Asking for Feedback on Our Startup: Coordinatr.com | Hacker News Reader

Asking for Feedback on Our Startup: Coordinatr.com

coordinatr.com

26 pointsdrm23792 comments

PG says to get your site out early and often, so thats what we're trying to do. We're far from finished, but feel its about time to take the ultimate test, and show the news.yc crowd.

Our Site: http://coordinatr.com is a site designed to give you the necessary tools to quickly and effectively coordinate plans with your friends, without any unnecessary garbage to slow you down. Check out our FAQ for more info: http://coordinatr.com/welcome/faq

Please take a moment if you would to take a look at our site, and let us know what you think. Thanks in advance for your feedback and/or criticism.

Congratulations on all your hard work. It's a nice looking, easy to use site. That said, here are a few issues.

1) It has a very silly name. The whole fad of misspelled words has run is course. I think it automatically associates your site with the whole concept of "yet another web2ish site", which simply won't last forever.

2) There is a serious lack of screenshots on the page. Show me what you do and how you do it, before asking for my email. Also, a screencast wouldn't hurt.

3) The calendar doesn't automatically highlight what today's date is. I think it should.

4) You don't seem to support Unicode. This is a huge mistake, which is quite typical of American startups. I created an event on purpose with the name "Questa è una prova". It got converted in an unhelpful "Questa ? una prova".

5) In the list of invitees, you cut the names down to the first part of the email addresses only. So now all I know is that I invited "info", not info at johnsmith.com.

6) In the profile area you only have settings in place for city/state/zip. Again, very American centric. And it's a bad thing (TM).

7) In the confirmation email, if info@reddit.com invites info@ycombinator.com, you send emails that look like this: Dear info, info has invited you to...

Thanks for the feedback. We understand the name is silly, but we wanted to get a domain that meant something when too many domains are random madeup words. Coordinatr.com is as close as we could come to getting that point across. If you have other recommendations for available domains, let us know!

The display name is generated based on your first, last name, and email address, so as soon as you enter a first and last name, we change what is shown. This way, we don't have to ask a lot of questions up front.

We understand it is very US centric right now. Our goal is to get it out there and get a user base so we can justify spending more time and resources on improving functionality and user experience.

Speaking as a human being rather than a L337 haxxor (or however the kids spell it nowadays), I think a photo of happy friends hanging out on the front page would be preferable to screen shots.

That might make it seem kinda fake with stock photographs and all.

If the photo looks "fake", sure. I think a decent photo would work great - maybe one of the founders or from users?

Better “This feels fake” than “What the fuck does this do? Looks like they want me to read the FAQ…”

Not supporting Unicode or non-American addresses is not necessarily a mistake. It depends on who your target audience is. I know, it sucks for the rest of the world, but maybe it just encourages international startups.

Here's a way you could get people to start inviting without registering. You let them go through the whole thing, and add their own address at the end. They hit send, but the mail to the other people doesn't actually go out until they've finished the registration.

That way, they're more invested in actually going through with it than if they have to register to even get in.

We agree that our biggest issue right now is probably the registration requirement and we've discussed exactly what you're proposing. Once we can build out our queuing system, we're going to move it that direction. Thanks for the feedback.

Whether Front-loading or end-loading registration requirements is more successful seems to hinge on which is greater: (1) the user's expectations coming into the site (2) how great the user finds the site once he's using it.

If your site has a low value when the user signs up but this value builds as he uses it more (eg. networking sites) then you're probably better off front-loading the registration requirement. My experience.

Yeah I would like to see more of the site and service before I have to register. Could there be a test event area that shows the comments, photos, and all that and perhaps lets the guest add comments and such... this could be reset every hour, but quickly give me a better idea of the site.

1. Your name is so 2006. By choosing this name you immediately set yourself up as an also-ran instead of an innovator.

2. The first thing you did was ask me for e-mail and password. You did not give me a chance to try out your service. You did not give me a chance to see what it's about. You were unable to get me to type in my e-mail.

3. Your site is all about people and social events -- why are you using business-speak to sell it? Micro-events? Would a teenager or a college kid think that a "micro-event" is a cool place to be?

4. I didn't think your site was ugly until I read your "faq" asking why the site was so ugly. Then I was like .. hmm .. I think he's right ...

