Ask HN: Please review my web app, Docley

Clickable Link: http://docley.com/admin/create_customer

A link would have been clever.

What does it do that a shared drive does not?

It seems that you are entering a crowded space with what is currently a weak offering.

How do you plan to beat

http://basecamphq.com/

or Google Docs?

Do you have any paying clients yet?

How do you plan to differentiate yourself?

Why would I use your system rather than a shared folder with controlled FTP access?

You need to address these questions on your front page.

The site design looks kind of depressing, and the logo looks weird. It definitely need some way of differentiating yourself from the competitions. I currently use dropbox for most of my file sharing/backup needs, and dropbox is a difficult player to beat.

Remove 'Username', make username == email.

Remove 'Confirm password'. Instead email the password they entered when confirming via email.

Remove 'timezone'. Figure it out based on their IP.

Make this into 3 columns.

The space is too filled up. You don't stand a chance. Let me give you a positioning that may work for you:

It's a "Document Management System". Back up your companies documents, and query and cross-reference them online. Share with your co-workers. See and reference past versions. Access your documents with our open API, mix and match.

The space is too crowded for you to try to welcome everyone. Focus strongly on business - if you can focus on more specific businesses that would even be better. Offer a compelling reason why they should use you. For my business, what I would like are:

- Desktop synchronisation - "Signing off" on documents (cannot be changed) - A way to store paper documents that somehow OCRs it (must not be perfect, just for search), and that allows me tag them with keywords - A clear way I can map the online documents to the locations where they are physically (shelf3, room 15) - Some type of category system that paid attention to the documents - for example, personal contracts of employees should not be mixed with working design drafts.

Pick a small niche that works with paper a lot and is not online too much (maybe Law?). Show them how your system improves their life. The start with that niche, perfect it for them and go capture the next. Having to go out, walk into a lawyers office and try to sell this to him will be the greatest feedback you could ever get.

1) Improve design in all aspects (change logo, colors, ajaxify (esp. simple things like renaming a file))

2) Differentiate. Don't assume I don't know about dropbox and the like.

the screenshot could use some work. its too small to read or even convey any info about the app at all, it has an evil twin lurking behind it, the perspective is way too tilted, and about 75% of the image is an ugly brown gradient.

also, regarding the general color scheme, i'd start by using the sign-up button blue instead of the turquoise. brown can be done, but its tough. check out the nettuts design for a nice example.

No comments for now, but I'd suggest SSL (https) encryption which should be fairly simple to implement.

Can't see how this would ever replace dropbox + google docs for me.

I think there are small/medium companies out there (similar to the one I've been working with recently with around 40 employees) that require a really simple self-hosted document management system. You might say that these companies should have a full blown CMS implemented, but often times all they want is document versioning, and CMS solutions like Sharepoint are expensive and can be confusing. There might be a market there but it would be hard to identify the individual customers amid a generally well-served market. The company that I was working with literally used a network share with documents organised in folders and renamed for each version. shudder. They were looking at Alfresco when I left, but I doubt they'll get the project off the ground - it's too big. If this was a really really simple SELF-HOSTED package, I'm sure they would go for it. Note: Self-hosted, not cloud based. It would need good backup features and the ability for clients to add their own ssl certificates.

Just an idea, based on observations without research.

"I have been working on Docley for about 6 months."

<withsalt> Given the technical complexity of a site like this, and the fact that you aren't yet open to the public, that seems like forever.

Have you talked to your future customers yet ? Do you know who they are ? If I was in your shoes, I'd implement the absolute minimum number of features to show the basic concept, and ship that prototype. Then I'd pitch it to just about everyone I could think of, and see what they say. Chances are, I'd change the feature set and my target audience in the process, so the faster I could ship the less time I will have wasted. </withsalt>

David, glad to see you launched, that's more than most people ever do. As a few of the other folks have said, this is a tough field and you definitely have your work cut out for you. And I bet a lot of naysayers would have said the same thing about Google doing search in 1999.

Your background and drive will go a long way. Keep moving forward and good luck.

Hi David.

Congrats on the launch.

As others have said, this is certainly a competitive space, but I imagine there's still room for innovation.

This is a nice technical foundation. If I were you my next step would be to get it in front of real users and begin to understand the unique problem you should be solving. I'd do three things in particular:

1) I'd pursue something like the "customer discovery" process to understand how your product concept maps to real customer needs. (MaxKlein had a lot of good advice on that "below" at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=956354)

2) I'd look into usability testing (via paper prototyping or even something as simple as userfly.com) to get a better feel for how users interact with this interface. I imagine there are areas that users might find confusing and ways in which you could streamline the workflow.

3) I'd research the words or language you should be using on the website. For instance, in various places on the site you refer to both "Documents" and "Files". Are they the same thing? You also use terms like "Groups", "Users", "Permissions", etc. Are these terms that resonate with your users? (I don't know that they aren't, I'd just make sure you have the terminology correct.)

I'm sure there are dozens of ways to skin this cat and advantages and disadvantages to each, but one thing that struck me when going through your site is that much of the functionality could be provided pretty much out of the box by other tools. For example, Drupal's free Database File Manager module (http://drupal.org/project/dbfm, demo at http://dbfm.org/, screenshots at http://drupal.org/node/236711#comment-785302) offers most of the same functionality and in places with a little more polish. I've no idea what your framework is (well, from your blog, I'm guessing Ruby), but you might be able to find something that does a lot of the grunt work of storing, serving and moving files for you so that you can focus on the value-add that Docley provides.

For what is is worth, here's a few specific bits of feedback for you:

1) Until you have it ready, I'd drop the "Coming Soon" video image from the homepage. Neither you nor users are getting value from the placeholder and having it there just calls attention to the missing demo.

2) In your grid of benefits ("Save time", "Share safely", "Search documents", etc.), the images are links that don't go anywhere (they just link to "#"), at least they are for me. Also, if these really are meant to be links, I'd make the whole box clickable, not just the images.

3) I'd trim the "Feedback" button out of the screenshots used in your help section (e.g., http://www.docley.com/help/createfolder.html). Personally I think they are distracting and make it harder to follow the breaks between screenshots.

4) I find the tiny document icons a little confusing or misleading. I'd test it with more users than just me, but you might consider adding some text or tweaking the icons a bit. In particular:

a) The icon you're using for "rename this file" suggests "edit" to me. You might want something more like these http://images.google.com/images?q=rename&imgsz=i.

b) The icon you're using for "preview" suggests "search" to me. Maybe just adding a document icon to it might help (e.g., http://images.google.com/images?q=preview&imgsz=i) but personally I still see that as search.

c) I'm not sure what the "Usages" icon is supposed to display. From the icon (a little bar graph) I had expected statistics on the number of times the document has been viewed or something ...