Please review my startup - Flowshark | Hacker News Reader

Please review my startup - Flowshark

flowshark.com

43 pointshajrice49 comments

Random feature idea: export to blank properly named templates for Balsamiq, Mockingbird, etc.

It seems like once you have a good idea of the interaction flow in Flowshark, the next step is to actually wireframe the individual pages - having something save me the 6 minutes it would take to essentially outline the pages in (e.g.) Balsamiq would be nice (though it's obviously a pretty random request).

No videos, a single screenshot, beta invite only. Is this another minimum viable product experiment?

You (and those that upvoted you) seem to thing that this is a problem. May I ask why?

I dont want to signup if I dont know what your product does. I personally go away from sites that ask you to first sign up, then you may see what it is all about.

kinda irritating if you spend the time giving a service your details if the product barely exists yet.

The current title feels misleading as it suggest you already have something working. A better title would have been "Review my startup idea".

Agreed. There is nothing to review but a concept here. I don't want to be jaded, but it's possible that you hacked this page together in an hour. To me, it feels like you are simply using Hacker News to draw some eyeballs to your site and generate some leads.

In my mind, you ultimately are hurting future folks who want serious reviews of their products from other hackers. Smart people who frequent Hacker News will get tired of doing these kinds of lead-generating "reviews" and won't up-vote them into the homepage.

My suggestion to others who want to use HN for feedback: you get one good shot at a review, so time it wisely.

I think what would be really cool is if you could make this process so incredibly simple that my non-programming customers could actually tell me their ideal workflow in my application (for new and existing features and such).

It's about getting everyone on the same page about what you're building before jumping into design

Absolutely. That's the big idea here. Flowshark will help everybody really think about the user experience and how to optimize it by providing a collaborative high-level view. We're working hard to make it what I'll call "playfully intuitive" enough that pretty much anyone can get started using it right away, including your non-programming clients.

That's totally awesome then. Though with one slight modification to the goal there, in that I don't want my customers thinking about UI. It should be so easy and fluid that they don't have to think about it. They shouldn't know what UI is. They shouldn't even realize that they're doing my work for me. I like your notion of "playfully intuitive". It should be a fun little way for them to make my site work for them.

Yes, and I appreciate that insight about your customers not thinking about the UI. Flowshark represents the pre-UI stage of planning out an app, and as such I'm doing my best to make the screen elements as devoid as possible of distracting eye candy. The focus is always on the flow.

This is awesome. I actually built a very similar tool about 9 years ago and it's incredible how effective it is for selling/managing business consulting services. It's amazing how many barriers can be overcome by simply getting everyone involved to visualize the discussion in terms of simple, changeable work flows.

The one I built had the following features:

- people could make suggestions for how to improve the flow - email notifications when a flow was changed - document uploads tied to each step - tracking whether each user had viewed new flow changes, etc.

I have gone into a sales meeting and sold thousands of dollars of consulting services just by drawing out how this tool works on a napkin or scrap of paper. The idea is so simple and powerful that it is extremely valuable for businesses that care about process improvement.

I strongly recommend against listening to the 1% of people who get mad that it doesn't do all sorts of complex branching, etc.

I no longer work with the company I built it for (I was a minor partner) but I believe they still use it extensively, though it's focused only on supporting business/management consulting services and not on UI design, etc. We would routinely get $15-20 per user/month for it.

I'd love to talk to you more about this. Would you mind shooting me an email at hajrice@gmail.com ?

As soon as I read the header text it resonated. My eyes went from the header to the text on the left. Then on to the screen shot.

But since the screen shot is kind of small - I tried clicking on it to get a better view. But there is no click to zoom functionality. Reviewing a larger screen shot is what would sway me from signing up or not. So either make it a click to zoom, or just post a bigger pic of the app. or something along these lines.

That's fair. We're working on a screencast to go in its place.

Design-wise you may consider asking for a feedback on Forrst.

You might want to reduce the sharpening of the text in the next version of the home page too, some of the the edges look very jagged on my monitor. The actual home page layout is pleasingly simple and clear.

"A better way to visualize and plan user experiences."

IMHO: "A better way to visualize and plan user flows."

then sub text: "Create, share and collaborate on creating beautiful user experiences with your team."

Your primary message is: this lets you create user flows

and the secondary message is: *collaborate & create great UX"

whereas currently it's the other way around.

The screenshot when clicked should lightbox and add some more details

I'm not sure what the text below is meant to mean, honestly. "Built for people who build software" but then you list various other job titles in addition to developers...

As I mentioned above, was hoping that I could use it today, I think posts where you can't actually "review" a product (because it doesn't exist) should be titled as such on Hacker News.

Why does your contact google map zoom in on the ocean? :)

Love to get in the beta though, signed up.

Thanks for the feedback. The google map is zoomed in on a shark :)

Naysayer alert!

