Show HN: Draft – A Design Feedback Tool for Designers and Small Teams | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Draft – A Design Feedback Tool for Designers and Small Teams

draftapp.co

70 pointssimonpreed59 comments

I love the signup page on this site. The writing style of the app itself speaking to you is a great twist and kept me scrolling at least.

I have to agree with others here that there are a lot of apps in this space, but the interactive demo right at the top is an awesome way of getting across just how simple this is to use, so I can see that going some way to help this page stand out in a list of many.

Thanks Michael, we put a lot of thought into how we could present the app to people so I'm glad you picked up on all of our little ideas :)

First of all, this looks very nice and I have nothing bad to say about this particular product at all.

But I can't help but wonder why there are so many apps like this. Off the top of my head there's Notable, LayerVault, Shipment, Cage, Marqueed, Moqups, the recently released Flatsie, and a ton of others that all offer some variation of the "show your work to clients" theme.

I'm really curious what pushed you to release your own version of this. Does Draft do something that, say, Notable doesn't? Or do you think the market for this is so big that it can comfortably support one more similar app?

Thanks for the comment, I'm Chris (designer on Draft).

So there were a couple of reasons for doing this but the main one was scratching my own itch (so to speak). I was getting tired of emails back & forth with clients for feedback and although I had tried some alternatives, including some of the ones you mentioned, I never found one that fit my particular workflow.

I guess we'll see about the market size and if there is room for this or not :)

Small thing:

"If you cancel & there is more than 7 days of the month left you won’t be charged at all. However if there is less than 7 days of the month left, you will be charged for the entire month."

should be "...there ARE..." in both cases.

Thanks for the heads up, changing that now.

Thing is, there's probably a large market even outside just web freelancers with plenty of space.

I agree. This will be extremely useful for printing companies, and graphic designers. They go through tons of back and worth with clients who wants "letter A to be moved 1 centimeter to the left."

Enjoyed the landing page and the product looks very simple and useful. However, I was thrown off by the demo image used (a login page) and was confused where I could sign up for your app. I think it would be useful to show a different image for the first interaction.

Additionally, consider letting the first-time visitor upload something of their own, drop a comment, and email it to their friends, coworker, or client right from this first page. Onboard them and get them using the social functions immediately to get behavioral patterns started.

Hi Steve, many thanks for taking the time to have a look and provide feedback. Excellent point on the login confusion, I'll have to address that as others may also have this.

With regards to the behavioural patterns on initial viewing, I definitely agree and this is something we're planning, just need to get it done :)

I think the site looks great. Kudos for giving the actual use case of the app with showing instead of telling. I think its a great overview of what you offer.

I am curious as to why you have so many monthly price points - I would have expected 3 for simplicity (or even 1 if you were so bold)

I don't have perfect clarity into the "buyers" of these servies, and maybe its as simple as them needed this level of options.

Choosing pricing plans was something we went back and forth with for a while. In the end we took a look at our prospective customer groups (agencies of varying sizes and freelancers).

Thanks for the feedback though it's something we'll definitely consider maybe just 2 plans a 'Freelancer' and 'Team'.

Hi, we've since simplified pricing so there are now only two options - https://www.draftapp.co/plans

For an individual there is a Solo plan at $10 per month. This gets you 5 projects, unlimited storage.

For teams there is a Team plan at $25 per month. This gets you unlimited projects, unlimited storage.

Again, thanks for the comment.

I loved the way you guys presented the simplicity of the app above the fold itself!

I agree that there are lots of players in the space and adding to the list given above, namely, Easyproof, Proofhq, Pixelapse and Conceptshare come to mind. Also, there's Framebench that's making some noise with its novel real time functionalities. I really think they might have something there.

Hey thanks for the mention! I'm a founder at Framebench (www.framebench.com) and we're trying out some new stuff with real time technologies. We too plan to launch soon and would love all your reviews!

Again Chris, Kudos on the design and the uber cool way you explained the applications use case. Congrats :)

The site looks great. Simple, to the point with an obvious call to action.

I have one question about the pricing. You say "x projects" and the cost is monthly. Is that x projects per month? If I start a project in one month, and it continues into the next billing cycle, do I get to start two new projects whilst I complete the outstanding third one?

The projects limit are the total you can have under your plan, your allowance isn't incremented monthly. So in your example if you require a third project you would have to either upgrade or delete a project.

Good idea, but unfortunately that product is really hard to establish because of the learning curve it introduces to everyone involved. I find it to be highly effective for beginning phases, but to transfer that information to another platform has been the determining factor for my version. :3

Hey, thanks for the comment. I had similar reservations but having used the app with clients I've that the majority have found it quite valuable in helping them explain their feedback, only a very small % have had issues understanding it.

With regards to transferring that information to another platform, do you mean transferring all of the comments/feedback to something like a spreadsheet? Or something else?

When compared to InvisionApp, which is what I use currently for sharing mocks and annotations capability - they have more features and for the same/similar price.

You won't beat them in features (atm) so you gotta beat them in price.

If you guys are cheaper, I'd give it a whirl!

Hi Jimmy, thanks for the heads up. I'd be interested to know what you would consider to be a fair price for the features we are currently offering?

Hi Jimmy, we've since simplified pricing so there are now only two options - https://www.draftapp.co/plans

For an individual there is a Solo plan at $10 per month. This gets you 5 projects, unlimited storage.

