Ask YC: Any Feedback on new web app ratings site appreciated | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: Any Feedback on new web app ratings site appreciated

wappied.com

14 pointsmoorage42 comments

I like this better than most web 2.0 directories I've seen (http://www.listio.com etc.), but it has to feel pretty exhaustive before I'll depend on it. If I don't expect it to give me better results than just plain Googling, I won't bookmark it to give it a chance.

Link directly to each site from the browse/search results page. I want the option to skip your site summary page and quickly open ten blogging sites in new tabs for comparison.

On the summary pages, I almost didn't realize there were reviews. If there are only one or two, it's not enough content for me to realize it just by looking at my scrollbar. That adwords block is going to be a wall for most people. I'd remove the screenshot altogether and put truncated reviews right next to the vital details.

Edit: There's another reason for removing the screenshot - for me, it just registers as a flash ad, and I almost don't even look at it. At http://www.wappied.com/apps/mint my brain wants to think that's a Vista ad on the right. Once you do look at it, it's still only about a quarter of its original size, so you're absorbing purely visual data(does it look cool?), which you already kind of get from the nice-sized logo.

I tend to agree - there's something wrong with the screenshots/slides right now.

Of course, for some reason I can't explain, I also like having them around in some fashion, so users can experience parts of the app without trying them. Perhaps this is what "tour" pages are for.

Maybe I should just make pictures part of people's reviews, if they want to show off a cool feature....

Hmm...

Might consider star ratings without forcing a login. I think the site is useful, but not useful enough to want to create a user account. A great technique is marketing is to get people to make very small commitments (star ratings) which will lead to bigger ones (getting an account).

This man sounds like he's been reading "Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion" by Robert Cialdini :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cialdini

Good idea but I don't like the layout. It looks like a template that domain-parking services use.

The amount of space between the categories does give that impression a little. Nothing a change to the grid won't easily fix.

Hah, interesting. It's definitely a balance between showing the categories, or some of the categories so that users know they're there to navigate. Each category will be getting grayscale icons - we'll see if that helps at all.

If you need more text, grab the highest rated app in that category and display it below the name.

I think icons would fix the problem nicely, kind of like the App Store layout uses them.

It looks good. I do have one minor suggestion. Part of what you're about is helping people find apps. From About Page: "What if, ... you could find the best webapp for your needs, at any given time, and instantly compare it to all of its competitors?" I really like that idea, and it would be useful to me. Currently, no one has got them all in one place and compared them. In fact, just a short time ago I did a post on YC asking about tools because I know I had read about them but forgotten where. So you definitely have me there.

I thinking building on this would really up the usefulness of your site immensely, because people want to know what's out there when they're looking for tools. Rating is secondary to someone looking for tools. Instead, they need to know what tools exist. Building out the categories more is a suggestion, as would be providing your own content (editorial) on how well apps in the same category work compared to each other. For example, if you're looking for a commenting system for your blog, what are the pros and cons of the major offerings. I understand this might run into a problem of what is a web app and what isn't, but people love to have someone else do the work of finding them a solution. That involves more than a one line description and a rating.

Rating is good to eliminate the lowest bottom feeders, but it doesn't help you choose between two five-star programs. Original editorial content helps people by providing more information, as will user comments of course once you get a mass of users.

Hey, Thanks tstegart. I whole-heartedly agree. The categories, aside from high quality reviews are the most important part. When you want to find the best app for a particular use, you don't really care about how good it is for some other use.

To me, it's kind of like Yelp - sometimes I want to just know what has the best food, and don't care about the service. Sometimes I want to know both.

What I'm still trying to figure out is how to implement this from a user perspective - it's difficult enough to get a user to provide a review, let alone multiple reviews for different purposes.

Perhaps the genii of YC have some good ideas...

To be honest, having the call-to-action to write a review separated from the main text doesn't help. Right now, you've put your ads in between where you learn about the app and where you find the review button. It almost completely ruins the work your interface (which is great by the way) is doing to get people to click on the review button. I'm not sure having the ads there is worth the ruination of your review button click-rate.

People like seeing information where its supposed to be, and ads where they are supposed to be. Part of what makes Web 2.0 websites so great is that the ads aren't in-your-face annoying. Here, your ads are messing up the user experience in an attempt to get in front of the user.

