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Comment by bshimmin | Hacker News Reader

I'll be honest - I find the UI impenetrable. It's dark and full of fiddly icons and I'm not sure what I can click, what I can drag, etc.

If there's any way you can find someone amenable who has no personal attachment to this project (ie. hasn't used it before, doesn't really know what you're trying to achieve) and has strong UI/UX sensibilities to take a look over this, I really think you should. Sometimes when you've built something and you're proud of it, it can be very hard to have an objective perspective on how usable something is.

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The UI is quite jarring at first, and doesn't give any call to action or incentive to "try" anything. The "Join the Beta" window is overlaying the "Welcome to Zephyr" box, which is confusing.

The dark color scheme is nice for a workspace, but the font size is difficult to read with large quantities of text. This makes it harder to onboard a user.

Also, I took myself to the home page (https://zephyrplatform.com/) in hopes of a nicer pitch....and was presented with a sparse version of the demo.

Good point on the overlapping cards, we're fixing that now. Thanks!

For our main website, soon as we release the full beta we will move that to a more detailed website. It's just a basic splash page for now.

I didn't want to be negative, but I had the same impression as you.

As far as I can make out, something like Asana is their direct competition and from a UI perspective, it is so much cleaner: https://asana.com/product

They're just further down the road than where we are, with more lots more money and a ton of engineers and designers...ha!

When we launch I would very much hope your opinion would alter, if you would like to join our beta you will be able to keep updated with our progress :-)

True! Congratulations on launching. That is always such a huge step to make.

Many thanks! :-)

This is just our first demo, and our first UI colour scheme. We will have a light version rolling out. You will be able to switch between light and dark, also adjust colours across the platform to suit your preferences.

Equally we have a full onboarding experience so by the end you will know exactly what every icon and button can do. Help module too. Completely understand the need to learn before you can fully use, we just haven't rolled this out yet.

My aim for this is to start building traction with this first demo, and we will continually improve, if you can see where we are going and like that direction sign up for the beta and you will be able to try all the new features and improvements as we release them :-)

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