I thought my site was clear but people disagree. Suggestions for Improvement? | Hacker News Reader

I thought my site was clear but people disagree. Suggestions for Improvement?

findhn.firebaseapp.com

2 pointsvargas848 comments

Looks interesting, but a couple of things that jump out at me. First, the drop down "About/Guidelines" section at the top is a little crazy. Personally I would go with a landing page that describes the app, let the person enter their username on the landing page, and then move to the search feature. If I had not been forced to read the about section drop down I would not know what it was at first glance.

Second gripe is that drop down area has a horizontal scroll bar on it and I have a 27" monitor. It makes it seem as if there is content if I scroll to the right, but there is nothing there.

Finally, I am going to assume the results are tags with the various usernames underneath the tags. Personally I would prefer to tag specific posts within HN and then be able to search that. If I am searching for a similar interest I want to be directed to the specific post(s) that relate to what I am searching for. I don't want to get a username and then have to sort through their posts to find one that may relate to what I am searching for.

Overall I like the idea of being able to tag keywords within HN.

Haha I was going for compact but I understand that frustration. I'll think a little bit more about your suggestion. My reservation is that I generally hate having to sign up for stuff before seeing the actual app. This way you can experiment and click stuff right off the bat. I'm sure there is a happy middle ground in there somewhere.

I'll fix the scroll issue now, thanks!

This third idea is awesome - something I hadn't even considered. If I am able to generate enough interest, I'd love to open source this and build out something more robust. This would be a pretty cool feature to add that I would personally get a lot of use from.

Completely understand your thought process. Simple is most often better, but at the same time too simple will leave users scratching their heads.

I don't know about others, but if you could figure out a way to tag specific posts as well as users, to me that would be a valuable tool for searching for past posts or things that have fallen from the first couple pages.

It would help to see what it looks like with multiple users expressing partially overlapping interests.

I think perhaps 'interests' should be, initially, independent from the user(s) that expressed it. Maybe just indicate interests, and a count of many people have expressed them, then clicking on an interest could give you more about those users.

As I user, I would expect to register, and then either '+' the existing interests that I also have, or add new ones. The taxonomy of 'interests' is probably the hardest thing to get right.

You're re-inventing a lot of UI paradigms, like editing an interest by clicking into something which doesn't look like an input field, and then clicking away to save it. You won't need to explain as much how to use it if you stick to more typical CRUD patterns. I'm not a fan of showing each interest in a rounded rectangle, and I don't think it will scale very far...

To verify an account is owned by a given user, you could ask them to (temporarily) add a code into their 'about' field.

You might get more registrations if you didn't ask for an email address.

I added some examples with a throwaway account. My hope is that this would become more intuitive as people use this and there is content available.

I think your second idea is awesome, I'll go ahead and implement this next, thank you!

Can you elaborate a bit on your third point? I'm probably misunderstanding but it sounds like the flow you're describing is currently implemented.

Another great idea here. To anyone else reading this, would you mind temporarily adding a code to your about HN 'about' field? This would replace the need for me to ask for an email (the only thing I use that for is identity verification).

To be secure, your app would tell the user what code to add. So after I tell you I'm 'zaroth', you say please add 'gHypQwnm' to your about (show a link to https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=zaroth) and a link 'Verify'.

I add it, submit, click back twice, click verify on your site, and then go back to my HN profile and remove it. It sucks from a user interaction standpoint, but better than asking the user for their HN password!

The password I am asking for is completely independant from your HN password. I make note of that in the text underneath the form area but you are not the first person to assume that I'm referring to one's HN password. You are absolutely right though, as a user, I would never give up my HN password to a random 3rd party. Your authentication implementation idea completely sidesteps any ambiguity - I'm going to go ahead and move towards this as soon as I can. Again, thanks for your feedback!

OP here. The biggest issue for my first iteration of this site was clarity - people just didn't understand what it was or how it worked. I thought I fixed that with this iteration but, after showing it to a few friends, apparently not. Any suggestions on how to improve? I'll keep tweaking until I get it right!

Note: You may encounter bugs, site is not totally "ready" yet.

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