Ask HN: How can I improve the design of my side project, TakeItApart.com? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How can I improve the design of my side project, TakeItApart.com?

3 pointstomkinstinch8 comments

Hi HN,

You may recall my May post introducing my side project: https://www.takeitapart.com

We haven't seen much growth in traffic or user activity since then, and I can't help but think it is due to the design. How can we improve things to make the site easier to use? We started working on it in college before Bootstrap became popular. Should we scrap what we have and start over?

We're hoping TakeItApart will become a resource for learning engineering and industrial engineering concepts through deconstruction of the items we interact with every day. The website allows anyone to share photo-based disassembly guides of electronics and other hardware, and supports sustainability by encouraging repair and reuse. We also have community programs; we have been bringing e-waste to Maker Faires on both coasts so that faire goers can turn screw drivers and see that it is ok to peek behind the curtain of electronics and household mechanical items.

I'm a designer, here are my thoughts.

It took me time to work out what your site is/does. I know that it's likely hardware/engineer-inclined people that would already be using the site, but if you want to appeal to the masses, you should put the 'About' paragraph in the footer up into the header so it's the first thing you really see.

On the featured guides, I think you could include some engagement counters (number of views, number of likes etc) for social-proof. Also can be useful internally, to see the kinds of guides people are most interested in & you can start to target categories.

To enhance the community aspect, you could feature how people have hacked products based on being able to pull them apart.

I searched for 'iphone' & no guides came up. Fair enough if you don't actually have a guide, but for common gadgets, you could recommend 'similar guides' in the search results & bring up any phones for example (encourages users to stay on the site, even if they don't find exactly what they were looking for).

I definitely think you need captions/instructions/tips etc on each image.

The design is not great, but it is useable. Some of the above features are more pressing, but I would recommend doing a redesign soon, at least in the interest of the brand.

1. First of all, nice work! I know how tough it is just to take such quality photos and upload them. I'd find your site more useful if the photos came with some labels for the parts, captions, and perhaps short descriptions. I like the way ifixit.com does it, but for me the more such sites, the merrier.

2. If you can add RSS support, I'll subscribe. For such tech sites which get frequent content updates, I prefer to get notified via RSS. If I find the title and extract interesting, I open the post and read.

Your website serves a niche population and imo design is not the problem.

Try some advertising and get the word out about your site, people will overlook the design if the utility and usefulness is there.

Any suggestions for channels to target? We're too cash-strapped to try a shotgun approach with Google Adwords or similar. Our exposure at Maker Faires has been one way for us to get the word out to about 200k people a year, in person. The reception has been phenomenal, and we received Editor's Choice at this year's past Bay Area Maker Faire. Kids and adults (with a roughly even gender split) love to learn about how things work, but not much attention has come back to the website.

Check what type of audience Khan Academy's Reverse Engineering section has (https://www.khanacademy.org/science/discoveries-projects/Rev...). I believe you have the same audience. But I also believe that videos are much more effective to learn how things work than photos. Maybe you should explore that road. Good luck.

I hadn't seen Khan Academy's Reverse Engineering section. It's awesome! Thank you!

And we do support video uploads. They go straight to a user's YouTube account from our site, via OAuth, and are subsequently embedded. I'm far from a videographer though, so there aren't very many on the site currently. I've mostly been using them to illustrate particular steps more clearly (ex. https://www.takeitapart.com/guide/92 ).

I think the design is fine, or at least serviceable.

I think you could take a lesson from photojournalists, though: it's not just about the photos, but about the captions, too. As a casual tinkerer, the photos are nice, but I need text to draw me in...not just descriptions of what to do, but how difficult/finnicky a particular step was.

Note that this is not just about making the guides more hand-holdy...it's about making the guides more engaging...and a narrative is a pretty solid way to do that, as it becomes a way to showcase your passion for taking things apart, and to express some of the joy you have in the small details...photos alone cannot tell this story.

Think back to some of the great reverse-engineering posts on HN...nearly all of them have musings from the author, including why they chose the project in the first place, how much they struggled with particular steps and how they brainstormed their way out of it, and what they learned when all is done.

It's not trivial to do these writeups, of course, but I think they'd have far more impact on making your site a must-visit than a design overhaul.

Thanks for taking the time to look at the site. You're right, of course, and improving the narrative is essential. It's something we'd like to do.

We're not experts at everything though. We can create some guides with improved annotations, we are also trying to get the word out that the site can be a place where tinkerers can go to author their reverse engineering posts. We have some functionality that sets us apart from blog software, like hover-over photo notes and the ability to tag notes as "components" which makes them searchable (if you want to find something containing an MSP430, it becomes a query away: https://www.takeitapart.com/search?q=c%3Amsp430). On guide pages themselves, components link to Octopart for datasheet and distributor information. And the authoring process was designed to be as easy as possible for making photo-centered guides. It's easy to bulk-upload images; crop, rotate, and sort them; and add annotations right on the site.

Beyond clever reverse engineering posts, I'd like to see more general posts that show visitors how simple things work. Mechanical, electronic, and software understanding is common among the HN crowd, but it's far from universal, and we want it to be a place where kids and adults can also go to learn how things work, virtually, without picking up a screwdriver. Along that line, we have been looking to partner with local appliance shops to create maintenance and repair guides for washing machines, etc., but it has been difficult to find a company willing to work with us. Any ideas about companies or groups who might be amenable?

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