We're currently limiting contributor growth as have a few changes we need to make to the product to scale. If you're interested, please add your info here and we'll send you an email once you're added! :) http://bit.ly/ph-contributor
PH has been a pretty great resource for me. There aren't enough hours in the day to keep up with every company that launches. Quality > quantity any day of the week.
Once navigating to a sub-domain there is no link back to main. That's really frustrating so a small link at top or bottom back to techendo.co would improve my experience greatly.
How do you intend to balance the need for high quality with the desire of users to get involved in the community? Are you worried if someone can't post/comment for months after joining, they may lose interest?
Great question! Honestly, that's one of my least favorite parts of Product Hunt. I hate turning away people that want to contribute but to keep the contributions of high quality and not overwhelming, we need to curb our contributor growth.
We will be making product changes to grow the community, opening it to more people.
The way that Product Hunt has been helping me to discover new products is by the collective curation, by people that provide a lot of insight and are users themselves, just as it would on HackerNews. Above all, it allows me to get involved with the community (founders, PMs, designers, avid users). I used to go to the App Store for my discovery, but now I do it faster and easier on PH. That's why I really like it. Kudos!
Had one of my apps featured on PH and was amazed at the quality of feedback. Ryan himself wrote a detailed review and a designer from Pinterest pointed out a UI flaw I'd never even thought about.
Tell HN: It is a great website but hella addictive, so be-aware specially those who complain about HN sucking all their time, now you have 2 addictive websites to deal it. I personally would stay away from it.
It emphasizes the product name, rather than the description, which I'd argue draws the reader's eye to the wrong place; that emphasis would be better placed on what something is, which information the reader will find useful in deciding whether she cares what something is called.
Obviously we should strive for better design, but greatly exaggerating is not a useful method of critique. The original post makes it sound like this information is almost impossible to find, when it is actually the second most prominent information on the page.
The original post may have overstated the matter somewhat, but in the responses it received, the underlying issue was clarified to the point where it is easily recognizable and can be trivially addressed by the site developers if they so choose. That being the case, I can see a reasonable amount of utility in the original post, if only in that it prompted the analysis it did.
In general, I'm not fond of seeing "now, then, let's not be too harsh, shall we?"-type fussing on HN. Welcome to the Internet! People here aren't always as nice as you'd like them to be. This does not mean the things they say, however rudely, necessarily lack value.
I'm not suggesting that criticism shouldn't be harsh. I'm just suggesting that it should be accurate. The original post gave me the impression that either the poster hadn't looked at the site or else the site's design had been updated since it was written.
I don't think it's exaggerated at all. I looked at the page for like 30 seconds, thinking to myself, "What is this? I thought it was supposed to be like Hacker News, but for products. It appears to just be a bunch of people posting half-sentences that make no sense."
Seriously, the first post is "Go Dish HotelTonight for restaurants (SF)" WTF does that even mean? It's just a string of words that make no sense at all. It's literally incomprehensible to a typical reader.
It's an example of poor design; the font color and weighting draws the eye straight to the product names and away from the descriptions, which are the real meat of what the site has to offer.
Sure, it only takes a moment's squinting to figure out what's what, but requiring your would-be users to put in that effort, or indeed any effort, to figure out the most basic nature of what you have to offer, strikes me as an excellent opportunity to limit your support and public relations commitment by reducing your user base.
The memory anchor is the product name though. I go back to PH often to find products I didn't have time to check out and to jump back into discussions, and the product name is the thing I'm looking for. I can find it in seconds, and I can also see how certain products have moved up the leaderboard in seconds. Sentences as the visual lead would greatly complicate that behavior, one I think is a primary one.
Said another way, the atomic unit is product names, which I actually think is more effective than the Show HN model. Some tagging/categories would really help overall, but I think this design actually helps beyond a cursory first-glance at the homepage.
You could more or less have your cake and eat it too, if you align the site names and their descriptions in two floated columns, so it's still - fairly - possible to scan whichever column you prefer.
Why do HN readers have to always complain, at least start your negatives with some positive congratulation sort of phrase, I bet most of people who post their newly created website or service want some sort of approval by HN which will give them a huge boost of positive emotions which will allow them to make service better. Just put yourself in his shoes, you just posted a service you l've spent lots of your free time building it, and the top comment on HN has nothing positive in it...
Agreed and it's often really hard to get someone to criticise and tell you what could be improved - everyone just dishes out the usual "yeah, looks nice".
I agree! I think we should be balanced in our feedback, point out the positives and negatives. It starts to get real old when it's nothing but negatives.
Negatives are easy to point out. Similar to how "People don't know what they want", if something is working right, people may not notice it because it just works. However, if something isn't working right, it's often easy to spot it.
For what it's worth, I see a lot of positive feedback, though they're more about the service itself rather than something that the service (or UI) does well.
This may feel a little harsh but I do agree with the sentiment. I loaded the site, skimmed through a bunch of product names and had to go back and read the much less emphasized description which felt like a pain in the ass. My eye kept being drawn to the bolder, darker product names. I then closed the site. Mind you I'm very interested in the topic.