5. What determines if a user will switch from an existing system to a new system? if (valueAddFromNewSystem - painOfSwitchingToNewSystem) > (valueFromOldSystem * lazinessMultiplier), then people will switch. You have no control over the values of valueFromOldSystem or lazinessMultiplier. Here's my question to you: How do you think you are doing on the values of valueAddFromNewSystem and painOfSwitchingToNewSystem?

Some people like the name because it actually relates to what we're doing. Some people don't. If you have a better idea, we would love to hear some suggestions!

I understand your concern about micro-events but micro-blogs seem to be pretty popular, so we're thinking this is a good way to describe the area we're targeting.

For your number 5, there aren't a lot of people using events sites right now. Evite is by far the most popular, but no one is going to use it if they're going to a happy hour tonight, thus we are attempting to increase the valueAddFromNewSystem through exercises like this (user feedback) while minimizing the painOfSwitchingToNewSystem by simplifying registration and streamlining the process to get up and running.

It might also be applicable to add in an additional variable, which is painFromOldSystem. Attempting to perform a task while being hindered by banner adds and a confusing interface may go so far as to drive a person to a new site/service. While we obviously have no control over that, that variable is rampant in this market segment, so we like to factor it in to our decision making process.

Good point about the FAQ. We were attempting to have a light hearted, entertaining FAQ, but it isn't coming across that way to most people. Definitely looks like some revisions are in the future.

Thanks again for the recommendations!

I like the instant feeback thing on the left - very slick!

My only complaint is that it forces you to sign up if you want to view the event details. I can do this with Facebook already.

I'd like to see more details in the "You're invited..." email. That way I could invite people like my parents (who vaguely understand email, but not how to sign up for this kind of service) to quick & easy events.

Forcing a sign up to see the event's message board, or something, might be a good compromise.

Site looks very nice! Very uniform design style - I don't love how all the headings are lower case, but that's probably a personal preference thing.

Thanks for taking a look at it. We tried to keep everything simple, so we're glad you like the design.

We're also not happy with the current registration flow, so look for changes to that in the coming weeks!

Yes that instant feedback thing is slick! But I thought it said facebook - and I got a little jaded. It must be me.

I saw that, too, for some reason.

Yeah i like that and think it keeps out of the users way.

On a UX note, please add a afterFinish function to the slide animation that focuses the first form field. Thanks!

I'll briefly preface my comments with the fact that when I've submitted sites to YC in the past, people have tended to focus on superficial things (IMHO). Maybe because it's easier to do that in a short span of time.

You've got a nice start, so take all of my comments with a grain of salt, of course:

- The front page is generally boring (screenshot? at least a photo of happy people?). I think other people have touched on this.

- There are too many things to click on the front page. Why are there two links to the "about" and "faq" pages? Are these the elements that you want people to focus on?

- In the same vein, there's too much text in general. I think engineers tend to overestimate the amount that people actually read on the web. I don't think you need to "dumb down" your site -- it's just that showing, rather than telling, tends to communicate more.

- The "create event" page is snazzily designed, but ultimately seems more like work than like fun, and it's one of the core interactions of your site.

- You can purchase contact importing scripts online for less than $100; I'd recommend it.

- Random: why have a FAQ if there aren't many users to A Q F? My experience has been that I nearly always guess incorrectly the questions people might ask.

- Why is the "logout" link under "Profile"? I had to click around awhile to find it.

- There's a lot of talk of "friends," but how much do you want to integrate social-networking features into the site? The more friction you have for other people to use the site (eg, if invited people have to "sign up"), the less likely they are to use it.

- General thought: How do you plan to differentiate yourself from Facebook, Renkoo, Evite, Skobee, and many other startups who have tried (and mostly failed) to solve the problem you're solving?

Congrats on launching and best of luck.

You bring up some very good points, most of which we have been concerned with and have been debating about as well.

Quick Question: - In terms of too much text, are you referring to the about us and FAQ pages? Or was that an "across the board" comment?

We're taking the approach of a little goes a long way. A lot of sites inundate you with content and functionality...they give you a pneumatic nailer when all you needed was a pushpin. We're trying to give you a pushpin and maybe some picture instructions. As you pointed out, many other sites have failed at this already, so it's key for us to receive and closely analyze user feedback to see if this is indeed the correct approach to be taking.

Thanks again for your candid feedback...it is greatly appreciated!

I was speaking in general terms, but the specific thing that brought that to my attention was the welcome notification -- the yellow box filled with "stuff you can/should do" after you sign up. My hunch is that it would be intimidating to new users -- there's too much text and perhaps too much ambiguity as to what's the next step.

