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Ask HN: Can I help you be more awesome today? (No strings.)

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11–20 of 175 posts

Re: Ask HN: Can I help you be more awesome today? (No strings.)

#11
Hi Mike! Thanks for displaying such unselfishness and support. It's really people like you who begin making a difference.

If you don't mind, I'd like to get some feedback for the landing page http://grooovy.me . If this is something that you might be interested in, signups would be appreciated. It would also help immensely if you can spread the word about us in any way you can!

Again, thank you for taking the time out to do this. You're amazing.

Re: Ask HN: Can I help you be more awesome today? (No strings.)

#12
post #7

I'm trying to expand my online LaTeX editor into a viable business. My cofounder and I think there is potential for a great enterprise product where we could really improve the workflow in publishing houses and teaching, where LaTeX is used a lot. We've had enough feedback from individual users to think this, but we're struggling to get our foot in the door with the people we'd need to talk to about selling to them o…

I think you forgot to include the link. By Googling "jpallen online latex editor", I found jpallen.net and ScribTex. To make our volunteer's efforts more expedient, I'll note that the url is at -> http://www.scribtex.com/ <- Click that.

Thanks, I didn't think the actual site was too important and didn't want to appear spammy. But you're right, actually what ScribTeX is can only help matters!

Re: Ask HN: Can I help you be more awesome today? (No strings.)

#13
post #2

Sure: Go to https://app.profitably.com/plan_ahead and model out a business. Would love to hear your thoughts on 1) how we can streamline that process 2) where you felt most confused or lost Thanks! Graham

Thoughts as I go through:

- Interface is quite busy. There is no clear call to action so I have to wade through the elements to see what I'm suppose to do first. (I highly recommend you play around with Wufoo's onboarding process to get an idea of a clearly defined path.)

- I like how you broke up the steps to the left, but it's not clear they are steps until I click NEXT. Conventionally, links to the left of a page are used for navigation. Placing numbers to the left and bring more attention to the current step to clarify that there is a flow here.

- I really appreciate the supporting material. (Video, articles...) The video would probably be very beneficial to introduce the step to the user and what they will do. Find a way to shorten the video to a 30 second overview and then offer a longer 3 minute version if the user is interested in hearing more. The 30 second clip might start when the screen first loads. (The auto load should probably be limited to new users only... saved users will have already seen this and will annoy them after some repetition.)

- Find a lecture hall with carpeted walls and re-record those videos (or invest in a clip mic). The echo is horrible in the video.... (still, major points for having the video in the first place).

- When you're segmenting customers, make the left area your "workspace" and the right area your committed data. Allow the suggested segments to be expanded. The first time the user does this in each step, give them tooltip explanations of each field and what it means in the big picture. Just a few lines are sufficient.

- A progress bar would probably help for long processes like this. I'm now noticing that the left side expands as additional steps are covered. So maybe the numbering scheme above might not work. But some combination between numbers actions and a progress bar should indicate to the user how far along the process they are. I currently feel like I'm falling down a rabbit hole so far...

- I should be able to reorder each (Customer Acquisition) Stage ever after they're added. Having to remove them after realizing it needs to be entered in order is forcing the user to do work twice.

This process is drawing out. Had you not specifically asked me to look through it, I probably would've given up a step or so back. I'm not sure what your on-boarding process is like, but the user should be prepared to invest 30-60 minutes if that's what it will take. (And PLEASE make sure you justify why it takes so long! Let the user decide if they want to make that investment with full knowledge of benefits and value they'll get.) I'm going to stop for now but I can continue on it later if you'd like. Hope these initial thoughts help a bit for now.

Re: Ask HN: Can I help you be more awesome today? (No strings.)

#15
post #7

I'm trying to expand my online LaTeX editor into a viable business. My cofounder and I think there is potential for a great enterprise product where we could really improve the workflow in publishing houses and teaching, where LaTeX is used a lot. We've had enough feedback from individual users to think this, but we're struggling to get our foot in the door with the people we'd need to talk to about selling to them o…

I'd be happy to play around with it a little bit over the weekend. I know a few people in academia and will ask their opinion as well. Maybe that will provide some help...

Re: Ask HN: Can I help you be more awesome today? (No strings.)

#16
post #9
post #6

Can you think of a way to improve my game's[1] interface, taking into account that it has to work on both mobile devices and PCs? Also, if you find any bugs I'd love to hear about it! [1] http://cardinalquest.com/free_edition/

Quickly, on OpenSuSE 11.4 (x86_64) running Chrome 14, the game interface doesn't hide my system's mouse pointer, but also displays its own. Slightly visually distracting. While playing, I would move the spell bar to the left, as that seems to be both more natural and more common. For whatever reason, having it on the right distracted me a lot more from the gameplay, I felt as though I always had to keep looking over…

Thanks! The mouse cursor is definitely a bug (doesn't happen on windows, mac os x or ubuntu).

About the left vs. right - I didn't think of that. I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that my mother tongue is Hebrew (written from right to left)?

It sounds far fetched but I've noticed other such "directional" issues since moving to Europe a few years ago.

Re: Ask HN: Can I help you be more awesome today? (No strings.)

#17
Hey thanks! Would love your feedback on http://www.workforpie.com/. It's a resume of sorts, built specifically for software developers, and based primarily on open source contributions to Github and Bitbucket.

I'll leave it wide open, but would especially like to know what feature/features you think might make it useful to you. (survey completed, btw :) )

Re: Ask HN: Can I help you be more awesome today? (No strings.)

#18
post #2

Sure: Go to https://app.profitably.com/plan_ahead and model out a business. Would love to hear your thoughts on 1) how we can streamline that process 2) where you felt most confused or lost Thanks! Graham

Thoughts as I go through: - Interface is quite busy. There is no clear call to action so I have to wade through the elements to see what I'm suppose to do first. (I highly recommend you play around with Wufoo's onboarding process to get an idea of a clearly defined path.) - I like how you broke up the steps to the left, but it's not clear they are steps until I click NEXT. Conventionally, links to the left of a page…

PS: And you should consider accepting "+" characters in the email address. It's valid. (i.e.: user+name@domain.com)

Re: Ask HN: Can I help you be more awesome today? (No strings.)

#20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thoughts as I go through: - Interface is quite busy. There is no clear call to action so I have to wade through the elements to see what I'm suppose to do first. (I highly recommend you play around with Wufoo's onboarding process to get an idea of a clearly defined path.) - I like how you broke up the steps to the left, but it's not clear they are steps until I click NEXT. Conventionally, links to the left of a page…

PS: And you should consider accepting "+" characters in the email address. It's valid. (i.e.: user+name@domain.com)

Hmm -- I thought we did (our CTO is a huge fan of that)
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