Huge congrats to Ryan & team for getting this out there. It's a great, focussed source of news on product launches that might not provide incredible traffic (yet) but that provides valuable, constructive feedback from smart people.
I really hope it retains this quality as it (inevitably) grows. We launched SupportKit for Zendesk (http://supportkit.radialpoint.com) on ProductHunt yesterday and the response was great.
Congrats to @nbashaw and @rrhoover, absolutely insane that you built this over Thanksgiving Break! It's been amazing to watch it grow in this short amount time. I always expect big things from the two of you.
Congratulations on getting this out there. My favorite hacker news posts are always Show HN so this is really cool. I love seeing what other people are working on and having a single place to find new tools could prove really useful.
That being said, in my opinion, product discovery doesn't seem well suited to the hacker news format. A new product's relevance lasts a lot longer than the average new news article does. I'd love to see tags added to each product and a way to browse by tags. Boring and probably done, I suppose, but I think it'd be more useful.
Thanks! Hacker News and "Show HN" is responsible for some of the market validation and product design of Product Hunt.
While we want to keep the product simple and useful, we do see value in adding more context and "searchability" with tagging. It's definitely on our radar.
The ability for people with certain domain knowledge or active interests to subscribe to tags, or customise their front page based on tags would be pretty nice.
Example, I'm interested in travel related ideas/products, but I've really no great interest in much of the stuff on the front page at the moment. But if something travel related does hit the site I don't want to miss it.
This might also allow for higher quality of comments, less eyeballs but more interested eyeballs so to speak.
I have been enjoying PH for awhile - congrats on the launch and getting the word out.
I would say that sometimes it is a little overwhelming to get through every service, and I look forward to a time where you are classifying/organizing the products that come through. Knowing there is a searchable repository of products would be a great resource.
I really enjoyed this site, at first my reaction was 'meh' but as I was starting to go through services and recognized some, I am seeing great potential. Startups as a rule need all possible ways to get the word out.
Shame you can't open the comments in a new tab - I usually use Hacker News that way. I realize javascript things popping up in odd strips down the side of the page are trendy but not very nice to use if you want to actually read stuff. Otherwise nice.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] threadHappy to answer any questions and would love feedback from the HN community!
But it is still invitation only, and so far I never got invited for anything invitation only and I end forgetting it and never using it.
http://www.producthunt.co/posts/868
Any feedback on how we can make the experience better, just let me know. :)
We will be making product changes to grow the community, opening it to more people.
For me, I treat it as a daily digest of cool products rather than a discussion board. I haven't lost interest yet!
Post here: http://www.producthunt.co/posts/442
P.S. Pinterest engineer, @connor, is the man.
I don't think there's any point in emphasizing the product names, when they don't serve to explain the product.
A really simple improvement would be to display the name and description similarly to HN:
E.g. I mean this in the most helpful way possible: the interface is really, really bad at serving one of its basic, fundamental functions.In general, I'm not fond of seeing "now, then, let's not be too harsh, shall we?"-type fussing on HN. Welcome to the Internet! People here aren't always as nice as you'd like them to be. This does not mean the things they say, however rudely, necessarily lack value.
Seriously, the first post is "Go Dish HotelTonight for restaurants (SF)" WTF does that even mean? It's just a string of words that make no sense at all. It's literally incomprehensible to a typical reader.
Sure, it only takes a moment's squinting to figure out what's what, but requiring your would-be users to put in that effort, or indeed any effort, to figure out the most basic nature of what you have to offer, strikes me as an excellent opportunity to limit your support and public relations commitment by reducing your user base.
Said another way, the atomic unit is product names, which I actually think is more effective than the Show HN model. Some tagging/categories would really help overall, but I think this design actually helps beyond a cursory first-glance at the homepage.
For what it's worth, I see a lot of positive feedback, though they're more about the service itself rather than something that the service (or UI) does well.
I really hope it retains this quality as it (inevitably) grows. We launched SupportKit for Zendesk (http://supportkit.radialpoint.com) on ProductHunt yesterday and the response was great.
That being said, in my opinion, product discovery doesn't seem well suited to the hacker news format. A new product's relevance lasts a lot longer than the average new news article does. I'd love to see tags added to each product and a way to browse by tags. Boring and probably done, I suppose, but I think it'd be more useful.
While we want to keep the product simple and useful, we do see value in adding more context and "searchability" with tagging. It's definitely on our radar.
Example, I'm interested in travel related ideas/products, but I've really no great interest in much of the stuff on the front page at the moment. But if something travel related does hit the site I don't want to miss it.
This might also allow for higher quality of comments, less eyeballs but more interested eyeballs so to speak.
I would say that sometimes it is a little overwhelming to get through every service, and I look forward to a time where you are classifying/organizing the products that come through. Knowing there is a searchable repository of products would be a great resource.
Question for Ryan, how are the contributors chosen?