Just my opinion (or perhaps I've misunderstood) - but this solves a problem that is better solved by a paper and pencil. Or a whiteboard.

On my mac I have a few different tools that I could use to make these sorts of diagrams.

I never use them.

I always revert to a paper, pencil and frantic scribbles - that's what works best as an individual and collaboratively, I've found. It's unintuitive and adds hurdles to the design process when you have to keep clicking "edit" "save" etc - I just want to rub things out and scribble.

The only time I think this would be useful is when doing UX brainstorming with a remote team, but I think that is a very niche market - too niche to make it worthwhile building this MVP. Unless you're aiming at enterprise where you only need a few customers to make it worthwhile ;)

When you've finished sketching out your flows on paper or on a whiteboard, how do you share them? Scan them in or take a photo? And then when someone points out that a change needs to be made to one of the screens or an entire section of the flow, how do you effectively distribute and communicate this change to everyone on the team?

Paper sketches are great, but they become pretty inefficient when you have to keep multiple people on the same page (pardon the pun) during a constantly changing product development project.

Looks interesting, but you should have handed out beta invitation codes to the first 50 of us...

there is definitely a need for this. I hate sharing word documents. How complicated will the flows be? Seems like in the screenshot it's just sequential. Will there be more like Visio later on where you can create loops and decision points?

Thanks for the feedback, and I share your frustration around sharing Word documents over email. Between Word docs and Visios getting flung back and forth around a team, people tend to quickly get out of sync.

Our mission is to make the flows as visually simple as possible, but robust enough to support if/then, validation, loops and decision points. We won't have everything we want in version 1, but enough for most web apps.

I have an immediate use for this - thanks.

No problem. We'll be sending out an email to you shortly.

I do as well. One thing I am worried about though--the first (cheapest?) plan has 1 user, which seems to defeat the purpose of the app. The attraction here is sharing and comments; it's easier for me to draw 10 flows in my Molskine if I'm not sharing them with anybody.

One thing I'd like to see on your homepage is some text highlighting the differences between your system and other, similar applications that have come into the market in the past year or two.

Can you point us to a few of them? We'd love to see how others have approached the problem. Thanks.

Like others, it's unclear to me exactly how far the product goes.. Is it a way to lay out state machines and make notes, or will it actually allow me to mock-up a user interface within the tool? If I'd still mock up the UI in OmniGraffle, screen-shot it, and upload so that your app will let me lay out the 'flow'.. that's not compelling enough to me to make it worth the trouble. If it somehow takes OmniGraffle/Visio out of the equation.. I'd be interested for sure.

Great question. The flows created in Flowshark provide the foundation for you to move forward with your page-level design mockups. In other words, this is a tool to figure out from a high level what the user will see/do on each screen. Once your team (or clients) reach a consensus on the user flow, the next step would be to get into more detailed wireframes and high-fidelity comps. Think of Flowshark as a central, always-current map that everyone on your team can reference while they're working on their specific parts of the project.

Flowshark makes it easy to design intuitive user flows for your software product, allowing you and your collaborators to optimize the user experience, identify potential trouble spots and know what to design for. Could be re-written as two or three sentences.

What kind of export formats are you thinking of ?

PDF and HTML.

You may want to remove the references to AppFlows in the footer on some pages. As it is, both sites show the same diagramme. Is one an earlier version? http://www.flowshark.com/ http://appflows.com/

Thanks for catching that, fixed now. Yes, Appflows was our original name idea and we decided to go with something a bit more fun.

I like it.. it looks great man! although I have to agree with others here.. please show more of what the beta can do before I sign up to try it!

I'm not familiar with the problem space. Perhaps you could explain some of the pain points on the web site.

Have you seen http://productplanner.com

Hey Paul. Yes, and I think it's great for jumpstarting the process when talking about a new flow and getting new ideas. We're taking this general concept in a more collaborative (but private) direction with Flowshark.

I have a font problem on your website,chrome 5.0.375.99

The font doesn't anti-alias in WinXP (Firefox) - hard to read especially at smaller sizes.

Sorry about that...we experimented with Typekit.

Same deal with Windows 7 - I believe that all flavors of Windows do a horrendous job on html5 fonts

Here is a screenshot (using Chrome 5.0.375.99): http://imgur.com/aLGBk.png

Like the name =)

Would love to, you have a great form ;)

looks interesting, I'd really like to see more screenshots

Nice design - shouldn't be too surprising for a design-oriented site. But it's a pleasing and simple use of Blueprint CSS.

Just one question: I don't understand why Wufoo Form Builder was needed for the signup flow. Why not just add a form of your own? Or am I misunderstanding why Wufoo was mentioned at the end of the signup process?

Thanks for the compliment. We used Wufoo so that we could spend our time continuing to work on the product.

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