Ask HN: Please re-review my new website www.favilous.com | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Please re-review my new website www.favilous.com

favilous.com

13 pointssw120520 comments

In your responses here you state you are aiming this product at the masses. So I'm going to attempt to review your site from this angle.

Before putting on my typical user hat let me say that I like the concept quite a bit and the site design is very nice.

I am putting my 'mass market consumer' hat which means I'm pressing the back button in 10 seconds unless something good happens.

I see discover. bookmark. share. But these are kind of vague... (I would A/B test this heading) But intriguing enough for me to checkout the tour.

Next I see what looks like a movie/slides. I press play and see the instructions are "click on play icon to view". I press play and get to the "what is favilous?" slide but then nothing happens. I don't really see another play button anywhere. This happens when I remove my mouse from the play task bar and unless I go back over it don't see it again. The play button to the lower right of the mouse if quite small and hard to see. Maybe think about either explicitly stating to keep pressing play or clicking the screen to keep the slideshow going or turning this into something more like a movie.

The slideshow itself is of very high quality but the initial slides highlight features. The entire time I was asking myself... I want to see this thing in action. Take me through a typical user experience with the app. What can this app do for me? This doesn't happen until much later on. I would make the slides more into a story about what a first time user would do and how this would be useful to me - a casual user.

Feel free to email me if you have additional questions.

Thanks very much for this.

I can see that quite a few people are struggling with the playing of the tour - we will have to make this more obvious. I don't think Prezi offer an easy autoplay option.

You are right with regard to the user experience and this is something that again we are rolling out in the next two weeks. We have made a video of a user bookmarking, discovering and doing other bits and pieces to do with the site. We will post this somewhere on the site (still to be decided!) and hopefully this can solve this issue as you are right from the homepage you still don't get a complete feel as to what Favilous does.

May well take you up on the email option - thank you for this. Also, we are offering a yammer style service to the worker (see my comments below). Would like to know what you think of this?

thanks

I would post this video right smack on the home page. To the right of the signup/tour buttons and try to make it btwn 30-90 seconds. Maybe with a heading like... See it in Action. And to stay consistent with the high end feel of your site I would try to make the video high quality.

Yes. Email away - I love providing feedback. While I do think a yammer style service would be useful I would try to focus on one thing and really knock it out of the park. If you are making the choice to pivot your product towards a yammer/bookmarking combo product that is new tech this is a new hypothesis and should be part of your overall strategy. As opposed to adding bells and whistles.

In my office, we all have common links... email, time tracking, bug tracking, PM web app, etc. And having a centralized bookmarking network would be useful. Especially if I could publish a bookmark to say all the sales people and say - read this o sales people it's useful. But you would have to ask people in management (which I am not) for a more important opinion since they are ultimately the ones making this decision. Or aim this new product at the front line employees and move it up the chain verses down.

It has been a month exactly since we posted Favilous for review.

You all gave us such excellent feedback and we have been working through each of those to try to enhance the site. We also have a lot of exciting new features that we are working on in the next month or two.

We have redesigned the homepage in line with your comments and we still need to tweak it some more.

We now have over 275 users (more than Reddit in their first month) and have over 7000 links bookmarked.

Any further help you can give would be much appreciated!

Thanks

Steve

Cool.

Bike-shed-color style: when I tried the tour, I was told to click the "Play" button. I did, but then I found it doesn't really "play" it. It's a "next" button, you have to keep on clicking it.

Impression:I'm not sure why I'd sign up. It says something about bookmarking, but like most people I already have a bunch of bookmarks in my web browser and wouldn't want them in two different places. Does it integrate the two?

Or is it another sharing stuff with people site? If so how does it differ from facebook, twitter, reddit, stumbleupon, delicious, digg, mixx, technorati, etc.?

