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Ask HN: Please review my new social learning site

cafecourses.com

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Re: Ask HN: Please review my new social learning site

#11

Post by apsurd »

To me, the signup/login forms are not clear. You use "login" on the signup form. I instinctively associated that word with logging in, so i kept looking for where to "sign up". A better word would be username.

When signing up using the big orange sticker icon on the right, you get no status message as to what happend after submitting the form. It was only after trying to sign up using the top left link that it told me "username exists" which meant the sticker signup apparently worked.

Not requiring a password on initial signup tells me you want ease signing up as much as possible; why are you requiring email validation then? Seems counter-productive. Let users gain instance access, and then delete accounts that haven't validated after a set timeframe, (with reminders).

Minor pet peeve. The facebox boxes have too little padding on the left/right margins. It does not look nice.

I tried to sign up for a course by clicking on the plus sign, but after I do that I am lost as to actually how to "take" the course. Maybe this is a lack of content issue, but I'm still puzzled as to whether these courses have video, audio, read like a textbook, or??

That is all for now.

Re: Ask HN: Please review my new social learning site

#12

Post by apsurd »

Using javascript for sign up.

Even though something like 90%< of users have javascript enabled, I think it is an unnecessary risk to have a signup form be 100% dependent on javascript. Especially when it is so easy to just provide a real link to a basic signup page and then load that right within the facebox using jquery. Pretty sure you are using facebox and facebox makes this ridiculously easy.

Re: Ask HN: Please review my new social learning site

#13

Post by jgilliam »

I signed up. The "conversational japanese" course was highly rated and recommended, so I enrolled in it, but I don't know what to do now. There doesn't seem to be anything there. Where's the course?

The "enroll" button was a bit scary, I wasn't sure what that would do. I'd expose as much of the course materials as you can without forcing someone to enroll.

Re: Ask HN: Please review my new social learning site

#14

Post by whacked_new »

bdmac97 wrote: post #10
kajecounterhack wrote: post #9

Hrm "Get In. Get Out. Get Smarter." Don't like it already, sounds trite. "Ya tai! - Hiro Nakamura, Heroes " What has that got to do with anything? And it is "Yatta" not "ya tai." The entire style of the site feels cheap too. I'm not sure, maybe the striped banner up top? You need a logo.

Thanks for the feedback. The Hiro quote is just a placeholder until I get a good one to put there. I like Hiro. I'll fix the spelling though! Don't worry, if I get some funding for this the first thing I'll do is hire a graphic artist to make it look better. One guy can only do so much.

> Don't worry, if I get some funding for this the first thing I'll do is hire a graphic artist to make it look better. One guy can only do so much.

HN understand this, but users will not. Ever.

This isn't specifically about your site, but about your response; that mentality could work against you. I didn't spend much time thinking about the graphics on your site, but if you provide whatever the user is looking for, who cares about looks. Shiny shiny is just the bait.

Re: Ask HN: Please review my new social learning site

#15

Post by mahmud »

kajecounterhack wrote: post #9

Hrm "Get In. Get Out. Get Smarter." Don't like it already, sounds trite. "Ya tai! - Hiro Nakamura, Heroes " What has that got to do with anything? And it is "Yatta" not "ya tai." The entire style of the site feels cheap too. I'm not sure, maybe the striped banner up top? You need a logo.

Cut the guy some slack FFS. He managed to get a good idea and launched it. Congratulations are in order and kudoses. We can't really predict the success of his project by the absence or presence of minor details, like a striped banner, and no site feels cheaper than Craigslist.

Fixing the UI/design is an iterative, everyday process, and the great majority of it will ever come to light after heavy traffic and use.

Regards.

Re: Ask HN: Please review my new social learning site

#16

Post by bdmac97 »

mahmud wrote: post #15
kajecounterhack wrote: post #9

Hrm "Get In. Get Out. Get Smarter." Don't like it already, sounds trite. "Ya tai! - Hiro Nakamura, Heroes " What has that got to do with anything? And it is "Yatta" not "ya tai." The entire style of the site feels cheap too. I'm not sure, maybe the striped banner up top? You need a logo.

Cut the guy some slack FFS. He managed to get a good idea and launched it. Congratulations are in order and kudoses. We can't really predict the success of his project by the absence or presence of minor details, like a striped banner, and no site feels cheaper than Craigslist. Fixing the UI/design is an iterative, everyday process, and the great majority of it will ever come to light after heavy traffic and use. Reg…

Thank you very much!

Re: Ask HN: Please review my new social learning site

#17

Post by bdmac97 »

apsurd wrote: post #11

To me, the signup/login forms are not clear. You use "login" on the signup form. I instinctively associated that word with logging in, so i kept looking for where to "sign up". A better word would be username. When signing up using the big orange sticker icon on the right, you get no status message as to what happend after submitting the form. It was only after trying to sign up using the top left link that it told m…

I've addressed most of these concerns in the last deployment I just did. The lack of notification on signup was a caching problem.

After signing up for (enrolling in) a course you should be taken to that course's landing page. A navigation section gets added to the sidebar when in a course that lists out that course's sections (assuming it has any). At that point, the norm would be to simply progress through the course's sections in a linear fashion but that is not enforced so you can skip around if you want/need.

I guess I need to somehow make it more obvious what you do when you are in a course.

Re: Ask HN: Please review my new social learning site

#18

Post by bdmac97 »

jgilliam wrote: post #13

I signed up. The "conversational japanese" course was highly rated and recommended, so I enrolled in it, but I don't know what to do now. There doesn't seem to be anything there. Where's the course? The "enroll" button was a bit scary, I wasn't sure what that would do. I'd expose as much of the course materials as you can without forcing someone to enroll.

On the content issue, most of the existing courses out there were created during the private friends/family beta. I have not removed them under the assumption that they will simply fade to meaningless over time. I believe the "Conversational Japanese" course is still under construction but the owner "published" it for testing purposes. Getting quality content is my primary concern at this point!

Didn't mean to scare you with that enroll button haha. Enrolling at this point really doesn't do anything other than give you full access to the course (you can then rate/review it, access the sections, and partake in the forums).

I have a story to think about letting people in w/out enrolling but am unsure how well that would work because then it is hard to gauge a) how popular is a course and b) should a user be able to review the course. Plus I intend to eventually allow course owners to charge for their courses if they so desire and want to get users used to enrolling since eventually that may have a checkout process attached to it.

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