Ask HN: Review our webapp (Sproost); team met on HN

    * Windows, floors, wall material, and other architectural features
    * Color — it's easy to change color combinations
    * Layout and arrangement — also easy to change

But I suppose if I were actually looking to redecorate, I would put more thought into my votes.

This is totally important. This is why almost all shopping carts these days use 1-2-3 style steps. The technical term (from User eXperience) is scent, and it's what gives the user a continued incentive to keep going.

I almost quit the StyleEngine until I saw that, but I almost didn't see it at all.

The quiz is very long and it seemed to my european eyes that there's an overhang of traditional styles and little differentiation among contemporary options. Modern seems to imply asian.

I didn't like most of the rooms, but after making my choices the system summerised my style pretty well. Very well actually.

The "design your room" page suffers from some layout quirks (Firefox 3). One of the items in my room got stuck when I switched to selecting more items from the sofas category. That rug just kept hovering on top of the sofas and only went away once I used the budget slider. I wasn't able to repeat it later though.

I love the budget slider but sometimes it didn't stick. It kept snapping back to the greatest price range.

My room looks a little jumbled because the pics aren't aligned at all. I understand that I'm supposed to arrange the items as I see fit, but that doesn't make much sense to me since I can't possibly make the whole thing look anything like a real room. The sizes and perspectives are just too different. I suggest you pre-align the items next to each other. People can still move the items around if they want to.

I appreciate that it's very difficult to actually let people design a room that looks like a room. It would work a little better if I could zoom individual items so I could at least put that lamp next to the sofa and make them look proportionally sized. To take this further you could figure out the sizes of the pieces from the vendors' sites and automatically zoom them accordingly. I know, I know that's a massive amount of work and maybe it wouldn't help enough to make a real difference.

I'm not sure why the "saved rooms" and the "design your room" pages are separate pages. I would prefer a drop-down to select other saved rooms right on the "design your room" page. The cost rundown could be placed on the "buy your furniture" tab or dynamically displayed by clicking somewhere next to the total. In my opinion, there are too many pages and menu/tab levels.

The "to be added" section isn't very useful I think, but if it's there it should at least let me remove stuff from it.

The signup process is OK. No confirmation emails, no nothing, just an email address. But I would still let people see the room designer before making them sign up.