We wanted it, so we built it...feedback? | Hacker News Reader

We wanted it, so we built it...feedback?

analystsedge.com

17 pointsrwebb64 comments

thoughts?

I think you've got something nice here. I personally don't care for the color scheme or the letter-based voting, but as you mentioned your likely user base will be comfortable with that. Probably a good move.

I'd actually use more line spacing between news stories though. It feels a bit too cramped to me. I agree with other comments about the ads too--lose them for now.

thanks very much for the feedback! it has been an interesting exercise for us: balancing what users what, what users actually DO on the site, and "good" design all at the same time. We've ended up going after the first two more aggressively at the cost of the third...simply because good design alone in a forest is worthless :)

I think it'd be handy to have tool where users can type in or mark certain companies they'd like to follow, and then get a feed of all the recent news pertaining to said company.

that's an interesting idea, but we're really focusing on "industry" news for the private finance world. specific company news is a huge box we don't want to get even remotely close to. the only reason there are specific companies mentioned in our news is because there is some sort of private finance move going on in relation to them. the goal is for the site to be a place where pe, m&a, hedge, and vc folks can keep track on the buzz in their industries.

I still think a feature like the one I stated would fit in perfectly. With a feature like that, I would most definitely be inclined to register with your website and check it on a daily basis.

i would sign up too :)

well specific company news sounds hard, but you can have something like a saved search filter that scans a full text index for specific words so you can essentially view all company specific news (at least all articles that mention that company).

The colors/layout give me a headache.

Yeah, I was considering signing up for an account to see if there was a preference for that. Brilliant!

good idea...

yeah the black background was a topic of debate. we went for black because all finance guys think bloomberg is the best thing since sliced bread.

Do you know what is the reason behind this color scheme? Maybe it's easier to read in crowded trading rooms?

bloomberg doesn't like changing things because their biggest and best users are old men. changing the background would be a big dice roll.

Not being physically painful is more important than vague associations with Bloomberg.

Also, use lighter fonts or more interline spacing.

advice: taken

we increased the line spacing, toned down some of the colors to make them easier on the eyes, and fixed the job board iframe headers.

thanks for all the great feedback!

I don't like the color scheme but it's bearable. Do take Paul's advice, though, and at least double the interline spacing. Maybe also increase the font size by a point or two. People are going to want to skim through the category names, so underline them or put them in a different color than the surrounding text.

I think the color scheme is great, although when I try to read the links, my eyes do a magic-eye thing.

Try spacing the items out, and put the vote/category/domain below the headline.

I actually like the background; I would maybe make all the other colors a bit subdued. My suggestion is to make the text font size a bit bigger.

thanks! you probably have a nice monitor? we tried making things more mellow, but a lot of our readers have crappy monitors so the dark stuff ends up being black on black...which is tough to see...

I actually have a crappy CRT monitor.

ha! maybe we should tone it down then...

toned down

I don't know much about this world, but it seems like the idea could be a good one. I found it pretty hard to read though. Might have been the color scheme, or that everything was too close together, or both.

I also don't see the username of the person who submitted the story. This might not actually be important, but I did catch myself scanning for who submitted each story. In this case, it was to see if it was all one or two submitters (i.e., you guys), or if you already had a real community going.

A few thoughts:

What about searching? I might want to see all articles with Citigroup in the headline for example...

Why not add regular news as well - news that affects the finance world? Actually, on a totally different topic, it would be really neat to create a site which somehow reads the news and correlates it with stocks that could be affected. For example, Apple's ipod news caused shares in SNDK to get whacked (the ipod nano's didn't use as much flash as SNDK investors hoped).

search feature is linked to on the right side in the "this site" box...

someone above wants stock news too...not something we want to get even close to though :) toooooo much info!

I'd use this but the color scheme is too hard on my eyes as well; doesn't allow me to spend a lot of time reading. I'd also like to have the ability to make comments on the story and hear the chatter of others. It would be nice to be able to look-up stock quotes. Thanks, nice start.

The small speech bubble icon seems to be used for commenting.

yup...

