Show HN: Opp.io – Meeting Minutes Made Useful
opp.io
opp.io
Why? Because the feeling the demo evoked for me was: "Uh oh. This looks like a micro-managers wet dream".
So rather than just have "@John please !phone client" perhaps the demo would itemise the meeting minutes with: "@John said he would !phone client and discuss requirements".
Perhaps this is simply because I have had the unpleasant experience of working for panic-driven micromanagers before. But I think you really want to make sure your landing page is resonating with "Awesome - this is going to make my life easier" vs. "What pandora's box of hell will this tool unleash in my organization and work life".
Product definitely looks useful though, and the above comments are about making sure you present it in its best light. Good luck!
It kind of distracts, I have never seen meeting minutes written like that.
So you could write in a very succinct way "@John please !phone client" like when you drop over a quick note on Post-It to your colleague-friend sitting next table. But you could also send as a more polite request, something like "@john, can you be so kind to !phone the client". Or what you just wrote "@John said he would !phone client and discuss requirements". These all refer to the same action: John should phone the client.
P.S. In the video we were of course limited by keeping the text as short as possible so it remains legible.
I do wish their logo worked @2x, the entire site has retina-versions for images except the logo which causes it to look grainy on my Mac.
Also, minor grammatical nitpick: "LESS MESSAGES" should probably be "FEWER MESSAGES".
Regarding your question about our target user segment. Currently we target coordinators, project managers and workteams but haven't identified yet a more narrow segment within that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
"If your work isn't ready for people to try out yet, please don't put "Show HN" in the title. Once it's ready, come back and share it then.
For example, blog posts, email signups, and fundraisers can't be tried out, so they don't count as Show HNs."
Actually you can try it out http://opp.io/app but there is no direct link to it from the front page. (It is less functional than in the demo video.)
Perhaps a "Succinct Team Messaging for Developers" or a tongue-in-cheek "Meeting Minutes DSL" would be a message more inline with a general feel of the app. At least special symbols in your meeting texts demos give a strong programming language vibe.
If you are a meeting minutes app made first and foremost by engineers and previewed on HN, you really should think about paying more attention to your early adopters -- programmers, hackers and engineers. Just a customer development thought.
What feels strange is that the UI you show in the video is not the same as the one that appears below, in the outlined iphones. My mind had to stop and guess; "ok, this is the same thing i watched in the vid".
Overall great job on the page, and the product looks interesting too. Wish you luck.
* Make integration with outside parties easy (i.e. Don't force everyone in the meeting to use the app to get the benefits.) Allow me to add aliases to meeting member's e-mail addresses (i.e. @joe = joe@example.com) Allow me to e-mail a link to the minutes when the meeting is over to all parties.
* Scheduling
I should be able to send calendar invites to participants of previous meetings / define recurring meetings. If I open up the app it should know what meeting I am in by my schedule.
* Continuity
Many of my meetings are recurring meetings. At today's meeting, I want to review the open/closed items from the previous meeting. Though I still want a way to delineate what happened in today's meeting.
* Self-hostable option
For legal / contractual / paranoia reasons, I may need to keep my data in-house. For several of the groups in my company, a cloud-hosted app is a deal breaker.
* Plugins
I should be able to integrate the user directory with my company's LDAP server. I should be able to promote tasks to real tickets in my project management software. I should be able to reference items from other meetings.
Anyway, good luck with your app!
I comment on some of them: - Emailing will be automatic, people receive the memo via email and also access the full document via a link. - We thought on importing last week's items, and have options to bulk hide the items done etc. - Data privacy is definitely a concern of organizations, especially larger ones. That's a hard nut to crack.
I really like the idea, because nobody takes meeting minutes besides me and I'm the only one who follows up on them.
The cool thing is that you don't need to get others to install anything just their email address. I am happy to see that this resonates with you well.
Trello and Hipchat integration would be awesome (actually, how about a nice plugin system or a way to fire off REST calls (and receive them as well))
We are thinking on integration and Trello'd be one of first choice. If anyone has other recommendations, please share.
