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Comment by mikaelgramont | Hacker News Reader

While it is good that you kept the UI very lean, you would probably benefit from having a UI/UX guy help you with making the app feel a bit more 'dressed up'. Currently this looks like a developer designed it (I should know, I suffer from the same problem).

Also, having worked on pretty much the exact same product for the French market, one thing I remember people liked was help sections. By that, I mean big long blobs of text that explain the law in detail. On each form page you could display the relevant explainations, and then compile that into a searchable index, and even use that on dedicated pages for SEO purposes.

Oh and maybe you wanna say 'the easy way [to do your taxes]', rather than 'an easy way'.

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Mikael,

Can you elaborate a little bit on what you mean by "dressed up". I am looking for feedback here :-)

Yes its mostly a developer driven UI.

About Help Section: I am continuously building out the help section from what people ask on our support aliases.

About SEO: Excellent tip. We have seen traffic come to our few blog entries on certain long tail google queries. So we will be working on this next.

I don't see your email on your profile. Maybe I can pick your brains about what you did for the French Market.

By 'dressed up', I mean choose a set of colors (say 3) and use them for recurring elements in your pages (titles, questions, etc). Try to use colors and white space to visually separate questions, rather than borders (ex: the legend tag uses borders). Use colored backgrounds to give a sense of vertical space. Also, most sites have a footer, that helps give a sense of space too.

I personnaly would stay away from using yellow/blue/pink/green on the same page (at 1:00 in the video).

I can send you my email, but I don't see yours in your profile either :p

Feedback noted.

I just added my email id to the profile. Thanks.

My 2 cents, I really liked the UI. Not so much the UX. Have a common footer at the bottom?

Just to get a clearer sense, how does a footer help? I am a design newbie. :)

Well, to share my own use case. I clicked the big, "Start your Tax return for free" assuming, it would provide me some information before I joined the site. When it didn't, I looked for the FAQ section at the footer, instinctively, but I didn't find it there. I wanted to know more about the site, before I give you my info. Yet even after creating an account, I need to go back to the home page to look at the FAQ! I hope you are getting what I meant here.

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