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CoffeeStrap HN

boards.coffeestrap.com

31 pointsmahesh_rm42 comments

"HI HN, WE ARE BUILDING TINDER, BUT FOR LANGUAGE EDUCATION, WITH INSTITUTIONAL CERTIFICATION.

WE'RE TESTING IT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF VENICE, AND WE'D LOVE NOW TO DO THIS ON HN AS WELL.

YOU THINK THAT'S A BAD IDEA, WHICH DOESN'T SOLVE A REAL PROBLEM? LET US KNOW WHY."

Your first paragraph is not informative at all. What if I don't know what Tinder is? You're suggesting that maybe your idea is bad (and we should tell you why) about 1/2 a screen before telling me what your idea actually is. How about putting that sentence "CoffeeStrap is a place..." right at the top?

p.s. I think your idea is great! But I need more help understanding what's going on :)

Just from the first paragraph, I genuinely thought it was a parody of your typical startup "We're building X, but for Y market" newspeak.

Thank you! Good critique, we just took for granted that the average HN user knows what Tinder is. We're basically trying to figure out how to replicate real world interaction between members belonging to different communities, but online. How we're doing it, well, we're still experimenting. :-)

I may be an average HN reader, but I only vaguely know what Tinder is, and how it works. Don't rely on my own half-baked idea of what another app is to make me understand your own - straight up tell me first. Good luck!

If the average HN reader knows what Tinder is, that could mean that 51% know and 49% don't know. Never ignore the 49%. :-)

Definitely agree about the "YOU THINK THAT'S A BAD IDEA" language. Besides being negative, it puts words in people's mouths, which is very off-putting.

Your project sounds neat, though. Best of luck with it!

I think the HN-specific landing page is not as informative as the actual main page: http://boards.coffeestrap.com/#/welcome

The HN-specific page reads like startup satire.

It's not, we're trying to put together people with different backgrounds, and different approaches to langauge. We started from the two context we were most familiar with. The line between what is satire and what is community culture may be kind of thin, especially for online communities such as HN. Don't you think? :-)

Other than hacker news, how many other targeted landing pages have you created? (just for my own curiosity)

Another one for the University of Venice (Ca' Foscari) that we proposed to students/ex-students last week.

Thanks this helps a lot, the HN page made it sound like a satire to me as well.

Every time I hear the name, I have to re-remind myself that it isn't bootstrap rewritten in coffeescript.

Same. And the Try CoffeeStrap button doesn't help.

Original concept was "Bootstrap your language with Coffee" :-).

I was disappointed to find out it wasn't! Although I guess it doesn't really make sense as a concept; maybe just the JS parts of bootstrap.

Maybe I'll get lucky and there'll be some folks willing to teach me Danish. There are surprisingly few good options for learning it in the US.

I like Duolingo's approach, but they don't have the languages I want available (except German).

Edit: Bummer. No Danish. :(

Hi! We're testing it out on a small subset of languages. Being it a peer2peer marketplace tool, we don't plan to restrict the amount of languages that will be included. Going to notify you as soon as Danish will be up! :-)

Kickass, thanks!

Swedish too!

Why on earth would you want to learn danish?

//Dane

Because Denmark is awesome? A few of my best friends are Danish and I would like to spend more time there.

Not sure if you know but Duolingo are allowing users to add new languages now: http://incubator.duolingo.com/

You really need to improve the design of that website.

I like the design. What do you see as problems?

First thing that jumped out at me was the "Try CoffeeStrap" button at the bottom isn't obviously a button - of course, the text gives it away if you're reading carefully, but if you're just skimming the site, it's easy to miss entirely.

Also, the grey on grey text (like for the "What is this?" header) could be improved, and while not a design issue, I would've liked to see a bit about why you called it CoffeeStrap - seems like a weird name for a service like this - brings to mind a Bootstrap tool for CoffeeScript - never would've expected it to be a language-learning tool.

