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Comment by moonchuck | Hacker News Reader

The app you are logged into is a place to create and share your checklists with a defined group of users, for team and business settings.

What you are looking at also provides the interface you login to when you want to create checklists or work with one of your running checklist instances.

What you are talking about, the directory piece of the puzzle, is in development and almost out the door. It will allow you to find checklists in this manner and clone them into your account so you can edit them and create any number of instances based on them.

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OK, based on a very brief splash, I think you need to email me in a week to tell me what I can do, then email me a week after that telling me what more I can do, and what people have already created on it, including you. If you want me to be a beta tester - and I'm happy to play with it for 5 minutes each week and risk getting sucked into more - then I need to know that it's got something I want.

Currently I can't see anything I want. I can't even really understand what it does have. It looks good, it looks like there might be substance, but from the screen I'm on I can't understand what it thinks I'm trying to do.

Does that make sense?

I'll email you separately, and this isn't entirely negative, and I want it to work for me.

And what's a "module"? And what does "Add a new object" mean?

Again -- a feature that wasn't ready for public consumption.

The system has a few different objects that can be embedded in pages and checklists - todo lists, data lists, docs, files, comments and other checklists. The feature needs some work before its usable.

> Again -- a feature that wasn't ready for public consumption.

Understood.

I think the underlying problem here is that you have a particular model in your mind of objects and actions, and I, as yet, have no way of discovering what that model is, why it's useful, or how I use it. I think you need to make explicit, either through the interface itself, or with an explanation (big, bold cartoons can be effective) what your underlying model really is.

Whether you should stop coding and do it now, or whether you should finish alpha coding and then do it, is up to you, but without some sort of communication of your model of what happens, I don't think you'll get any useful feedback.

I hope that helps - it's intended to. More via email.

Rider, thanks for the feedback.

This happened about a month sooner than I was planning so I haven't had a chance to address the learnability of the app yet. Would love to have you check it out when I am a little farther along.

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