It sounds like you guys have a good attitude for improving the site -- my only other suggestion is to log every single action users take, and base your product changes on such data, not on hunches like the one I offered above. :)

Completely agree about too much wording. Eliminate half of the words on the page, and then cut the remainder in half again, right?

We're trying to walk the fine line between an intimidating amount of words and not having enough content to accurately convey what we want to say. The welcome and all other wordy areas could definitely use another once over.

Thanks for the response!

Ditto almost everyone else's comments, especially about registering first. I'll also add my (highly personal) opinion about something else:

There seems to be a disconnect between the appearance of the site and the verbage. The design is excellent: simple, straight forward, and very professional. Build by pros who will be around for a while. Something I wouldn't hesitate to adopt.

Then words like "garbage", "vespa with tassles", and "kick in the pants" make me wonder if this is a bunch of script kiddies with a hobby. I know that makes it light-hearted and cute, but after a while, it just gets tiring (and risky to you). Just my 2 cents - who knows, maybe others like that.

Great job! Keep us posted.

You're right, that was trying to be light hearted about boring topics. Definitely worth modifying if it's coming across in the wrong context.

Thanks for the feedback!

The site looks good. I don't know if these things were covered already, but I went through and made a list of things that I would change. I sent it to you on the "Feedback" form too.

Notes on Coordinator:

Home page after login: Text says "Sorry, you currently don't have any events listed."

No reason to be sorry. I would change to: "No events listed (or, You haven't planned anything yet!). Click here to add an event!" or something that provides a way to change the fact that there are not yet any events.

On creating an event: The date box doesn't have a default date shown. I can't see what today is. Maybe make the current day show up a different color or have days in the past grayed out.

On friends: Longer names get extended past the box representing friends, instead of wrapping or adjusting.

Contact Us link at the bottom of the page should bring me to a page with forms to fill out, not attempt to open outlook or whatever program I use for email. If I want to email you with these, provide your email address on the "Contact Us" page.

Last thing, the pages don't have a "What's next" button. Meaning, After I add friends, I'm brought back to the page to invite more friends. There's no "Thanks for adding friends. We'll let you know when they accept. Here's the button to go back to the home page."

Just read your feedback from the site, but thanks for the follow up! The calendar stuff is getting fixed ASAP, as are the friend names. We will be following up on the other items in the coming week.

Thanks again for taking the time to provide your input. Please let us know if you have any other suggestions as you continue to use the site.

Show, don't tell.

I kinda get what you're doing, but a screenshot or infographic would quickly communicate if it was worth the user's time.

I'm not sure whether I think a big "sign up" button would be better than the two big form fields you have from a conversion POV... But it'd be easy to measure/test. Given most of the big boys have a signup button, I assume your way would convert less well.

Having a different color for strong tags is a bad idea. They look like links.

Absolutely agree. The strong tag css has been changed.

We'll look into the rest of the suggestions. Thanks for the feedback!

Uh, People really need to get over that Flickr-style of naming their products. In particular with long names. It just looks stupid.

Good luck, though.

What alternatives would you suggest?

Coor.di.na.tr!

I went to your site, skimmed the FAQ, skimmed the "About" page, and I still don't know what your service actually does or looks like. All I know is that you think email is bad for coordinating "micro-events", and so I'm guessing that somehow you're going to help me organize my micro-events without email (which is a problem I didn't know I had).

I know what you're going to try and help me do, but I have no idea how, and until I see that it's a how that actually makes my life easier, I still haven't seen a problem in my life that needs to be fixed by you.

Would like to see screenshots or something.

Just my $.02, probably nothing original. Best of luck to you.

Thanks for the feedback. That's probably the most common issue people have mentioned and it's something we're going to address very soon.

My first impressions of the site were good. I like the design. I found it funny that one of the first pages I hit was the FAQ where you downplayed the design.

Anyways, the ui looks and works pretty slick. My only complaint was that when my form submission failed the error message was kind of small and initially below the fold, with no error indications above the fold. Otherwise I thought the site was really well done.

Thanks. What page was that error on?

I just set this up to coordinate a local user group and I've got to say it's pretty nice. Looking through these comments, I can see they've incorporated a lot of the feedback. Here are some observations (turned into its own blog post):

http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/using-coordinatr-t...

Beautifully designed, except for that damn feedback button. Why is everyone copying what I think I first saw on Draftmix?

It's not easy for people to read sideways.