1. Line-height needs to be increased as lines are almost touching.

2. Colour scheme is terrible: green, orange, grey, pale yellow, orange on dark blue, dark blue text with orange shadow, green text on black terminal style popups, black text on asphalt texture, light blue boxes with grey text and dark blue headers, dark red footer with coffee table.

3. Lack of distinction between what is uppercase and what is lowercase. (And in general, just don't do uppercase like that as it's hard to read.)

4. Long-winded copy.

5. "Let Us Know Why" takes me to a team page. On the bottom is what looks like a gigantic back button. Where does the so-called back button go? Not back to the page which I was before I can tell you that. If it's a call-to-action it should be clear what it does.

6. Weird branding in the copy: text that jumps in between trying to appear professional/startupy and wanting to share a beer with you.

7. I just found a whole new introduction page: http://boards.coffeestrap.com/#/welcome I am so confused why more than one exists?

For starters. Realistically they need to work with a designer and start focusing on simplicity.

+1 I couldn't agree more that design needs to be improved.

1. Work on forms: they should be easy to distinguish from other "blocky" things around.

2. It took me like 2 minutes to find what your project is about. Improve your landing page.

3. Colour scheme is really messy. Pick 2 base colors and extend them using http://kuler.adobe.com

4. Choice of name - I believe that in hacker community CoffeeStrap really sounds like Bootstrap in CoffeeScript

The greatest trick the Devil ever played was convincing the world that design is subjective.

We are working on it, any ideas on how to improve navigation? :-)

I would work on a more uniform color scheme. Also, more repetitive design elements. The random dashed border buttons, and other inconsistencies aren't helping with consistent UX and are a little jarring.

The name and first sentence on your site made me think this was satire.

Nice idea and I could see myself using it. I currently use Duolingo but this seems like it would complement that nicely. I would suggest changing the name though. As a dev I immediately thought Bootstrap in CoffeeScript. As a regular person I don't think I'd have a clue what something called CoffeeStrap would do other than something related to coffee.

I'm receiving a bunch of errors when trying to sign up. Seems to be related to the following:

  XMLHttpRequest cannot load http://api.coffeestrap.com/api/v1/users/xxxxxxxxxxxxxx. No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource. Origin 'http://boards.coffeestrap.com' is therefore not allowed access.

The site also tends to go into 404 redirect loops which eventually crash the tab. Not sure if that's related to the above. This is happening loading http://boards.coffeestrap.com/ in an incognito tab.

Also, don't see Thai as a language. :(

I guess this is because it's a bit overloaded the website! Thanks for the heads up, looking into!

Cools stuff, it seems like you guys made quite a jump from the previous version of the platform! Looks cooler now. How do you handle the video chat? Local plugin or external service?

Hey thanks! We are pouring a lot of efforts, we are improving day after day! The video chat is on a isolate instance of heroku. We used a nodejs app with webrtc stuff!

So how are you going to succeed where Livemocha failed for instance ? To be frank , I liked Livemocha,too bad they couldnt monetize their application without selling out to someone that doesnt care about users.

I take it you mean Rosetta Stone? All emails I get now from Livemocha are pitching them. The thing is it actually works. Hell just from the demo CD years ago I can still say "The horse is white" in Welsh!

Are you planning to partner with other universities in Italy only or you want to spread this idea across europe either?

The Ca' Foscari one (university of Venice) was a pilot that we launched last week. The cool think about that is that we are able to automatically certify people that comes from Ca' Foscari. We are planning to have a 'karma' style reference that goes up based on languages certifications, institutions in which you studied and so on.

So definitely yes, we want to repeat that for other Institutions as well.

FYI, your "The Team" link in the page footer seems to be broken (links to http://boards.coffeestrap.com/team)

Have you guys ever considered getting EU funding? There's always some grants to be had with projects like these.

Why must i upload a picture. Use my gravatar.

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