I think you hit the sweet spot with the simplicity of the functionality shown. As you add features in the future that you'd also like to demonstrate in a video (such as calendar events, integration, etc. as suggested in the thread), just be wary of adding them all to one video and consider separate videos if they take long enough. At that point I think an A/B test would be a good idea. But back to the present, I think the current video is great!
Was hoping this would take minutes from Word as 95% of secretaries will use, somehow extract action items, and then help communicate/track them.
Everything shown here I would just use email to manange. It's not outdated, it works and it's an LCD. I run a small nonprofit organization and was hoping this might be helpful because action item followup is a pain point. But I wouldn't use this.
UX wise, I'm not ok with the "red/orange/green" codes and "fail/done" tags. Even for a small startup, communication is not that blunt, for a reason. Red in the demo seems to stand for postponed, canceled, rejected or badly executed. Yet "red" means bad in most cultural contexts. The color code implies too much and would really harm any group using such a basic code.
Also, if every team member could assign tasks, send requests and questions using this syntax, would that change your perception of this being a top-down management tool? Because our intention is to build a tool that allows a more horizontal communication among team members - but that's more difficult to visualize in a single video.
We are also aware of the cultural-contextual association of colours. This is one thing we are actually struggling with. While colors are a very easy and effective way to communicate status of tasks, especially to give a quick overview of many tasks - they have severe limitations, just like you say, red evoking associations with something as being "bad".
The video is supposed to show a use case of writing meeting minutes. Of course, making text legible within a video has some limits. But still, reading your (and others') comments make me learn that the video has became way too abstract and simplified.
For a reference, this is an approximation of what light red & light green look like for someone with protanopia: http://i.imgur.com/EGSlsmB.png
In particular, I don't think that people without a software background are going to be comfortable with the abundance of syntactic sigils. Even in the twitter-native world, I think it will makes the product seem intimidating and un-natural (at least at first).
This is especially a concern because the value of using them is not immediately clear (excepting @person).
Teletype and Twoodo are most similar to our app.
Our approach is somewhat different, more focusing on email compatibility, on the free text editor experience and more systemic. (We'll post about that later.)
So you might want to change that word to something a broader audience would understand.
I wish there weren't 69,772 people ahead of me... (first world problems) :( or at least some way to gauge what that means.
You use "less" when the item in question is not measured in discrete units - "there is less rain today than yesterday."
You use "fewer" when the item in question is measured in discrete units - "there are fewer raindrops today than yesterday."
Messages are discrete units.
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/myl/languagelog/archives/003775.ht... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fewer_vs._less
There are plenty of people out there who "know" the less/fewer grammar rule, and those people are going to find this landing page a bit unprofessional.
And I'm not a grammar prescriptivist, but "Less messages are more" still sounds wrong to my ear -- it's based on the phrase "Less is more", but putting "messages" in there forces the "is" to "are", and that clashes unpleasantly. My brain wants to fix it to "Less messages is more", which is then also bad.
"Fewer messages are more" isn't any better -- we lose the "less is more" echo (which was the whole point!), and it has a whiff of "my English teacher told me it should be 'fewer'." :)
Alternatives (none perfect, but better):
- Just use "Less is more" as the heading (and possibly tweak the copy below to start with the word "messages").
- Change "messages" to some non-plural word so you can preserve the "is" -- there may not be a good option here, though ("communication"? ugh).
- Just toss it, and capture the idea in some other phrase. "Don't drown in messages", "No message flood", or whatever, then you can even put *"Less is more" when it comes to messages" in the copy below.
[edit: dumb errors in a post about grammar and word choice tend to backfire]
appears during social shares:
"Welcome to opp.io, the actionable messaging platform. Stop waisting time on emails"
Just thought you'd wanted to know.
edit: Wow, that was an extremely quick down vote. Didn't even get round to posting my follow up with a bit of evidence.
Drugs are bad, m'kay.
Doesn't mention opium, but a quick google says that it takes 10 kilos of opium to make a kilo of heroin, which admittedly is near the top of the list. There are lots of prescription drugs based on opium, no?
This article comes to mind:
http://www.thefix.com/content/confessions-opium-addict-drug-...
And this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Opium-Fiend-Century-Slave-Addiction/dp...
Also, I wander who downvoted me for this...