User Interface: A Personal View, Alan Kay (1989) | Hacker News Reader

User Interface: A Personal View, Alan Kay (1989)

afterclasshq.com

2 pointsarsalanb3 comments

Linking to the homepage for afterclasshq would probably be a better way to introduce people to the product. While you have an understanding of what an annotated document means, other people do not. It just looked like another document with advertizing links (and a generic chat popup to interrupt my reading). Forget about being a developer and put yourself in the shoes of potential users/customers.

The first question people will have is "What is it?" If they do not know or it looks like something low quality -- link filled pages and chat boxes tend to correlate with that -- they will close the tab or click the back button. Overall, my first impression was that the post was blogspam because the content was lifted from someone famous, filled with links, and there just to open a chat window.

It's an interesting idea and I see some potential because there is obvious thought behind the execution. Make the presentation straight forward and honest so that people know what it is, what it does, and why they should care.

Good luck.

I did do a show Hn earlier this week, but it seemed very inefficient to put people through a page that gets them to sign up to create their own documents, I just decided to annotate documents that interest me and post them here for other like-minded people. (Believe it or not, annotating this took three days.)

Also, you're right about the chat box being annoying I will probably remove it from that page.

If there are specific tips for making the presentation more straight forward and honest, I'm all ears.

Thank you for the feedback

Inefficient for who?

I clicked on a link hoping to read something by Kay. I got something else instead. Figuring out what it was required me to look at the "Show HN"; click on the unlabeled logo; and scroll around on the project's home page. I never did read the article by Kay because the intent was to demonstrate your product not sharing an article by Kay with the Hacker News community.

My specific tip is still, just link to the project's home page so that people know what the project is. Put yourself in the reader's place. They don't know anything about your annotation tool. Accept that most people won't have a use for it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com