Show HN: Volley, a friendly place for helping others
volley.help
volley.help
Not a sign up flow I haven’t seen improved by a giant dinosaur. :) Anyway, great first moment on that email. So many people waste that moment. What I love more than Godzilla is the giant call to action Sign In button. No confusion what to do next there.
Next step, I don’t love so much. http://cl.ly/image/3H2X1U380v3J
I’m trying to reply to someone. You make me confirm my email…Okay. I get through that hurdle and then bam, another door. Fill up my profile. You're a big tease. I think I’m done and you make me fill out another form.
I’m like five, ten, i don’t know how many clicks in just to reply to this first person. I’ve seen worse and if you didn’t show me an ancient fighting monster from my childhood, I might have given up sooner. What I noticed, however, was all you needed was my name to reply.
Here’s a suggestion: Ask for my name after I reply to the person. You got my email so you can bother me to fill out the rest later. More importantly, get my comment or reply to this person. It’s a miracle you got me back to the site…those email confirmation flows really kill conversion/engagement rates. Don’t squander that.
That all being said, you’ve got good people making it through the flow. These discussions are pretty good, especially in the startup dedicated questions:
https://volley.works/topic/Startups
Excited to see where this goes next. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. And happy to hear that you liked our welcome Godzilla -- definite shout-out to Wufoo's dinosaur there :)
I totally agree that our sign-up flow has far too much friction, and you're spot on that all we need from new users is their full name.
While I like your suggestion of prompting for the user's name after they submit their reply, since Volley is a place to get help from real people, we believe it's super important to avoid all anonymous content, as well as all feelings of creating content anonymously. People just behave differently if they don't know that they have to "Own Their Own Words" (https://github.com/VolleyIndustries/readme/blob/master/etiqu...).
Here's our proposed improvement: upon signing up to Volley with your email, we'll also prompt that you enter your full name, but instead of bringing you out of Volley to your email, we'll automatically create an unverified account for you so you can reply right away. I think this gives us the best of both worlds: the benefits of our passwordless sign-up process without the friction of having to bring you to your profile before creating content.
Would love your thoughts on the improvement; we'll be shipping it this week!
Thanks again for the feedback, Kevin, Mike