Ask HN: Review My Web App - OnMyMission.com - LDS Missionary Profiles
While our target audience wont necessarily be found here on HN, we would appreciate any feedback!
Is the purpose clear? Usability? Design?
Is the purpose clear? Usability? Design?
Incidentally: less talk about features, more talk about benefits. Nobody will use your site to "Keep a personal list of missionary pages you have access to". They will use your site because it makes their lives fuller, because it lets them keep in touch with their family, because it helps them to support their community in fulfilling their duties to God. These things matter to your customers. Implementation details do not matter.
Edit to add: I understand there may be practical and cultural reasons for defaulting pages to private, but you may wish to reconsider whether that is the only mode of interaction which you will support.
So the private/public pages thing gets a little tricky and it has been on my mind since I started the project. Pages are actually default to public but that doesn't mean open to the internet. What that public means in this case is that any registered user can search/find and view the page. In short it basically works more like facebook and not myspace.
After viewing a few other sites that provide guestbook/forum type services I noticed that a lot of people (moms/dads/grandma) seem to be more willing to post emails and other contact information publicly because they trust the site for some reason. Which means google could crawl that.
Of course, as I mentioned I'm not convinced 100% yet that this is the right way to do it. There are definitely many people who just want to view the page and not bother with signing up. The alternative is to make public pages open to the internet so that any unregistered user can view it.
But that makes things interesting for the private pages. Thats because when we ask for the 'password' for a page we actually only ask for it once and then store the fact that you now have permission to view the missionary in the DB. Maybe the solution is to either create a cookie if they aren't a registered user or store it in the db if they are?
I agree with patio11 on the lightbox effect, but I still think it needs some sort of tour or demo instead of just screenshots. I visited a similar site recently (not for missionaries, but for high school graduating classes), and I'm leery of creating an account here just because that site had poor usability and about ten pages for registration.
More general will give you larger market and you will get more feedback. :-)
I think keeping it only for LDS missionaries and MAYBE expanding it at some point beyond that to other youth missionaries abroad would be as far as it ought to go.
Being the "go-to" site for a particular segment is a winning formula here, not trying to be an "everyman" site to an audience that doesn't have a compelling reason to adopt something like this, whereas, the LDS missionary target audience doesn't have an alternative and it's rare that anyone would think to target them, so that helps a lot in this case.