We always respect the HN community feedback. Thanks in advance for your comments on what we've built so far...
http://www.sproost.com
But I did stop at entering my email address.
Sites like HN have spoiled me with their fast and easy signup. I'd make giving one's email optional.
Remember signup is one of the biggest hurdles any website has. The easier you make it the more people will do it.
Especially if someone is just playing around and has not created dozens of rooms, the worst that could happen is they take the test again.
And I must say the test is fast, short and fun, perfect.
P.S.
Browsed around some more and came back to add to my comment.
If I'm going to be buying furniture over the internet I am going to need A LOT of technical information.
And A LOT of pictures, not just different angles of nicely made bed, but the assembly process as well.
P.P.S.
Bug?: http://www.bobbyberkhome.com/product/bedroom/19393/modloft-w...
I think the placement of the signup is quite nice. Why? because my test result accurate depicted my taste and I was curious to see more.
Needless to say, I signed up.
Didn't buy anything though... everything was way expensive.
I've got a few comments:
First, as someone pointed out, you should not switch your quiz interface between the first question and the latter questions. I don't see that you gain anything by switching and it is a little confusing. I would stick with the first question layout, because it is simple.
Second, I'm not sure that you need the "Most recent results" feature. The investment your seeking from potential users is so small, I don't think I that you need to prove that you have traffic, and I don't really see this as morphing into a social app (if it does, I think you are straying too far away from what will make you money). Further, I think it detracts from the point, which I assume is to get people to take the quiz and click through to buy products. Removing it will make the interface cleaner.
Third, as someone has stated, I would make it clear how many images have been rated and remain. A simple "1 of 10" would do the trick.
Fourth, if you go with the second layout for the quiz interface, I would do away with or hide the "How to take the style quiz" text, like you do the "like or hate something."
Fifth, after the quiz, I would take people right to the "room" of stuff that they can click and buy. As it is, you are going to have a lot of people navigate away at the end of the quiz and they will never even see your money page.
Lastly, I noticed that you are using some magazine images. Although you will likely fly under the radar, that is copyright infringement. I see that you source it at least, and that may be enough to get them off your back.
All in all, good start for sure.
You should make that consistent.
Otherwise nice work.
I ran it past my gf (who watches a lot more home decoration shows than me), she didn't like the quiz results. She felt that they were all over the place and a bit contradictory.
I felt that the quiz was too long :p I was also a bit confused about how many more questions there were - I didn't really understand the potential/eliminated stuff.
I agree with run4yourlives, the objects in the room were really mish-mashed. Having it as a simple 2D representation of the furniture isn't very satisfying - the most jarring example being that the rug is just an upright rectangle...
I'm not part of the target audience, but I think you have something pretty interesting.
This is totally important. This is why almost all shopping carts these days use 1-2-3 style steps. The technical term (from User eXperience) is scent, and it's what gives the user a continued incentive to keep going.
I almost quit the StyleEngine until I saw that, but I almost didn't see it at all.
Seems also very valuable for remodeling-- not just furniture. The most commonly remodeled rooms are kitchens and bathrooms.
The site is agonizingly slow. You are serving up 200k+ images scaled down in HTML. Seriously? Make it as fast as hot or not and you have a winner.
I'd also break it down by room. Kitchen, Living Room, Bedroom, etc.
Of course, as with many sites-- there's no build in marketing. How are you going to get visitors?
One thing surprising is not the fact that the team met on HN, it is the fact that only David is a hacker. I didn’t know that HN was also a meeting spot for interior designers. Really good to know : - )
You really need to Photoshop the pictures in your quiz to make them as standard and innocuous as possible. Telling people to ignore the floors, walls, etc. is just impossible. Ideally, you'd be able to stage your own photos.
Also, the interface needs to be 1) consistent and 2) less cluttered. I'd recommend really blowing it out with whitespace to figure out what you need and don't, then incrementally making it tighter. CrazyEgg might be super-helpful to you given that you have a very visual site.
As for "going viral", having quick page loads is necessary but not sufficient. You can make the page load quicker.