This was an example of the power of plain text. I don't think anyone has much doubt about how to find the comments in news.yc or reddit.

what about digg? ;)

The line spacing for the list of links is quite small, it makes the page feel quite cramped for me. Notice how the links on bloomberg.com are about twice as far apart. You could also put more space around your logo, again like bloomberg.com. Not sure about the serif font.

yeah - there is tons of content every day that we want on the site, so we tried to get as much on as we could :) not great from a design perspective, but our users like it way more so far.

I like the color scheme.

You should allow logging in with the user name as well as the e-mail address.

The upgrade/downgrade links give me no feedback, but that may be because I'm using Opera.

I'll be checking up over the next week or two. The news is good from what I've seen so far.

It might make it look more uniform, and less chaotic, if you move the voting, commenting and other elements that have static widths to the left side of the link.

that's an interesting idea. the one line + variying lengths + static lengths produces some issues for sure.

I think it would be better to align the vote arrows vertically, like in reddit and here, rather than putting the down arrow at the right of the up one.

good call...tough to squeeze them in there since we're putting a premium on # of stories per view though...

You are getting asked to increase the spacing between lines anyway. Good luck with your decision. :)

I like this a lot. It's much more professional than http://digstock.com/ , which never really took off.

thanks! digstock really is focusing on stock specific news though. our focus is on private finance news.

Looks like the jobs page is not picking up your stylesheet ? I see borders round the logo and the major links have default HTML formatting.

ha - yeah that's jacked up! we weren't going for the purple borders...

fixed now...

Black on white text > white on black text.

I won't even look at it long enough to find out what it is supposed to do with that color scheme.

Now that all that information is aggregated into one convenient place, it doesn't really provide an edge, does it? ;-)

My one suggestion: invert the color scheme to black on white. It will make the site look more professional.

Also, there doesn't appear to be any indication of who submitted a story.

I see no indication of how many comments a story already has.

Drop the google ads until you get serious traffic.

why?

Money derived from ads = traffic * click-thru rate.

Web page quality reduction caused by ads = (Some constant)

So, you plot that out and find out when the money derived exceeds the damage. Requires guesswork, of course.

It feels sleazy to me to draw users with a certain level of page quality, while planning to reduce that quality later after they get in the habit of using it and recommend it to their friends.

There is pertinent info to this topic in discussions of monetizing forum communities. SearchEngineWatch maybe? I forget the link.

you don't have to promise not to run ads. but ads are a drag on your acquisition of users, and the quality of your site improves with the number of active users -- so are you doing a disservice to your early users by running ads?

I think you're just rationalizing here. My response would be: sleazy it is, but if it's what it takes to make it succeed, it's your choice to make. Besides, it's not sure at all you'll eventually use ads; they are not the only way to monetize a site. So why move there before it's really worth it?

Nice site. Going to pass it on to a few friends in the industry to see if they have any comments I might pass along.

SEO theory suggests dropping ads until you have lots of traffic b/c with AdSense you provide random relevant exit points and they're not hooked on you yet. It's also distracting, takes away from the experience, etc.

In your case I think it's subtle enough not to detract.

yeah we're not getting huge traffic, but i doubt anyone is not looking at us because we have some ads...and if we can get any but closer to breaking even, i'll take it!

I'd like to see the numeric rank next to the link.

we opted for a letter based ranking system (derived from moody's debt ranking system) because it relays relative value like a numeric ranking does, but avoids the issue of the user "let down" when they see everything has 0 - 20 votes. there are no +1000 point posts on anything other than digg and reddit...no need to use their system...

The reason I say to enumerate the links is not so much for ranking purposes, but to reinforce the visual aspect of the page. For me at least, it's much easier to parse the page if there's some kind of visual cue to help me keep track of where I am on a page.

Also, I've been on the web long enough to have learned to scan over and ignore ads (image and text ads), and a list/block of text without bullets or numbers screams "avert your eyes... ads!!" For example, the main content of the page looks very similar to the Google ads on the right column (with the exception of underlines), while the RSS feeds with the bright orange icons screams "look at me on this page of monotony!!"

I hope this helps. Keep up the great work!

You are talking about different things: chengmi talks about 'hotness' ranking numbers at the left of the links, while rwebb talks about the 'votes' ranking letters at the right.

I myself was confused by this AA BBB thing, but I suppose your target audience knows better?

ah i see - yes i was referring to hotness ratings and he was referring to numerical ordering. interesting ideas - i definitely think numbers help "parse" the text...

Looking good !!!

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