the one thing that would compel you as a designer to post is quality control? If not, what are the one or two things that would most influence your decision to upload content, in the same way that you do to Dribbble for instance?
mnicole
Of course.

Knowing there's someone there curating quality stuff is a huge plus, but having a curator that is truly knowledgeable in the industry is preferred. I actually wrote an email to the fine folks at Behance letting them know that their Web Design Served gallery was pretty lackluster considering the talent they have on their site, expecting that there was some sort of algorithm in place that would shuffle content tagged as Web Design over to Served once it hit a certain amount of Likes or if the user has a lot of Followers. To my surprise, they got back to me and told me that their posts are hand-picked by staff members. After that, I lost a bit of faith in the platform and stopped utilizing it as a place I went to (daily) to find inspiration. Clicking through page after page of thumbnails got old and was really time-consuming, and I was hoping a site like The Served would eliminate that work for me, but it had the same problem.

Another thing for me, personally, is I thrive off of competition; it has consistently kept me moving forward and it seems to be the driving force behind a lot of Dribbble trends and rebounds alike. At the same time, as a day-to-day designer, I'm not going to be in the market for assets for most projects so the question becomes "How do you get designers to stick around and contribute to a site they wouldn't necessarily use themselves?" I think an answer to that would be that competitive factor; give them the opportunity to upload and explain changes they made from the original(s) and get real feedback not only from other designers but people that are actually in the market as well. One of my biggest issues with Dribbble is that it can tend to be more of a wankfest than it is a place to get real constructive criticism, and sometimes those criticisms are weak or flat-out misinformed.

I don't know how you monetize off of the concept of designers one-upping other designers to ultimately create a quality pool of assets for people to choose from, but I like the sound of it and will keep thinking about it. :)

Does that help?

cilliankieran
Really helpful mnicole, thank you! Sorry to ask more questions but you're offering a truly valuable and different perspective to other feedback. I'm curious to hear more on your view that you wouldn't use it for assets and you don't think most designers would.

Interestingly some other designers have said that they're looking for 'building blocks' or components to save time in the design process. Do you feel that's an exception rather than the rule and therefore you design absolutely everything from scratch without borrowing inspiration or gathering assets to speed things up? This is really what I'm interested in knowing more about as it's really this insight that to speed up design downloaded assets that are still in layered art format (i.e. a PSD) can help to speed things up? Would love to hear more and incidentally if you could drop me a mail would love to ask you some more questions?

cillian (at) fol (dot) io Cheers.

mnicole
I might be in a different boat than many of my peers (and for this reason I wish HN had more designers), as I've started designing almost exclusively in the browser outside of some initial wireframing on paper, so my assets are CSS and not PSD. In that sense, I wouldn't mind using others' work because the ability to see the code and the output are valuable in determining if I'm going to (or can, browser-dependency pending) use it. I'm also able to change values on-the-fly to see if it looks good in different colors, dimensions, etc. With PSDs, I'm left waiting until I open the file to see how it was created, hope it was done right, and then try to tweak the Layer FX to suit my needs. I've also then got to go through and slice it up and sprite it out.

When I was using Photoshop exclusively I created everything from scratch, mostly just because I am a perfectionist and because it was another way to learn. As is the case today, the only assets I'm willing to download and pay for are icon sets and typefaces. If I see something someone else did and want to use something similar, I'll simply copy/paste the flat image into Photoshop and recreate on top of it to cater to my needs.

Emailing you now!

cilliank
@mnicole thanks for the really solid feedback. All the points you've raised are quite reasonable. If I'm hearing you correctly your biggest concerns are around the 'cheap' factor and the risk of rip off while also maintain quality content and viable pricing?

I don't want to appear to have an answer for everything but we have a pretty complex community based curation solution that will very much be powered by it's users in the future and we have some ideas on how to work with top designers but at this stage it's very much about proving that there's a need for a tool like this.

Bear in mind, our focus isn't on ripping off - it's actually on allowing creatives to sell the building blocks of their design work between one another. It's really about the 'foundations' and not complete design work. This is for content creators/professionals to rapidly share assets between each other - think about how you use font libraries rapidly rather than perhaps cheap assets. We're not there but we're working on it! :)

On the UX point - can't fault you for spotting that - very eagle eyes, we're still working out some UI kinks and already looking at more drafts of this.

Any more feedback would be appreciated.

mnicole
Right. For me, I'm not really into selling my resources to other professionals; for that I'd rather hand them out for free and see what they turn into in the hands of other creatives like is done on Dribbble already (also because I imagine that it is faster for a real designer to be inspired and create new assets than it is for them to download mine and waste time going through the layers, making tweaks, etc). If I'm going to be profiting off of it, I'd be selling the work as-is to devs and/or people that can hardly manage their way around Photoshop or sliced up into sprites and/or straight-up CSS. That being said, while code is more out-of-the-box useful, I can't really justify selling it either since all it takes is a View > Source to steal it.

I'm much more likely to search and find what I need on a service as vast (and generally free) as deviantArt than I am to look on ThemeForest, iStockPhoto or the like. Something about people and money makes the quality of the content go down in order to just churn it out and on the opposite end, the buyer's remorse is greater when you open the file and it isn't what you'd hoped.

cilliank
Thanks for this mnicole - probably some of the best feedback we've had! I'm eager to see how many others share this point of view so will keep gathering feedback for now.

Cheers!

reiz
I like the name and the logo. But landing page is a little bit over crowded. And for me "App" and "Audio" in the Filter just didn't fit to the page. This 2 points are more confusing for me. It remembers me a little bit on 99designs and istockphoto.
cilliankieran
@reiz, Thanks for the feedback. Yes this is what we're hearing from a number of people. We're currently reducing the category options and also looking at the design to better reflect the marketplace nature of the system and get away from this 'gallery' concept.

Would love more feedback in the future if that's possible.

Cheers!