I agree. I took the ads and pushed them to the bottom. To your point, creating a review has to be incredibly easy. I think there are a couple other things UI-wise that can be done to make sure of this, like letting users click on the stars under the app's name, to create their own review

What about a Netflix style pop-up when you click on the stars, suggesting users leave comments, or write a full review? Clicking on full review takes you to a page where you answer in-depth questions (like have you bought this) and leave comments (or questions are suggested for you to answer).

Some people will want to do a quick review, others will want to leave a comment, and still others will want to fully explain how it helped them or what they liked/disliked. This way you take into account various user participation levels with the app the user is reviewing. The final rating could be a weighted average of the three types of reviews, with in-depth and commented reviews being rated higher. Knowing your review will count more and be more important if you put more effort into it is another psychological tool to get people to write about the apps they care about.

Love it.

Haha, I love the reviews you're writing. Apparently one person thinks you're on crack when it comes to Live Journal.

If you removed thumbnails for apps that only have one screenshot, and moved the "suggest changes" button directly to the right of the vital details, I think the top of the reviews section would be visible above the fold.

The idea is great, but how about grouping the types of apps into sub directories? Perhaps you could separate the pure "utility" apps such as webmail, blogs, organizers and office applications from content sites like BarackObama.com and YouTube?

Let me add an app while I wait for the confirmation email. Don't display it until my account is confirmed.

I second this. Is there a reason for needing to login when adding an app or review? I only say this because I saw an article today on getting rid of logins. What about just requiring a captcha?

I agree with this for apps, to be sure - I think I just implemented it that way because of second-nature.

I will remove the login until app creations become problematic.

I like that one. We do have "suggestions" to existing apps, which anonymous users can make (which basically creates a diff, which has to be applied by an admin, or the owner of the app).

But we definitely need something similar for adding apps. Thanks!

Going on 30 minutes now with no confirmation email. Checked spam, not there either.

Hi John, Doh! I'm not sure what happened here. I resent the email to your info address.

I got it now. But at first, I didn't recognize it was from you. Put "Wapp'ied" somewhere in the subject and change the from address to be support@wappied.com. Wapp'ied isn't mentioned anywhere in the email until after "Regards,". It looks like a phishing email up until that point.

I love how a simple post on HN can catch all these little things that make a big difference. Its really a great way to iron out the kinks. I'm very impressed with your response on all this stuff, moorage, its pretty amazing.

I agree - I it's such a great forum for launching a web app in general.

I just want everyone to know I'm reading everything that's said!

This fix is going to be deployed tonight - thanks!

1. Why not use OpenID? 2. You're using the HTML 4.01 doctype but you're coding in XHTML. Not a huge problem but your pages are VERY invalid.

We should use OpenID - it was just lower on the list of features.

Ahh doctypes. We'll have to get that squared away too, thanks.

Couple other things I noticed: - Standardize on either "Log in" or "Sign in" - Logo doesn't have weird apostrophe in Wapp'ied like other text does (why is it there anyway) - When adding an app, it isn't immediately clear how to upload a logo. The empty picture boxes don't tell you anything - Category counts would be useful - Getting a 500 error on 'Newest'

These are all good suggestions, which I've added. Sorry about the 500 errors - I pulled the trigger too quickly on deployment. I've started to keep track of the todo list publicly at: http://www.wappied.com/about

"Service Temporarily Unavailable"

For a lot of pages. What's up?

Sorry, I was pushing a fix for a few errors, and it took 60 seconds or so for apache to figure out Mongrel was up and running again. I'll stop pushing fixes for awhile!

I think he's working on implementing some of the suggested changes as we speak.

Just curious, how long did it take you to code this site? I take it you can't just make it in Sprout.

Probably 2-3 weeks of on and off development work. I've got a lot of other things going on, so I didn't keep track too well. I did hire another ruby on rails contractor to augment some of my development work, which I highly recommend (if you're good at finding them).

How many people are working on it now? You say "we" in your comments. Is there a team involved, or is this a solo project. Either way, it looks great.

Just 1 developer on a continuing basis (me), and I paid another contractor to do some programming work, and another contractor to input some data.

Are you full time, or part-time? How much time do you estimate you'll be putting into it per week once its up and running?

I'll probably be paying more for others to work on it, and I'll focus on writing reviews.

I need to take a week to regroup though, and figure out the strategy for this.

It looks like success hinges on two things (which in retrospect is obvious): (1) getting a really well organized (categorized) database of apps (2) creating momentum on review writing.

App owners have incentive to add themselves to the database. Maybe an email announcing yourself to App owners would be less work than going through and adding them all yourself. It also is a sort of secondary press release and will get people talking about you.

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