Our startup Seekler just launched (alpha release). Feedback is much appreciated | Hacker News Reader

Our startup Seekler just launched (alpha release). Feedback is much appreciated

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In a nutshell, Seekler makes it easy to find and create lists of the best stuff (songs, movies, artists, comics, jokes, restaurants, or anything else you can think of). Seekler merges users' lists together to create 'community lists' that display the aggregated opinion of the entire community. Some of the popular community lists include Best Movies, Best Cities to Visit, and Best Presidential Candidates.

We're doing a staged launch, so we're limiting the number of user accounts for now (until we complete some important features). However, you can still search for and view Seekler's community lists on a wide variety of topics.

We'd really appreciate any questions, comments, or criticism about the site. Thanks!

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Looks good overall. I understand where you're going with it. However, I agree that the navigation is just a bit confusing. Also, the value proposition is a bit unclear, in my opinion (perhaps because there are limited amounts of users, and it's new?)

For instance: What benefit do I personally gain from using the site? To see what other people think?

I don't mean to belittle your startup, I just want to be sure that I'm not missing the point. Perhaps a bit more explanation on the landing page would help?

No, you're not belittling it at all. Communicating the purpose and value of the site clearly and quickly has been a recurring problem (and we still haven't gotten it right yet).

To answer your question: The value to you is to find new stuff. So if you are interested in crime comics, you would come to Seekler to quick find some new comics to buy. Ditto with music, movies, etc. If you happen to have an opinion on some area, it'd be awesome if you made a list yourself, but it's not necessary.

For most users it will simply be a place to find new things or peoples' opinions on things, much like people go to Wikipedia for facts. I would also like to point out that we are working to help users that create lists to be able to use that information to help them discover new things. If you have a list on your favorite movies, we could suggest users' lists with similar movie tastes. This would help you to find movies on other people's lists that have similar interests to your own. Along these same lines we plan to eventually add features letting you view merged lists other than the entire community, allowing you to view merged lists on groups like your friends, people from your state, or other groupings that users might find interesting.

In that way the site will be rewarding to users who build up communities to express opinions on any common shared interest.

Ahh, now I see. Yes, that's very clear. Cool.

I think that this would be very useful. My biggest complaint would involve having to sign up and create my own lists in order to see lists that best match my own. That takes a lot of time and energy.

Perhaps utilizing lists people have created elsewhere on the internet, just to supplement things? I mean, I have all that stuff already in facebook. Perhaps you could use that information, and allow me to find other people/movies/books/magazines without having the feel like i'm putting time and effort to join a new community.

That's the only thing that would stop me from signing up and doing it all right now. (I'm playing devil's advocate just a bit, sorry for the harshness).

No, a devil's advocate is definitely what we need. I hear good feedback, not harshness.

I think you're right - the user account is going to our biggest barrier to entry. I think that using the info that already exists in a user's profile on Facebook, Myspace, etc is a great idea. For Facebook, we could build an app that grabs this data. For other services, we might just be able to scrape the data from their profiles on demand.

We definitely want to make it as easy as possible to input data into Seekler. Thanks for the great feedback.

One quick comment: Your layout doesn't really work on a smaller screen -- here's a screen shot from my laptop with 1280x768 resolution as I was browsing and having some stuff open (visible) behind the browser window:

http://screencast.com/t/6ufdUZOW

All other sites I usually visit work fine at this size.

Interesting. The site is designed for 1024x768, it should should not require horizontal scrolling. Is your browser window full-screen, or do you browse in a smaller window?

As you can see from the image in the link, I was not using the full width of my screen as I was having an eye on some things running in the background while surfing. The window width was 923 pixels, height 770.

My screen is actually 1280x800. Even at full screen, the site requires vertical scrolling, even though the content would fit just nicely on my screen if just packed a little.

Anyway, my point was: didn't look as good as it could have when using the screen size I was using. I know it is impossible to please everyone...

Yeah I guess we can look at redoing some of our CSS as fluid to allow for more compact views on smaller screens. We avoided it for now as our graphic designer said it was more complicated and we would likely face more cross browser compatibility issues. After nailing down pretty much the whole UI, it is probably worth investing the time at that point for scaling CSS.

Overall everything worked well. However, I did find the navigation in the "Results" page a bit counter-intuitive:

I entered "beer" as the seek term and was taken to the "Results" page and I clicked on the first entry in the results--"Beers" which is a list--and got a new page with a view of the items in that list. But when I clicked on the second entry in the results--"beer" which is an item--I didn't get a new page with a view of the item. Instead I got a preview of the item in the frame on the right-side of the Results page.

After further review, I saw the link to the right of the "beer" entry labeled "view" and was able to view the page for that item. I really don't think labeling the links to the right of each results entry differently--"preview" for a list and "view" for an individual item--will prevent the user from being surprised by this behavior.

Seeklr is a very intriguing site. The presentation is very attractive and implemented nicely. Good job and good luck.

Hey, great feedback. I totally agree with you - the navigation on the results is pretty confusing and we should make it all consistent. Thanks a ton!

Something about the design of the front page makes it look like one of the linkjack/adsense pages. This is a first glance kind of thing, but it's important as it can turn off a huge percentage of visitors.

Also, the footer on the front page seems a little off.

We pushed a fix that includes cleaning up the footer thanks for the feedback.

I can see the linkjack/adsense page look and feel, any thoughts on what gives it that vibe? Is it just that we have a collection of plain text links at the bottom of the page? Would adding some more content or more text describing the site help give it a more valid look?

Interesting. I can definitely see what you're saying and we don't want to give that impression to first-time users. Thanks!

http://unspun.amazon.com/

Thanks for the heads up. We have been looking around for competitors (and have already shown the site to a large number of people) and you're the first to point out Unspun (so at least they are not really well-known yet).

There are a number of existing competitors out there, but this one definitely looks the most similar to our concept. We'll just have to differentiate ourselves with features and usability. Thanks!

When I displayed the Movies list, it appeared with only results 1-10 of 257. Maybe you should have the option to increase results to 20, 50 or even 100 results per page.

Good luck.

Great idea. It is pretty tedious to go through that many pages of results. Thanks!

Another potential competitor: http://www.listible.com/

Front page starts with a link to itself.

Do you mean the "Seekler" image in the top left links to itself?

yes

Interesting. What would you expect to happen when you click on that image? We weren't sure what to do with that link, so we just had it take you to the main page. This seems to be a pretty common pattern (Reddit, Digg, and Favebook all behave similarly), but if this goes against user's expectations, we'd happily change it.

When you are already on the main page it should not be a link.

Are you really bothered by this? For example reddit and news.yc does the same, I don't see it as a problem. Odd? Yes. Standard? Yes.

Being a web-savvy person myself, I'm not thrown by this particular usability error. It's an easy one to make when working with templates; I have pages myself with this problem. However, I do think it's worth pointing out.

It's standard just like stubbing your toe is standard. Everybody does it sometimes, but it's worth avoiding.

See #10 on this list:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20031110.html

I guess you are right, it is worth avoiding. I am just so used to that behavior that it is what I expect a page to do, but I guess another way to refresh the page doesn't justify confusing the user.

Btw, I was just checking how sites handle this, and here's an innovative approach by Nokia: Let the Home-link take you to a totally different page if you are already on Home:

http://mobilecodes.nokia.com/index.htm

;)

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