Build It With Me (Connects designers and developers) | Hacker News Reader

Build It With Me (Connects designers and developers)

builditwith.me

30 pointstortilla28 comments

Two biggest problems with this:

1. The interface is awful and terribly slow. I don't feel like you can have filtering as a "coming soon" feature when the entire service is based around filtering. Also, I don't know what sort of awful JS is used to power the site but it really needs to go. It feels extremely sluggish (which after browsing Drew's other sites seems to be a theme).

2. It's built entirely on trust and very limited amounts of information. I feel like one could waste a lot of time contacting and vetting prospective collaborators.

I really want to like services like this; finding fellow designers/developers is difficult whether you have a project in mind or not and is really stodgy outside the comfort of referrals. Sadly, this isn't looking like a great fix to the problem (though it is a start).

Relevant to this, I got this upon loading the site.

    A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. You can stop the script now, open the script in the debugger, or let the script continue.

    Script: http://www.builditwith.me/js/jquery.js:19

While sexy, it is extremely sluggish here as well. :/

Ass-slow for me as well. I thought it was broken because none of my clicks did anything. But it was just slow.

The secretly not-working search was really annoying.

"App ideas" - wow that's just annoying, but is so because you must know by now about how HN feels about ideas.

Overall good start, and a good problem to tackle but I don't realistically see how this would be any different from those "hire a freelancer" type sites. Don't mistake that for me "hating", rather it would just seem to me that the more users using your site, the more noise you are going to have to deal with. Whether that be "biz-devs" with million dollar ideas or designers straight outta devry, or lowball $20hr programmers.

It runs pretty quickly in Firefox 3.5, but the font rendering is horrific:

http://i.imgur.com/HXFke.jpg

I actually liked the interface except for the header part(specifically the purple-ish colors) and the font rendering (just a disaster). But you're right, it is snail-like slow when loading. Initially I thought it was because it's loading a bunch of users' info and thumbnails (I can scroll down for quite a while), but some people here are saying it loads fine for them, so it might be browser specific. It's also sort of "glitchy." Nonetheless, it's a neat idea.

Same here. Although the interface looks nice, it caused my system to hang for a few seconds. This is a high-end PC running Firefox 3.5.5 on ArchLinux. You need to fix this.

Add filtering or at least some pagination.

I like the concept. I'm a developer (web / desktop / mobile / whatever) with minor design skills. If I was to ever do any sort of project on my own, I'd need and want to partner up with a designer. Hell, I actually need an idea too!

But the interface of this site is feels wrong to me. It seems to be assuming that I want to make a really quick (5 minute) decision based on very little information. But choosing to partner with someone is a rather significant event requiring time and research.

What I find interesting is that people often seem to feel this way, myself included, but then there are these start-up weekend events where the goal is to build something quickly based on ideas presented in one evening and teams built in a couple hours and people seem to be willing to take that chance without much problem. I wonder what the difference is that people perceive that makes them so cautious in one context but not the other.

Face-to-face communication contains significant non-verbal information which lends itself to trust. The human organism has developed ways to test others for inauthenticity, lack of confidence, etc. These tests are difficult to apply online, but humans do them naturally face-to-face.

If you waste a weekend on something (fun), that's not really a significant loss. I'd be more than willing to waste a weekend building something even it doesn't work out. However, most of my partnerships are have lasted much much longer than that. It's very costly work on something for even a few weeks and have the partnership fall apart.

Just recently a friend of mine had a serious break-down with his designer. This wasn't a partnership relationship, he was contracting the designer. But when the designer flaked out, misappropriated other designs, and disappeared for weeks that ended up costing my friend a lot of time and money.

It wasn't snappy, but it was fast enough. The speed non-issue is definitely not the first thing I'd fix.

On sites that you use ten times a day, every day, definitely speed is very important. On something like this that might be used a couple times a year, no.

The real issue is you need to get more useful information onto the front page. The "number of ideas" column is next to useless. What does it mean that a designer has zero ideas? That their head is completely empty? I doubt it. It probably means they aren't necessarily looking to work on a specific project they have in mind. But then, on the other hand, maybe there are some designers who chose '0' because they really, truly, have absolutely no ideas (and, by implication, no creativity). I would want to avoid those. How do I know which are which? I don't. And if the number of ideas listed is 1, 2, or more, similar opportunities for confusion abound. So that column is useless.

I was excited when I saw this, because it's hinting that it may be a good tool... but please bring more detail to the surface. You may need to gather that detail from the users, then present it, I don't know, maybe as CSS display-on-hover windows next to each name, which is debatable as a UI, but better than having to click through.

Actually, unlike other commenters, I found the interface to be pretty fast (I'm on Safari 4.0.4).

I like it. Very cute. We could use some of those fancy GUI tricks on FairSoftware.net, since it's basically the same people finder (with solid legal dealing on top).

One interesting thing about this UI is it rules out finding people who are already busy with projects, but who may be looking for people to join their project.

So say I'm a developer with a good ('good' === 'pays the bills') project, and need a designer, and I am not available, because I'm busy with that good project.

Now I can search for a designer, but a designer cannot find me. Maybe this is intentional; I'm sure some people would prefer it this way. Or maybe it's an oversight in the UI design. It seems like the latter.

you are presenting way too much useless information on the homepage.

The list is useless from user perspective. It's just a list of names and photos. Doesn't tell you anything about the person's experience without clicking the "view description" link

I think a much better approach would be to let users create a custom subject, to describe their idea. You can still display name + photo in user description, but there is no reason for them to be in results.

a much better approach would be to let users create a custom subject, to describe their idea

Have you ever looked at http://fairsoftware.net/publicProjects ?

IE8 destroys the design: http://i.imgur.com/qNEW1.jpg

It looks fine in FF, but as a general rule I won't bother using a site that is untested or doesn't support IE (especially without good reason). You're eliminating 70%+ of your potential market in one fell swoop.

http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe/

I don't understand why you'd cut yourself off from using a product because they choose not to target a certain market.

I rather not work with a developer or designer who might want to go out of their way to support a browser that is horrible broken, at the expense of his/her creativity. Regardless of how many people who uses that browser.

Remember, the prospective audience for this site are developers/designers who are fairly tech savvy (or should be). Someone who is using IE8 (out of choice) shouldn't be there.

To be on topic. The site looks nice and the interface looks awesome, but not for a website. Maybe for a desktop application (specifically mac). It takes too long to load.

I would suggest a more traditional design front ala linkedin (minus everything that is wrong with linkedin).

+1 for filter by location. I like this. It's very straight-forward, no fluff.

How about a list of all the app ideas on there? It'd be fun to scrape and crunch that data if this takes off.

Ideas have little value, but it'd be interesting to profile them.

There are other people besides designers that developers need to work with. Writers and marketers are two that come to mind. But designers are a good place to start.

I have this idea, just need someone else to to do all the work for 10% share, really it should be easy so if you can't do it in a few hours I'll find someone else.

I have 10+ years of experience with google go and Windows 7, I would be interested in working with you.

There are a lot of good application/web service ideas floating around freely, which gives the site substance and a makes it really interesting. Great work!

help me with mine? http://www.builditwith.me/idea/1VBc

Fast for me (Chrome) but yes the font sort of suxs.

have to sign in to see app ideas, contact is via mailo, sort by app ideas?

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