Duuble: microblogging diary | Hacker News Reader

Duuble: microblogging diary

duuble.com

21 pointsliu3hao23 comments

Well done on shipping. Here are some things that can be improved:

1. Increase the font-size from 13px to 16px and set line-height 24px to make the type friendly.

2. Increase the height of your input fields and buttons to 28px to make them easier to focus and click on.

3. For the diary image on your front page, show a diary that has something written in it. Even better, show a screenshot of a Duuble diary.

4. Combine "First name" and "Last name" fields into "Your Name" for better internationalization and less visual elements / tabbing.

5. Move the "Tweet" button away from your sign up form to top right of the page. Use the official Twitter button. People are used to it.

6. The "Read more about Duuble" button should be a link not a button.

I think this could really use screenshots (as above) or some kind of visual tour. Usually if I can't figure out why I would want to use something within 30 seconds, I don't bother coming back. You need to sell the product. :)

I didn't even notice the 'read more about Duuble' button until I saw it mentioned by jorangreef above (point 6). It isn't in a very obvious location and isn't particularly eye catching, mostly due to looking like the other buttons and having a small font.

By comparison, Springpad has an easily visible 'How it works' button in the top-right corner, next to the create account button (https://springpadit.com/) and Simplenote has a link called 'More reasons to use Simplenote...' in the bottom-right corner (http://simplenoteapp.com/). These are much easier to find.

Also, I assumed your headings (It's Simple, Private, Posting, etc) were links to more information, since they didn't have any content below them explaining /why/ Duuble is simple, private, etc.

In summary, you really need to sell the product by clearly explaining what it is and why I would want it. I think the front page design could use some general improvement, as suggested by jorangreef.

Good work so far.

Woah, that's quite a list. Thanks though!

The "tweet" button is completely out of place, I guess some people can fill all the inputs and click on it by mistake.

Agreed about the Tweet button.

Also, consider renaming the location dropdown to "Timezone/Country", and either auto-populating it based on IP or using a "Please select item." Don't autopopulate with some obscure location where almost none of your users live.

First Impression: For some reason, unless I can see an example of exactly what this looks like / a demo I can't see myself signing up.

Signing up was fairly quick. However making my first post was a little troublesome: Hitting the "enter" button when didn't seem to post anything. The overall feel here feels less like a diary and more like a self-contained twitter feed. I think it's the atmosphere of the application that is throwing me off the most.

Congrats on shipping a product though! I'll continue to try it out.

Thanks for the feedback! We'll try to add a working demo, or at least some screenshots! For the UI, we'll tweak it a bit too!

A communications scholar at Cornell named Lee Humphreys has a paper under review that compares Twitter to 18th century diaries. Apparently, it was common practice for people (mostly women) to keep short accounts of daily life in their journals. Every six months, they swapped the diaries with their friends and family. The Twitter of the 18th century. Old is new again.

A friend of mine found once such book from 1932. It's pretty amazing and she has fittingly been posting some of it on Tumblr: http://someoldbooks.tumblr.com/tagged/diary

A lot of walking down the street!

Hmm.. Swapping diaries, that sounds like an idea we could add in!

I think a demo is definitely needed on the homepage to convert signups.

Design wise, just be careful with using such light grey text on white background, as you can barely read some things. For example, the "bars" layout is unreadable on my screen unless you hover over a post.

Interesting. I wanted to edit a post in order to add a tag. Unable to edit. Also, why not use the same tag format as twitter since people will be used to that.

Is there any API so I can send feeds through command-line. I already have a bash script called "whatidid" which logs to a text file and mails the file to my gmail account. I could push it to duuble.

Are metal umlauts the new left out vowels for Web 2.x? Will we see "flickr" renamed to "flïckër"?

Well, it's not really an 'ü', we are officially 'Duuble', not 'Düüble'. The dots above the 'u's are meant to complete the smiling faces :)

Well, I'm German. We do umlauts, we don't do smiles…

;)

Is the lack of nicknames intentional? Sure, for a private diary I don't need to see "xxCuteHoneyPiexx" in the browser, but one might prefer to "blug" as that instead of "Deborah.Jingleheimer".

Yeah, we did not really include nicknames, just first and last name. You could change your first and last name under Settings to your preferred name. If enough users want an additional option of a nickname, we could add that in the future

Considering the current Google+ brouhaha and the target demographics, I'd recommend something like that.

Also, having a bookmarklet for a pop up version of the "Just Post" page might be quite neat.

Sorry for being negative. I would say its bad design.

Why does a daily dairy site has to be like twitter? Yours is a original concept. Pour some thoughts into it and come up with original design. :)

aren't there any username? So that i can go to my blug by http://duuble.com/username

I like lots.

Scoured the front page.

Still have no idea what this is.

Is it not obvious that it is an online diary?

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