For teams there is a Team plan at $25 per month. This gets you unlimited projects, unlimited storage.

Great site, only problem I found was some wording at the bottom:

"I was built by Simon Reed & Chris Mahon. Simon made me work they way I do and Chris who gave me my good looks."

Simon made me work THE way I do and Chris -who- gave me my good looks.

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Beautiful site!

Thanks benny, made those changes.

No problemo'.

Small bug in the demo: When I click for a text box the scrollbar on the right of the page disappears. This causes the entire display of the page to shift right by (half of?) the scrollbar width to remain centred. It's pretty visually disorientating.

Win7 x64, FF 17.0.1

Sorry, clarification: When I mouse over the textbox itself. If I click on an existing comment or click to create my own new one, it doesn't do it until I mouse over the textbox to enter text.

It is only when the mouse cursor is on the textbox too, once the input is on the textbox I can move the mouse off it and the page scrollbar returns, yet I can still keep typing as it's the active input still.

Hi, thanks for the detailed feedback, we'll get that fixed.

There are dozens of websites doing this for free. Why should one use your service?

Hi, thanks for the comment. Every plan comes with a free 14 day trial for people to try it out for themselves to see how it compares to any alternatives.

After that it's up to that individual to decide if the experience we've created is something they would like to continue using or not, hopefully they do :)

Just a sales recommendation: the parent, by asking a question, has given you permission to talk to him. Take that opportunity and expound on what distinguishes your product from others - better customer service? a more responsive site?

Don't leave it "up to the individual"!

(Great looking site btw)

Thanks for the tip, always good to learn new things :)

This may just be me, but 14 days seems kind of strict for the type of projects it is for and given the learning curve of all the parties involved like someone else mentioned. It could take two weeks before everyone on my team has even had the time to go over it. If there was a file or size limit, it might be more friendly.

Hi, thanks for the comment. Interesting viewpoint, we'll look at increasing it to a month, do you think that would be sufficient time to test it out?

Thanks for responding!

I would think so. I mean, I'd want to use it throughout the entire iterative process, so that means I'm waiting at least a week for everyone's feedback, implementing it and getting it back up there and then having them look at it again. Toss in another project to ensure that it will be easy to navigate the site and I think that could easily take a month, but definitely more than two weeks.

No worries, thank you for taking the time to give us feedback!

We'll update it so that the trial is increased to 30 days to give people more time to get a feel for the product and anyone who has signed up prior to this will have their trial extended to make up for the difference.

Awesome, thanks so much! I should be giving it a go in the next week or so once we start our next project.

I'm not him, but I would definitely put it to a month. As somebody who used a tool like this in a company across departments, it takes a while to get people on board that changes a process like this.

Hi, just wanted to let you know we've increased the trial to 30 days.

Looks really interesting. I’ll definitely consider using this. Seems great for collaboration.

Idea: integrate something like this with a version control system like Git(hub)?

Hi, thanks for the comment. We do have version control for each design/image you upload. If it has the same name, you can flip between previous versions. Is that what you meant?

I like this a lot. It wouldn't be HN if I didn't have a nitpick to contribute: dragging the textareas to the right takes it past its right border (Chrome 24 / Mountain Lion).

Hi, thanks for the comment. I can't quite replicate this, any chance you could email us at hi@draftapp.co ?

I tried emailing hi@draftapp.co both from gmail and my dreamhost mail and both returned to sender

Doh, sorry that should have been hello@draftapp.co

There is also a pretty cool (and free) alternative: http://mocku.ps

Thanks, always interesting to see how others are approaching this problem.

Nice site, with Draft we wanted to focus more on organising the feedback on our designs as well as the annotation of our designs.

Free is always nice, but sometimes free can mean not around very long, which is not so nice, especially if you have tons of data stored, talking of which, is there a way to export your content from the app ?

Hi, thanks for the comment. At the moment there is no way of doing this automatically (in theory we could do this for you manually) but it's an interesting point and something we will definitely think about implementing.

> but sometimes free can mean not around very long, which is not so nice, especially if you have tons of data stored...

I do wish people would remember this when talking about how unjust it is that PACER charges 10 cents a page (up to a maximum of 3 dollars per document) for court documents.

Take a look at - http://webklipper.com/webklipper

the right product in this space is going to shake things up on price. everyone is trying to squeeze too much out of this concept. and that's why it hasn't gained near the traction with agencies as it could. its not cost effective.

Hi Michael, thanks for the comment. Interested to know your thoughts on our product, do you think we're trying to do too much?

For now we've tried to keep things simple with a limited feature set (i.e. only what you really need to get going).

But very interested to know what you think we could do better so we can improve.

pricing too high. max pricing should be about 15.00 a month but just have a limit of storage and force people to dump old stuff.

Hi Michael, thanks for the input, definitely something we'll discuss internally.

Hi Michael, we've since simplified pricing so there are now only two options - https://www.draftapp.co/plans

For an individual there is a Solo plan at $10 per month. This gets you 5 projects, unlimited storage.

For teams there is a Team plan at $25 per month. This gets you unlimited projects, unlimited storage.

Again, thanks for the comment.

we use http://clarify.io pretty cool too (and free)

As above, thanks for the comment. Always interesting to see how others are approaching this problem.

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