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Ask HN: Please review my new social learning site

cafecourses.com

17 pointsbdmac9731 comments

Using javascript for sign up.

Even though something like 90%< of users have javascript enabled, I think it is an unnecessary risk to have a signup form be 100% dependent on javascript. Especially when it is so easy to just provide a real link to a basic signup page and then load that right within the facebox using jquery. Pretty sure you are using facebox and facebox makes this ridiculously easy.

Hrm "Get In. Get Out. Get Smarter." Don't like it already, sounds trite.

"Ya tai! - Hiro Nakamura, Heroes "

What has that got to do with anything? And it is "Yatta" not "ya tai."

The entire style of the site feels cheap too. I'm not sure, maybe the striped banner up top? You need a logo.

Cut the guy some slack FFS. He managed to get a good idea and launched it. Congratulations are in order and kudoses. We can't really predict the success of his project by the absence or presence of minor details, like a striped banner, and no site feels cheaper than Craigslist.

Fixing the UI/design is an iterative, everyday process, and the great majority of it will ever come to light after heavy traffic and use.

Regards.

Thank you very much!

Thanks for the feedback. The Hiro quote is just a placeholder until I get a good one to put there. I like Hiro. I'll fix the spelling though!

Don't worry, if I get some funding for this the first thing I'll do is hire a graphic artist to make it look better. One guy can only do so much.

> Don't worry, if I get some funding for this the first thing I'll do is hire a graphic artist to make it look better. One guy can only do so much.

HN understand this, but users will not. Ever.

This isn't specifically about your site, but about your response; that mentality could work against you. I didn't spend much time thinking about the graphics on your site, but if you provide whatever the user is looking for, who cares about looks. Shiny shiny is just the bait.

I signed up. The "conversational japanese" course was highly rated and recommended, so I enrolled in it, but I don't know what to do now. There doesn't seem to be anything there. Where's the course?

The "enroll" button was a bit scary, I wasn't sure what that would do. I'd expose as much of the course materials as you can without forcing someone to enroll.

On the content issue, most of the existing courses out there were created during the private friends/family beta. I have not removed them under the assumption that they will simply fade to meaningless over time. I believe the "Conversational Japanese" course is still under construction but the owner "published" it for testing purposes. Getting quality content is my primary concern at this point!

Didn't mean to scare you with that enroll button haha. Enrolling at this point really doesn't do anything other than give you full access to the course (you can then rate/review it, access the sections, and partake in the forums).

I have a story to think about letting people in w/out enrolling but am unsure how well that would work because then it is hard to gauge a) how popular is a course and b) should a user be able to review the course. Plus I intend to eventually allow course owners to charge for their courses if they so desire and want to get users used to enrolling since eventually that may have a checkout process attached to it.

More food for thought.. "Enroll" feels like there is going to be some requirement of me, and I wasn't willing to make that commitment yet. This isn't the right language, but something like "keep tabs on this course", or simply "follow", or maybe there's two options: "enroll" and "audit"

I personally don't like generic icons.

Neither do I! Want to make some for me for free? :-)

What about just not using them? Or you can find super cheap ones on istockphoto

To me, the signup/login forms are not clear. You use "login" on the signup form. I instinctively associated that word with logging in, so i kept looking for where to "sign up". A better word would be username.

When signing up using the big orange sticker icon on the right, you get no status message as to what happend after submitting the form. It was only after trying to sign up using the top left link that it told me "username exists" which meant the sticker signup apparently worked.

Not requiring a password on initial signup tells me you want ease signing up as much as possible; why are you requiring email validation then? Seems counter-productive. Let users gain instance access, and then delete accounts that haven't validated after a set timeframe, (with reminders).

Minor pet peeve. The facebox boxes have too little padding on the left/right margins. It does not look nice.

I tried to sign up for a course by clicking on the plus sign, but after I do that I am lost as to actually how to "take" the course. Maybe this is a lack of content issue, but I'm still puzzled as to whether these courses have video, audio, read like a textbook, or??

That is all for now.

I've addressed most of these concerns in the last deployment I just did. The lack of notification on signup was a caching problem.