Put it at the top or bottom of the page so users don't have to cock their head to one side. This seems like a curse of knowledge problem---you and most of us on HN already know what it says because we've seen it before. That doesn't mean it's easy to use, though.

Good comment. We'll look into moving it, although I think it might not be as obvious on the top or bottom of the page...

quick followup to the feedback button, the 'Let' in 'Let us know...' is cut off when viewed in Safari. Cut off meaning covered up by the feedback block.

Good to know. Thanks!

Kudos for the nice simple styling and layout! A few minor points:

- would be great to highlight today's date in the calendar

- I don't know about the general populus but I never allow any site to import my gmail/yahoo contacts. The address book also links to plaxo. Can't you implement an import yourself?

- would be great to add a google map widget

Great comments, thanks!

- Updating the calendar date item is on the top of the list of things to do.

- The address book uses plaxo for now, but plans are definitely in place to replace it with our own import mechanism.

- As for the google map widget, we currently have a mapping feature using google maps if you enter in a location for each event. Is this what you are referring to?

Aha.. cool.. I see the map now! Another suggestion: Coordinatr would be a great app if all my friends were regular users. However, I am guessing that a lot of people would rather use their regular scheduling tools (Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar) to keep track of events. Those calendars don't have as rich a feature-set as coordinatr but are still the first point of schedule tracking. Anyway, my point is: coordinatr can really set itself apart by somehow integrating with these calendar systems (something like how xobni attaches itself to Outlook, but something simpler)!

We're definitely going to integrate with Google Calendar and are currently looking into integration with Outlook and other commonly used calendars. Great recommendation..thanks!

I see in the FAQ you guys compare yourselves to email. I was thinking your real comparison is the phone. I'm not sure why I would use this service instead of just phoning someone.

Perhaps I'm not the target market though. Otherwise, good luck to you. It looks like you put a lot of hard work into this.

Have you ever said to someone "a bunch of us are heading to _____ for _____. You should come."? This is the kind of situation we're targeting. If you can easily inform everyone you want to at once, we've shaved a good bit of time off of your phone calls.

That's just it though... rare is the time when I want to inform "everyone I want to" to come out for drinks in a casual setting.

One or two people max is the norm for a casual get together. Again, I think this is where I'm not in the target market... as you get older, your desire for large groups of people wains.

:-)

Good to know. Are there ever times when the phone is inconvenient to use? For example if you're at work, are you free to call your friends and arrange a get together or is that frowned upon?

I'm not trying to convince you to use our site! I'm really interested in your demographic and if there's any value we can add to a situation like yours. Thanks again for your feedback.

No. The phone is always convenient. More so than the internet. (And I have a laptop and work online all day)

I'd see value in maybe an sms service that could hold all my buddies numbers... that might be worth exploring... so I could, say, sms your site with "drinks after work @ cheers" and it would forward that to the "Drinking Buddies" list.

That functionality is actually very close to being released. We'll keep you posted on when it's available for use. Thanks for the feedback!

The site looks good, but this wouldn't make 'micro-event' planning any easier for me. I just text my friends. I only make one message and send it to my 'friend' group. You would have to improve upon that for me to sign up.

I understand this is early stage, so this is basically food for thought.

Nice job, 3 comments

1) If I fill a time in 24 hour format for example 23:00 you need to parse it correctly and understand its 11pm.

2) Let me add users to an event I already created.

3) Let me add people's IM instead of email. Especially critical for events that are in the next few hours as emails aren't always checked as often.

All great suggestions...thanks for checking out the site!

Just an FYI, once you create an event, if you edit it, then you are able to add more friends.

Registered, when putting in contact info you should go ajax with it, cause I put in all my data first and then anticipated that it would still be there if I clicked "Add [formofcontact]".

Other than that, it's a cool concept ( i had a similar idea ) and it's very well executed/designed.

Here's an idea for increased contacting functionality.

Let the event manager call a certain number and record a message for the invitation, then have it call everyone and play that message. That way, you have an advantage over picking up the phone and calling people one by one.

Screenshots. A picture is worth a.. you get the idea. Three or four nice screenshots of your interface on the front page, or at the top of another page (how does it work, FAQ etc.) Not having those was an immediate turn off for me.

That's starting to become a recurring theme. Will definitely look into it. Thanks!

Bad name. Taking a long word and removing the last vowel just doesn't work. It's not snappy enough, and hard to remember/spell. Unlike flickr it doesn't sound like a brand, it sounds like "coordinator.com" was too expensive.