"So 80% of your visitors"
* Windows, floors, wall material, and other architectural features
* Color — it's easy to change color combinations
* Layout and arrangement — also easy to change
But I suppose if I were actually looking to redecorate, I would put more thought into my votes.
I wasn't sure what it was all about until I actually completed the quiz and started looking at "rooms". You may want to fix that somehow.
Also, I found some issues with the way the room objects were displayed (after you have a style)... seemed a little mish-mashed.
Looks like a good thing to present to Architecture digest or House and Home or one of those magazines... timing might not be the best with the recession though.
Good luck to you!
Kudos for using cookies and keeping my quiz results; I would've been very irritated if I had to do it again just because I didn't sign up at the same time. :)
In the room display (which is odd, but the problem is hard), my apache area rug showed up somewhat smaller than my great plains porcelain table lamp, and a throw pillow dwarfed a sofa. Giving some better sense of scale is the only definite improvement I can think of. That and don't let pictures almost completely overlap, as some candle holders do on a leaf bowl the second time I loaded the page.
ETA: Clicking to buy a "Deep River Rectangle Cocktail" table went through the affiliate program link and to the retailer, but it dropped me on the front page.
Very sweet though. I'm going to pass it on definitely.
I'm curios as to why you went with two different styles though. When I start I have radio buttons and a submit on the right of the picture, then you go to the voting blocks on the left of the picture. Why the change? It would maybe be better to go with the more familiar (Hot or Not) style of selections below the picture.
The quiz is very long and it seemed to my european eyes that there's an overhang of traditional styles and little differentiation among contemporary options. Modern seems to imply asian.
I didn't like most of the rooms, but after making my choices the system summerised my style pretty well. Very well actually.
The "design your room" page suffers from some layout quirks (Firefox 3). One of the items in my room got stuck when I switched to selecting more items from the sofas category. That rug just kept hovering on top of the sofas and only went away once I used the budget slider. I wasn't able to repeat it later though.
I love the budget slider but sometimes it didn't stick. It kept snapping back to the greatest price range.
My room looks a little jumbled because the pics aren't aligned at all. I understand that I'm supposed to arrange the items as I see fit, but that doesn't make much sense to me since I can't possibly make the whole thing look anything like a real room. The sizes and perspectives are just too different. I suggest you pre-align the items next to each other. People can still move the items around if they want to.
I appreciate that it's very difficult to actually let people design a room that looks like a room. It would work a little better if I could zoom individual items so I could at least put that lamp next to the sofa and make them look proportionally sized. To take this further you could figure out the sizes of the pieces from the vendors' sites and automatically zoom them accordingly. I know, I know that's a massive amount of work and maybe it wouldn't help enough to make a real difference.
I'm not sure why the "saved rooms" and the "design your room" pages are separate pages. I would prefer a drop-down to select other saved rooms right on the "design your room" page. The cost rundown could be placed on the "buy your furniture" tab or dynamically displayed by clicking somewhere next to the total. In my opinion, there are too many pages and menu/tab levels.
The "to be added" section isn't very useful I think, but if it's there it should at least let me remove stuff from it.
The signup process is OK. No confirmation emails, no nothing, just an email address. But I would still let people see the room designer before making them sign up.
Scaling of fonts / liquid layout could be improved, looks a bit funny on FF/Ubuntu. Layout could use more white space for clarity.
I still like the idea. Good start, keep it up!
I kept answering like, hate and what not for like 20 rooms, but then got tired.
I thought it would stop, analyze the rooms I liked and give me a personality or the app would design my perfect room with perfect furnishings.
good job and good luck!
I would like to see a list of specific styles and their representative pictures though. That way, I can see the names of other styles that I might like or dislike.
Like biohacker42, I stopped at the signup.
I also got tired of looking at pictures.. perhaps a little more reward after going through 5 or 10 images?
Can you take your engine + make it work with different categories?
The placement and design makes it look like a menu.
Well done! I'll try to add some more details later.
Is there a way to tell my friends my results? Not via email, I want a direct link to tweet/IM etc