I don't know what it's new big feature or innovation is. Or how it's different at all. Explicitly tell me what your new big innovation and feature is. Or if there is no distinguishing feature (which is fine), at least tell me "we are different than other sites because we are NEW, BETTER, and AWESOME"

True... there are a ton of sites which do almost exactly the same things. But in a non-saturated market there's always room for a usurper with some kind of hook. Be it better usability, just a more stylish interface, or simply better marketing. So I'd say its got a chance. Saying that, the service is far too invasive for me, or probably most other people on here. We already have enough goddam firefox extensions etc., and already know 1m places to get buzz and social-driven recomendations. But pitch this at the n00b-level, and pitch it well, and it could be a winner imo.

One of our ideas that we are thinking of is 'work networks' - very much like Yammer. We aim to position ourselves, in the next couple of months or so, as a Yammer for bookmarking.

We will still offer the same 'personal service' for our users but we will also go down this other route. Like Yammer people will be able to create and then join a private work network. You will be able to bookmark work links and documents as part of your work network and build up your Favilous work page. You can share these with other people from your network and your network is private - you cannot see out and other's cannot see in.

Would this feature be of use do you think? As I say we are a couple of months away but I know I would use it and find it useful so I am hoping others may feel the same way!

Any feedback on this would be most welcome...

I couldn't immediately get the video to play (IO_ERROR), looked around for something else that would tell me what the site did, failed, gave up. My recommendation - add a text based explanation of what your site is for.

Hi guys,

I have gone back to your last submission and think you have, largely, done well.

You have taken the comments on board and implemented them pretty effectively. 275 users is pretty good going too.

I would like to be able to convert my existing bookmarks however before I sign up with you..

Keep up the good work.

I think the design looks cool. Personally, I would like to see the fonts in the main graphic a little fuller & "fatter" if you will. I think those bullet points are part of your key selling points, so they should probably be bold and strong in order to draw more attention.

That is a fair point - these bullet points are our key sellers and this is something that people felt we had failed to do last time we posted. Do the bullet points give you a flavour of what the site is/does?

The bookmark tools slide down animation is incredibly jerky is safari.

Also the front page doesn't tell me enough to get me excited about your product. How does it differ from Reddit/Delicious? What makes it special? Why should I sign up?

When you're loading in ajax content, it loads very slowly. I clicked the sign-up button and it took about a second to load.

With regard to your first comment I will look into this and try and fix it - works fine in IE, Firefox and Chrome (I believe) but I thought that to be true of Safari too. I will look into it and fix it.

With regard to your second comment - Favilous is aimed at the mass market. We feel that Delicious, in particular, is a bookmarking site for 'techies' and we are keen that anyone can use Favilous. We also want to focus on the bookmarking and not just the social part of social bookmarking. We also feel we fit well with the IPhone and IPad markets - our site is particularly visual, clean and simple. Added to that the fact then when you are browsing from any browser be it IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari (on the IPhone or IPad) you can bookmark any link using Favilous

If you're somebody who thinks "I like this article but I haven't got time to read it now, I'll read it when I get home", you might email the link to yourself for when you do get home. With favilous you can click one button and it saves it for reading later.

We wanted a visually compelling site that focused on bookmarking and the ease of bookmarking. With additional touches such as being able to have your own background image, sending links to your Favilous followers, seeing what is popular on Favilous and discovering new sites and reading descriptions of sites.

We are also going to be offering a big feature in the coming weeks that we hope will give us a niche in what is a very competitive market.

Here's a link to the original feedback - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1060022

The tour looks beautiful!

Used a neat tool called Prezi to do it - very cool site, check it out! We wanted a tour that was a bit different and one that matched our ideals - I.E. very visual..

stylish. I like the idea of saving a bookmark to look at later... does the service email you at your primary email address???

Funny you should say that. We are rolling out a bunch of features in the next week or so and this is one of them! Along with some enhancements to our bookmarking tools...So just to clarify you would like to click 'view it later' and it would email you the link to your primary email address? Is there any other features like this that you would like to see?

thanks

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