Show HN: Bubbles - An option for people who don't want to write emails. | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Bubbles - An option for people who don't want to write emails.

bubbleideas.com

22 pointsmonsterix27 comments

The homepage is rather terrible at explaining the product. The two clearest explanations on the page are in the smallest and most illegible type.

"@bubbles is a fast, cool and easy way to write authentic letters. Put hand-written signature, draw, sketch, paint, write or collage on your letters and mail it to anyone."

"@bubbles lets you write authentic letters straight from your browser. Add pictures, draw, type, paint, sketch or collage just like on real paper – it's as easy as pie."

I'd skip the "fast," "cool," "easy," "easy as pie" explanations and keep it as honest and succinct as possible.

In fact, your enterprise page does a decent job of explaining the product, especially since you have a video explanation, but I'm still not sure if you're a social network, email 2.0, a paper distributor, or a tshirt printer.

Noted. We will iterate the home page again and improve upon it. Well, I think we're a social utility which is centered around letters, and sits very close to emails.

We provide official letters heads to enterprise, so that employees can write with brand on the top. And ordinary sheet-of-paper style letters to users on which people can write/draw etc.

We will fix the design of plans page shortly, also.

It looks like LinkedIn plus fancier messaging.

I can't imagine a case where I would prefer to open a PDF from an email or go to another site rather than directly read an email though.

Atypically letters (Like appointment/proposal) are sent as attachments and people seem to be used to opening it as PDF.

Opening letters on @bubbles has some incentives. For examples, you can highlight on letters received from others and comment "on it". Not under it.

I spent time going through each page "and" reading through these HN comments and I still don't know what the product does. Great graphics, but I didn't grok what the product was in the first 10 seconds (and still don't after 2 minutes).

I hate to be that guy, but the page's design looks like a bad mishmash of every contemporary trendy framework/web aesthetic.

- the 3 columns at the base of the first page are misaligned

- there is something wrong with the hover on the menu, enterprise, contact us, and pricing all highlight at the same time despite going to different places

- contact us changes the menu on top

- there are an insane amount of ways text is emphasized, from the angular graphic border, ribbons, the {} thing, the round blue button on the enterprise page, soft grey insets, soft blue insets, insets in insets, all-caps, bold, random colors (blue, black, green, red), the checkmarks, the badges, etc.

- the buttons are all different. different border-radius and color on almost every page

- i have no idea what the search bar on top is for

- what is with the clocks? there are 2 on the front page, and the footer provides a clock with a very corny digital font for every other page.

This is all on top of the fact that I have very little idea as to how you actually go from the browser to a hand-written letter.

I connected with Facebook, went through the entire registration process, and got the writing page...and still didn't know what I was doing.

It definitely needs to be more clear what @bubbles actually does (and why I would use it).

Hmmm, we're trying to lower the learning curve and improve on this. I just connected with your @bubble profile. You can now try typing @arvind anywhere on your letter and send it to me.

OMG OMG OMG... One big alignment problem. Please read this: http://www.chrisnorstrom.com/2011/05/quick-fix-up-redesign-o...

Fix up your alignment and spacing problems. It shouldn't take more than a few padding, margin, and width adjustments.

Hey @chris, thanks for your f/b. Would love to hear more details on this.

As a note @bubbles doesn't use a regular pixel perfect approach to render its views. We've not completed all parts yet, but even now we provide more pages/app with less than a third of "style-sheets" as compared to say Twitter.

Try this trick. Open a published letter and press CTRL + / CTRL - on that page. See what happens to the letter.

I agree with all the comments that other gentleman posted here.

- Need a Video Tour - Homepage Needs a better Redesign shot at explaining the product better.

You have a users first 30 seconds of attention when he/she first lands on the page.. Lure them during that time.

Good luck with your endeavour!

+1 for the Gmail Plugin Idea.

The pricing page needs larger prices. It took me a few seconds to actually locate the price for each plan. The titles / list of what you get at each price point don't fit the site style and are not pleasing to read because of the font / all caps.

Alright, will fix this and iterate the plans page design. Thanks a tonne!

Aha! So, I can basically write "rich" emails. That's cool. Wouldn't it be nice to have some sort of a Bubbles-Gmail plugin using which I can do such a thing inside my Gmail itself, while composing emails? Overall neat.

Thanks sooperman. We explored the idea of mail plugins, but decided that real fun would be on a ground-up idea! People tend to play hand drawn tic-tac-toe on this virtual paper to and fro. :-)

An app and/or desktop client and I would probably switch to this full time. Definitely a cool idea.

Tx Brodney, we have a tonne of line-up ahead. Hope to see you more on our platform :-)

Beautiful site, but as others have said, I have no idea what it does.

You guys really should focus on getting a front end developer...

Yes @brandon we've already upped the ante on front-end side. We just wanted to have a feel of what HNers think about this whole thing. Which seems very encouraging :-)

Hah, just trying to be constructive. I'm a bit of stickler for details. Glad to heard your filling the gaps in the team to address these issues. Seems promising :)

I have no idea what your product does and I'm not inclined enough to sign-up (especially with my facebook account) to find out more.

Why is "@bubbles" all over the place? You don't even own the Twitter handle.

We let users write letters directly from the browser and send it to anyone on email. You can put hand-draw signature on your letters using mouse/touchscreen, draw, sketch, collage etc.

Sorry, we're a bit early-on into our product, couldn't meet expectations :-(

Big mistake: no video demo on the home page I can immediately dive into and see @bubbles in action. This is a visual product, that's critical miss.

Hey thanks for feedback. I will put up a "how this works" video up there very soon.

I tried watching your video: http://vimeo.com/29003525 and all I heard was http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0N05WL2NlLo

@bubbles brings letter-writing to the web the good-old fashioned way. Our users can write, type, draw, sketch, collage and put hand-written signature on their letters and send it to anyone.

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