Ask HN: Please review my startup crowdmind.com | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Please review my startup crowdmind.com

alpha.crowdmind.com

17 pointsrichesh18 comments

At first I thought it was just another of those 'ask the intarwebs!' sites where people just twitter or post to each other, but on further inspection I was very taken with the scoring system and the ability to rate the poster's good and bad reasons.

It looks like quite a bit more work to create the question than is usually the case, which might be a disincentive for some - although it will also help them to focus on the issue at hand. The layout is a little confusing at first and god only knows why you made the search box background color to dark grey against a black background - I found myself wondering why there was a search button with no search box until I looked more closely. I think you could use a one line explanation like 'Our members help you rate and discover your options' on the landing page, because it took me a couple of minutes to realize that the stars and ratings were functional rather than mere window-dressing. your 'about' page does this very well, why not use the top two elements from that (title and icons)?

It also wasn't obvious to me that the 'good/bad because...boxes were text fields at first. Stick a flashing cursor in them or something, because they look like headers.

For a site with so few questions and needing a network effect to take off, I'm already impressed and think you're onto a winner here. I would even suggest spinning off a 'pro' version aimed at business or other markets so that professional users who could really gain from this won't have to encounter questions of the 'how does I shot web' variety. Also, find some way to embed it besides the x-posting to twitter, FB and LI. And why aren't you posting 'How can we make CrowdMind better?' as one of your featured questions, you silly-billies!?

Overall, excellent: simple but not shallow.

Thanks for your review, it is very helpful and I really appreciate it. Looks like the UI needs considerably overhaul given other reviews, so we'll definitely implement your suggestions as well.

As I'm sure you're aware, http://ask.metafilter.com does the same thing. I use it because of the MetaFilter community: I have a general understanding of the demographic, morals, values and politics of the people I'm asking questions of. I also know that people's answers must be posted with an account they probably value because they have paid $5 to create it.

Do you plan to foster a community with certain features? Or are you looking for a broader range of people?

Hi, thanks a lot for your review. We are currently working on a credibility score for the users based on how much others value their input. This should create an experts community in each category. Currently you can invite trusted advisors to your own decision pages with special invite code (the UI is only visible to decision creators). The trusted advisors are people who's opinion matter the most. The page will let you toggle between "the crowd" and the advisors via the link on the right of option area.

If you look at this page (http://alpha.crowdmind.com/decision/17_What_Is_The_Best_Java...) I'm the trusted advisor to the decision maker. So our ratings and scores are maintained separately and displayed in the box above.

Right now the site is open to a broad range of people. We are also considering allowing people to import their credibility from their blog, forums they are active in, etc.

The UI needs some work. The Viget Labs page looks really slick, so whoever did that should take a crack at crowdmind. I won't sign in to sketchy looking websites, even if it is with OpenID.

Thanks for your review. Anything in particular you can point out that we can fix, or is it just the overall design? We initially had Viget Labs to do the design but our direction changed after they delivered. So we had to make the changes ourselves since funding is limited.

I like the concept-I think assigning attributes and making people think about rating them will help weed out the idiots you get on places like Yahoo Answers. I do think you need to focus on building a strong, intelligent community for this to work. Also, the layout of the attributes rating box needs to be cleaned up-it's kind of confusing right now.

By the way, I'd be happy to feature Crowdmind on our website, www.usefultools.com, either now or in the future (since you're still working on it).

Thanks a lot for your review and support. I will definitely get in touch with you once I've fixed some of the issues pointed out here. Seems like we need to do some UI tweaking to the decisions page.

Any suggestions on how we can build the community? Its definitely been a struggling point for us at the moment.

Well, step one is just to make people aware that you exist-I think the "get a bigger crowd" option is a great way to do that. Increasing your Twitter following would probably also help, though. Tweetspinner is a good app for this-if you get their premium service, you can follow people automatically when they mention certain keywords, automatically follow all of your competitors followers, then purge the followers that don't follow you back.

You can also submit your site to social media sites like Digg and Reddit. Getting other websites to write about you will also help point people in your direction.

Once you start attracting people, I think having a credibility rating system will become increasingly important in helping to keep the community healthy, intelligent and civil.

The main page is pretty slick, though you might want to think about using at least slightly different styles for the "Considering" and "Looking for" sections.

The "get a bigger crowd" options are a really good idea.

However, the question/answer pages are rather crowded. A clearer seperation of elements would probably make it easier to see what's going on where. Also, the "Reason (intellect)" section has good functional elements for rating/feedback, but the "Attribute Ratings (feelings)" part doesn't. Why a drop down menu? That's an extra two clicks for every rating I want to give.

EDIT: And the "0" button for a 0 star rating doesn't feel intuitive and I don't see why it's even needed.

Thanks for the review. We are definitely looking to changing the consideration and looking for to be more aligned with terms being used on the site (Options and Attributes), and will try to make it more prominent.

We will look into re-working the UI for Attribute rating, I do agree that its extra clicks for something simple.

The reason for the "0" is to give something 0 stars, because in the system 0 has a negative value vs. not entering anything. Not entering a rating means you may not know about it to rate it. a "0" star means its bad. But, I see your point about how that can be confusing.

Please advise that I need to be logged to have an aswer, because with the Back button I need to rewrite the question.

Hi, Thanks for helping with this review. Yes, you need to be logged in to interact with the site.

Like it, but the interface is a bit confusing. At first I did not even see the options in the side bar, which are actually the main thing to decide upon? It wasn't clear to me where to enter stuff either.

I guess the actual options should be more prominent than the "feeling aspects" of said options.

Thanks for the review, its very helpful. We've definitely heard about options not being prominent and will be working on making them visible.

Think of a way integrating a Twitter conversation. Question & related replies. That'll add some more value to the service I guess.

Thanks for the review. We have been investigating adding twitter integration, but the character limitation seems to be a bit of a problem. We are trying to use both status update and a direct message approach to make this work.

Does anyone feel that they wouldn't sign-up to this site because of the bad design? (Anyone share antiismist) view below?

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