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Comment by pea | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for your reply! Sorry our homepage wasn't clear enough: Kivo is a way to annotate presentations and PDFs in the browser. If you want more info, check out the video on the homepage or try the example presentation below it.

Re the problem we are trying to solve: giving feedback on documents really sucks. Emailing around 'Slide 1: change x,y,z, Slide 2: change this' and other out-of-context comments is a massive pain-point for users, who want to be able to do it quickly, visually, and in their browser (instead of in an old piece of desktop software). Feel free to ping me on leo@kivo.com if you have any more questions.

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I disagree with the one you replied to. I instantly understood what it was about, and with the example it solidified my thoughts.

However, it wouldn't hurt if the home page had the above explanation explicitly written, and if they mentioned who is behind the site.

Also, common questions like "where are my documents stored", "is it secure", "how do I share the result and who can see it"... remain unanswered.

As it happens, they do have a FAQ answering those questions; it's hidden behind the signup process. It just didn't occur to them that it would be useful to have it at the home page. It seems they didn't really learn the lesson.

Thanks for the feedback! I work with Leo at Kivo. We've gone through a fair few iterations of our home page and we know it's not perfect yet. Right now we're trying to throw people right in to the product itself and then if they have more questions after that then they can find them in the site. But you're right we need to be upfront about a lot of information, it's just a balancing act, we're trying to find the right point. Thanks again.

That's the problem - I couldn't find the information I was looking for at the site. It took a leap of faith to sign up to find the FAQ, expecting that the interface for registered users would be more complete; exactly the same problem you were trying to solve when removing mandatory signup.

The only parts of the site that should be hidden behind the sign up process are those that only affect logged-in users; learning about the site and business is not one of those. Most of that information does not need to be located at the front page itself, but there must be a link allowing the user to find it.

Your homepage is as clear as mud. It says "Delightful ... annotations" and "drag in a presentation or click anywhere" and finally "see a sample" But it doesn't tell you WHAT you actually do. You could easily add a couple lines of text with an explanation, without adding any clutter. Links to a FAQ and More Info and About would be helpful. further down you have "click here to upload a file" WHY would I want to upload a file to you? You need to let people know

Hey Leo, just a small copy error: 'if your heart of heart' should be 'in your heart of hearts'

Ah! Cheers!

For me it was kinda obvious when the video started playing :-) Although the idea shown in it is creeping me out, reminds me of these over-managing micro-managers saying things like "what about half a pixel left?" (really happened to me)

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