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Thank you
Ask HN: Please review my website
mathmaster.org
I find the configuration of the worksheets somewhat confusing. What do minimum and maximum value mean for reducing fractions? That is completely unclear until generating a few worksheets and seeing what it does, but generating a few worksheets and then tweaking the results is a pain because of the lack of HTML preview.
Some of the sheets seem repetitive. I did 20 reducing fractions problems, and almost all of them had 54 in the numerator.
In regards to design, I think one thing that would really help is having some visual guidance in the form of icons or previews. Instead of tucking the list of available worksheets on the side of the home page, stick it right in the middle and instead of making them normal links, make them big buttons that say what they are and show a preview of the type of problems you can generate. Instead of giving complicated names to the types of problems ("associative multiplying with missing number"??), show a picture of them. Users are going to get frustrated if they have to download a dozen PDFs to finally figure out what kind of worksheets they actually want.
Great idea and am sure lot of people out there will find it useful. All the best
Your "Follow Us" "On Twitter" part should be all one line, and perhaps be reworded to "You should follow us on twitter here (see http://dustincurtis.com/you_should_follow_me_on_twitter.html)
The 1px border at the bottom of the page shouldn't extend past the footer, this looks pretty ugly.
The front page "Worksheets available" could be reworked into a "Popular Worksheets" ranking sheets on the number of views.
The text fields in the registration page should all line up, it looks pretty bad how they are at the moment. Also on that page:
"We'll only use your email to send you signup instructions" could be reworded to "We'll only use your email for signup", less words means people are more likely to read it.
I didn't see any monetization in my (admittedly brief) visit. Do you have any plans to make money from the site?
And what does registring get me? If nothing, then don't even allow it, if something, then show me what.
By the way, I really love that you fill the generate form with sane defaults. You don't even have to think about filling anything in and can just start to see what it's all about. Lesser sites would annoy you with stupid "Required field" warnings.
As far as design goes, the site looks pretty good. It's not super flashy, but I think that's generally a good thing.
A few minor nitpicks.
1) I think you should put a few images on the homepage, and possibly elsewhere. Text is nice, but I find I value the visual description as well. A picture's worth a thousand words and whatnot.
2) This is very minor, but when I was registering, I accidentally hit enter before I entered my password. Naturally, the page spit back a few messages saying I needed to fill out more fields. I have no problem with this, as it's just standard behavior. What bugged my was the error messages indicating the fields I had left blank. The title of the field and the field itself get separated by the error message, which itself seems too big. I'd consider a different way of indicating that a field needs correcting. Very minor though.
EDIT: The login screen does this too, and also, when I mistype my login, it just says "please correct the errors below" which is not a standard "your login is incorrect" message.
Also, I guess I have no idea if having an account actually provides me with any advantages. I didn't see any changes with the site, other than the fact that I could logout.
A bug: After logging in, when I click on one of the worksheet topics to fill out my preferences and then generate it, I am automatically logged out.
Great site overall!
I think forcing a PDF download in order to have any idea what you're getting is a mistake. Some sort of HTML preview would be really nice. I find the configuration of the worksheets somewhat confusing. What do minimum and maximum value mean for reducing fractions? That is completely unclear until generating a few worksheets and seeing what it does, but generating a few worksheets and then tweaking the results is a pa…
Second, and it would be helpful to view some demos on the front page. I realised I was going to download some sheets, but what did they look like? Shouldn't be too hard to screenshot a few as demos.
Very quick feedback: it was immediately obvious to me what the site did, and it only took a couple of clicks to make it do something useful. This is exactly the way that things should be. The site solves a clear problem and it does it well. Good stuff. I didn't see any monetization in my (admittedly brief) visit. Do you have any plans to make money from the site?