Agreed with others on having to provide an email address right away. I think it's better to build some trust with the user first, by showing them your site before asking for an email address.

Good luck. I hope you kick evite's butt.

I like the look and feel of your site. Creating an event is pretty easy.

You should do fields required on the client-side, it now requires the complete server round-trip. Edge-case but still :)

Btw, congrats on launch.Cheers:)

The ShareSpace tag is brilliant. I don't know if you came up with that yourselves or were inspired by another site, but either way nice work.

Thanks! Other people actually came up with the concept, but we came up with the name.

The moire effect in the background is distracting.

You're the first to mention that one. Thanks for the feedback.

Is there a sample event that we can see for helping us evaluate your site? Everything I've seen so far looks good.

Seems like it might be a good idea, but having to register just to see what it's all about is rather off-putting.

Agreed, and see some other replies for our approach. We thought that by minimizing the registration requirements to just an email and password, we are making it as painless as possible for now until we can get a better flow in place. Thanks.

i like it more than evite for sure. there are some little issues but i am sure you will work those out. some of the UE needs work like adding info to the profile. no biggies though. i am looking forward to see how the event ID can be use to show fotos, vids, friends, etc.

Thanks for the feedback! What exactly did you not like about adding info to the profile? Any other suggestions you can make?

Let us know what you think of the sharespace page once you get some content tagged.

This is an EVIL site. It sucks in your gmail contacts without even asking for confirmation. And I can't delete my account once I create it.

These guys are potentially HUGE email spammers (why else would they pull in emails without asking) and NO PROFILE DELETE??? Hello.. look at what happened to Facebook when they tried to pull that crap.

STAY AWAY from this site.

Wow...slow down. You didn't like that after you clicked the "Done" button, we thought that you were done? And no, we don't currently have a way to delete your account, but NOTHING in your account is currently public! We will have a way to delete accounts in the future, but we need to figure out what to do with the events you've created, comments you wrote, etc. So settle down, and if you have specific concerns, let us know and we'll work with you.

You spelled "coordinator" wrong

wow...thanks...that's really embarrassing...

Ha, I’m sorry. The name annoyed me too. However, keep in mind that the average web user probably has only heard of one “noun+r” website: Flickr. If you can withstand the heckling from the in-crowd, you probably don’t need to change your name, unless you think up something awesome.

Don't be sorry, I thought your post was funny. It's good to see a sense of humor when providing the feedback. I was going for the same humor but apparently it's not coming across that way...

We do face challenges from this domain name and we're still open to possibly using another. If anyone does come up with something they think is better, please post it!

so it's renkoo but with a better tumblr-inspired design. that's pretty nifty. definitely need to add on more features but this looks great.

What do you think we need to add? It's certainly not done, but I'm curious what everyone thinks is missing and what they would like to see added. Our goal is for it to always remain lean and fast so some "features" will ultimately be sacrificed to keep it simple.

Great work. Do I have to register to use it?

Yes, for now, you have to register. We tried to make it as painless as possible though, so try it out!

I like it. Design is great!

Love the design!

any plans for twitter integration?

I'm not sure how we would integrate with twitter. What are you thinking we could share between the two?

allow me to be alerted of events i am invited to, rsvp to events, and create events over sms, let all of my twitter friends see that I am attending X event

could be a good way to spread virally if people see in their twitter feed 'susie is attending X ( coordinator.com/event/X )'

doesn't necessarily have to be twitter

just some kind of sms integration would be nice

if u really want to be the evite of small events, i don't want to have to go to my browser to create an event, if me and joe are chilling at a dive bar, hey lets make this a coordinatr event. sms is the easiest way.

Good points, and we're building out sms as we go. We already have the infrastructure to accept input on specific events so we'll be turning that on in the not-to-distant future. Creating events from sms is a little more tricky...

you bash email (which i like, don't see what's wrong with it) but i didn't see how you notify my friends instead of by emailing them.

personally, i'm only really available by AIM and email. maybe the target audience includes cell phone users and you send text messages or something? it should say how you contact ppl near the top of the FAQ.

Our intention is not to really bash email, but say that it is not the be all and end all for coordinating individuals. It's a great tool to use in conjunction with other means of communication for conveying our message, which in this case is event information. We should probably emphasize all avenues of communication that we support. Thanks!

you compare using email to plan things to drunk driving, so i think that counts as bashing.

it's your decision if you want to market yourselves that way, it could be for the best, i dunno.

glad to hear you'll add details about what communication you use.

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