Ask HN: Review my site - Rate Expectations | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Review my site - Rate Expectations

rateexpectations.com

28 pointskarzeem29 comments

I have the same complaint about almost every other new site I visit - I don't immediately know what the site is about.

My screen is filled with "Movies Coming Soon."

The actual point of the site is barely visible at the very top, and the very bottom. And massive displays of rich media are drawing my eye to the center, so I didn't notice.

Were I a casual browser, I would have already closed the window, and totally missed the point.

In short, make your point visible, center-stage.

I had the same problems. After checking the url to figure out what the site was called, I finally got it.

Good point, I just pushed a fix for this — a nice, big title right above the featured movies.

Very cool idea and concept. However, I'm not convinced of the utility of rating a movie compared to it's trailer. If the movie has a shitty trailer, but is actually an OK movie, it will get high ratings. If it has a great trailer, and is a great movie, it will get average ratings. Why should I care about the "quality of trailer" to "quality of movie" ratio? What's the advantage over a rotten tomatoes rating, for example?

What I think stands out the most is the super easy access to the trailers. I would come to your site just to see what movies are coming out and watch the trailers. The other sites that offer trailers, at the moment, are barely worth going to because of how much spam they have everywhere.

As far as my first impression: I was confused at first, until I saw the top tagline. The google text ads at the top were very disorienting. It looks like navigation, and immediately causes me to question the legitimacy of the website. I basically ignored the slideshow thing, I'm not sure why.

Scrolling down I notice names of movies coming out. Ok, and so what? Further down I see ratings. Ok, I get it. I think you should put popular movies with ratings first. (Perhaps take the top 10 grossing movies, and only use those that are at least a week old... odds are everyone has heard of these) Just seeing a movie name with a screenshot was confusing at first.

When I watched a trailer I was pleased at the trailer quality and speed at which it started. Now, where do I vote? I have no idea. I can become a fan or follow you on Twitter, but where the hell do I vote? Do I have to sign up? There's no login anywhere... Eventually, after two or three trailers, I read that text that said I need to login with FB or Twitter to vote. You should make that text stand out, for sure. I just assumed that it was the standard "share on Facebook and Twitter" thing that I see elsewhere.

Finally, were I to commit to your site and actually want to browse around (which I have), I would expect more content and more means to sort it. What are the highest/lowest/most voted movies? That definitely needs to be there.

That's all for now... sorry about the disorganization in my post. Best of luck.

A lot of great points, thanks. I removed all the text ads, so it's just display ads now. And on the movie pages, I enlarged the "log in to vote" text and cleared it up.

A bunch of your organizational points are good ones, and I'll probably be changing the structure of the site as time goes by. Thanks for the guidance.

Great design, clever idea. I would signup for this:

http://www.fandango.com/affiliateprogram

and add a nice big button for "buy a ticket to see this movie". Seems like that would deliver better than adsense.

Fandango makes you apply for that on Commission Junction, and they've turned me down twice so far. I'm going to keep trying, and I figure now that the site has launched publicly, they'll be more open.

Awesome name. I like the design, but I think it would be better if you had more movies that were already voted on in the first screen. My first impression was "okay, here are a bunch of things that I can vote on tomorrow... not sure what to do now."

Also, I think the font for the 3 headings ("coming out this week", "released last week", etc) could stand out more.

Cool. The main thing I find confusing is the rating scheme. It's hard at first to know what constitutes "good".

The site rates movies where the benchmark is the quality of the trailer. If a movie has a 58% "voters said the movie is better than the trailer" rating, that means 42% of people were disappointed by the movie. Is this your thought? With this, maybe you should adopt more of a rottentomatoes.com scheme - anything above 50% gets a thumbs up? I'd like to mainly see some sort of notification of whether the movie is worth seeing based on what I know from the trailer. You have the power to decide what percentage is sufficient.

Thanks, I'm going to keep tinkering with that, because you're right, it's a bit less clear than it ought to be.

I think there is great utility in the concept. The most accessible description of a movie is the trailer, and this site allows people to comment on how accurate this description is.

The use-case I see is people looking for movies they're interested in and watching the trailer. They can then use their impression of the trailer and the comparison of trailer to movie to get a better feel for what the movie is going to be like.

Rather than a simple rating scale (80% of people liked this movie), there is a more subtle dimension to the metric of this site: Of the people that liked the trailer, this fraction didn't like the movie; or of the people that didn't like the trailer, this percent of people actually thought the movie was good.

Cool site, cool name. As mentioned by a few others I run into the same problem. I enjoyed browsing and watching, good way to waste a little time, derive a little enjoyment. And I may use it as a way to evaluate my movie going options, but i'm not entirely sure that I would make a point of returning to review a movie after the fact. Rather I would use it to choose from movies, and then not revisit until I next wanted to watch some trailers. Seems that there might be a huge drop off point, where people don't bother coming back to vote. Whereas if you can somehow link the trailer=>movie times=> buy tickets locally? Hmmm not entirely sure as to where you can add value, regardless cool idea, maybe a good starting mvp

Thanks, I'm working on setting it up with the Fandango affiliate program so that you'll get a convenient "find nearby theaters/showtimes" box.

also a "next" or "random" or "suggested similar movies" button on the video page would be extremely useful also (instead of having to navigate back to the homepage)

Excellent idea. I was blind to it because I tend to keep a site's home page open in a separate tab.

Nice site. I would use it to decide which movies to watch based on the ratings. And I would like the movies playing now to be at the top (not the one's coming soon).

During the process of deciding, I might encounter a movie that I watched, I would vote for it.

BTW, what is the incentive for people to vote other than what I have described above? I would suggest adding comments apart from just ratings. Sometimes a movie appeals to me so much that I look forward to write something about it. It works the other way too. I've seen enough horrible movies that I come home so pissed that I need to vent. :-)

I dunno. I'd prefer it if I could:

a) See trailers for movies coming out further in the future than this week, and

b) Rate the trailers before the movie comes out (and more to the point, see what other people think of the trailer of as un-yet unreleased movie)

You could have two forms of voting: until the movie comes out the question is "What did you think of the trailer" and after it comes out it switches to "Was the movie better than the trailer?"

Interesting idea, it might help users form an opinion faster by making the rotten tomatoes score more prominent, and perhaps add it to the white space on the right of a title on the home page.

It would be nice to integrate the trailers for the 'Coming out this week' by playing them when the user clicks the large image.

Of all the movie/trailer combinations I've seen the one I'd predict closest to 0% would be Congo. The trailer is for a completely different film as far as I can tell, and it looked really good.

What's your endgame? Are you thinking of trying to sell data to movie studios/theaters/marketers? Might be helpful for them to know what trailers generate the most excitement.

Cool idea. The name is very clever; are there any plans to expand it beyond a simple "login w/Twitter or facebook" app?

Not at the moment, but later on, who knows. For now, I'm using the Twitter/Facebook login as a simple way to keep people from voting twice on the same movie.

Why have you recommended only firefox instead of old browsers, and not chrome as well?

I figure that someone who's using an old browser is relatively unlikely to know much about browsers in general, so I didn't want to give them a bunch of indistinguishable (to them) choices. My guess is that more people will actually follow through if they don't have to make a choice.

it is turbo addicting. I spent last couple of hours watching trailers

I love it, great idea.

Nice name.

Perhaps too long?

Why? It's memorable, and with modern browsers you're only going to have to type the whole thing once at most (sure enough, now I can just type "rat" and it will autocomplete)

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