After signing up for (enrolling in) a course you should be taken to that course's landing page. A navigation section gets added to the sidebar when in a course that lists out that course's sections (assuming it has any). At that point, the norm would be to simply progress through the course's sections in a linear fashion but that is not enforced so you can skip around if you want/need.

I guess I need to somehow make it more obvious what you do when you are in a course.

Once you get into the site itself the design is fine. I think the negative reaction you are seeing is more about the landing page. To sum it up; it has a web 1.0 feel. There is a lot of text, and it seems like a pretty intense sales pitch.

I'd cut that landing page down to the bare essentials.

The site itself feels very complete, but without content it is impossible to understand what the point really is. I registered and as others mentioned, I had no clue what to do. The "what to do" drop down is great, but so much to read. I don't have the patience to read all that (and I want to help you), so I wouldn't expect a user to read it.

Regarding content; you need to champion a topic. Pick something you know that would relate to other people. If you can't think of something, do something technical.. The site can't be empty, and the things that people see must be current.

good luck, looks like a strong start

That is great feedback. Thank you.

Just wanted to say thank you all again for the valuable feedback.

I have taken many of the suggestions from here and updated the site's landing page to be less wordy and more to the point.

Also, I have streamlined the signup process so that you no longer have to validate your email address (although now I probably need to add a CAPTCHA or something at least).

I've also added in a new user help page that you are taken to upon signing up that tries to give some pointers on what to do next rather than just dumping you on your profile page.

Again, thank you all for the feedback!

As soon as I understood what you were offering (make your own courses online!) I wanted to browse example courses that had been released, and it wasn't obvious how to do that.

Course Catalog link at the top. It's also the home page when you are logged in.

Ah, I see. I didn't understand what a course catalog was in this context. Maybe "Browse Courses", or place the link more centrally? Also, it should default to a few examples that are really awesome, not "Most Recent" which is full of garbage at any given moment.

for a one man army, I think its pretty neat what you've put out as v1.

Some gripes: - Please allow me to see content without a signup. it will help in SEO too.

- You can put up this on your hompage :) http://www.cafecourses.com/courses/3-course-creation-101 and invite people to take up more courses (if #1 is done)

- Related courses will help when looking at a particular course (you already have tags and search, so I think it might be easy to do this)

- Your login form is a bit too intrusive for my taste. Why do I have to check my email to continue using the service? (I dropped out at that point and didnt get to see a course) I didnt mind a signup for testing ur service but checking my email was a blocker. I have 2 emails (both on gmail) and one I dont check at all. Used for experimenting. To see that inbox I have to signoff from my account and log in there, wade through spam to find your mail.

Thanks for the comments.

1. You can already see the content without signing up (at least the course overview pages). It is probably not obvious but the Course Catalog link at the top is accessible when you are not signed in. I didn't want people to get lost in looking at courses (especially when there aren't many yet) because I want them to sign up and get involved in the community.

2. Related courses is a great idea, thanks!

3. Due to comments here I am reconsidering the email verification step. Most people just use a trash or temp address to get around it anyways (like I do).

Tried to sign up but all I got was an animated gif in the popup window. Tried with Safari and FF on OS X.

Edit: The popup worked from /courses but not from the home page.

I think the site is just under a bit heavier load than normal and until I get some more traffic it's running on a pretty low-powered server. Be patient please!

Pubb is right, it's the same for me. It works from /privacy and /courses. Clicking on it from the landing page returns 422 "Unprocessable Entity" as a response to the ajax call.

Chrome/XP.

Think I fixed it. Sorry for that guys!

Same here - FF/Vista

Thank you all very much for your feedback! I truly appreciate all of it, both positive and negative.

nice idea, if a user creates a course will another user be able to modify it? because that might be helpful.

This is not implemented yet but there is already a story for allowing possible course author collaborations.

i'm reminded of something joel spolsky said about the changing state of volunteering, that people are willing to do small defined tasks, but less willing to volunteer a certain block of their time each week. So if somehow you had a course todo list, and people could each contribute, i think that might work well.

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