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Comment by spking | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 ?

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.

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