Ask HN: Review my startup, PeerLeaf
http://PeerLeaf.com/
It's in private beta now - let me know if you or anyone you know would like to participate.
Any advice from established guys on how to get more private beta users for a service like mine?
It's in private beta now - let me know if you or anyone you know would like to participate.
Any advice from established guys on how to get more private beta users for a service like mine?
On a more concrete note, the green and blue tabs at the top seem inconsistent, compare https://peerleaf.com/Report/1 to https://peerleaf.com/About Shouldn't the demo tab be blue when you're on the demo page?
Yes, the active tabs are a little weird -- they literally match the URL that you've gone to, and should be more forgiving. Thanks for pointing it out.
- General look and feel
It's professional but a little lacking in whitespace, especially since you've chosen such heavily saturated colours.
- Home page
The three key points at the top aren't as eyecatching as they ought to be. Oddly, they work better in IE without the drop shadow (which appears to shift the block visually upwards away from the dynamic content and into the header). shifting it ~10-20px down the page might help a bit, as might rollovers if you want most users to click to learn more.
My attention gets drawn away from the text on the left. Possibly a box (with curved edges and ideally vertical dimensions to match the slides might help) and/or a pastel background colour might help here.
The animated slides are effective, but possibly a slightly reduced size would give you the scope to make other changes (most of the graphs would still be clear at much smaller resolutions)
I'd revise the "Secure" text - developers might be interested in knowing that passwords are securely hashed, but Joe Manager just wants to know that it's "password protected and private" and even more importantly "you decide who can see what level of feedback". Customer permissions sound like they could be an important feature depending on the level of openness within the company. Some companies might be comfortable with everyone knowing exactly how each colleague voted for each peer, whilst others might want to anonymise all the votes even to management analysing the results.
Minor point, but there should be an apostrophe in the possessive "each other's" (there seems to be some consensus amongst pedants that each others' is incorrect as both "each" and "other" are singular")
- About Peerleaf page.
Text is a little overwhelming. Stick "Security", "Requirements" and "Privacy" at the bottom of the sidebar (or on a separate FAQ page) to keep the flow of the page about the core benefits and use cases of the product. Your flowchart looks better above the fold too
On the mechanics side of thing, when I view the demo (using Opera 11), mousing over the average score bar next to names makes the horizontal black bar flicker a lot, which is really jarring.
The first graph actually seems redundant in light of the table with the names, average scores, and best areas; the table is the best display for me since all of the information is right there and easy to read. I kind of wish that instead of the bar graph, the pentagram were displayed above the table so that I could mouse over names and see the pentagram change, or select two (or more) people to have overlapping pentagrams for easy visual comparison.
The review matrix display seems slightly awkward because of the horizontal scroll.
Overall, this seems like a very useful tool!
Edit: The about page is really cluttered with lots of duplicate data...