Ask HN: Review my startup, PeerLeaf
4 comments
Very strong idea, and it is apparent that a lot of thought and work has went into this already. Functionally, the reports and questions etc seem great! In general, it feels a little bit overwhelming at first (a lot of info on each page, but some of this feeling may just be minor design cues like font choice, size, colors, margins, padding, etc). It was difficult to know where to start or what to look at first on some pages.
On a more concrete note, the green and blue tabs at the top seem inconsistent, compare https://peerleaf.com/Report/1 to https://peerleaf.com/About Shouldn't the demo tab be blue when you're on the demo page?
On a more concrete note, the green and blue tabs at the top seem inconsistent, compare https://peerleaf.com/Report/1 to https://peerleaf.com/About Shouldn't the demo tab be blue when you're on the demo page?
Thanks for the feedback, good points. Let me know if there are any design cues that would make the data easier to digest.
Yes, the active tabs are a little weird -- they literally match the URL that you've gone to, and should be more forgiving. Thanks for pointing it out.
Yes, the active tabs are a little weird -- they literally match the URL that you've gone to, and should be more forgiving. Thanks for pointing it out.
A few constructive comments on the marketing side of the site. The product itself looks well-thought-out in a good market niche.
- General look and feel
It's professional but a little lacking in whitespace, especially since you've chosen such heavily saturated colours.
- Home page
The three key points at the top aren't as eyecatching as they ought to be. Oddly, they work better in IE without the drop shadow (which appears to shift the block visually upwards away from the dynamic content and into the header). shifting it ~10-20px down the page might help a bit, as might rollovers if you want most users to click to learn more.
My attention gets drawn away from the text on the left. Possibly a box (with curved edges and ideally vertical dimensions to match the slides might help) and/or a pastel background colour might help here.
The animated slides are effective, but possibly a slightly reduced size would give you the scope to make other changes (most of the graphs would still be clear at much smaller resolutions)
I'd revise the "Secure" text - developers might be interested in knowing that passwords are securely hashed, but Joe Manager just wants to know that it's "password protected and private" and even more importantly "you decide who can see what level of feedback". Customer permissions sound like they could be an important feature depending on the level of openness within the company. Some companies might be comfortable with everyone knowing exactly how each colleague voted for each peer, whilst others might want to anonymise all the votes even to management analysing the results.
Minor point, but there should be an apostrophe in the possessive "each other's" (there seems to be some consensus amongst pedants that each others' is incorrect as both "each" and "other" are singular")
- About Peerleaf page.
Text is a little overwhelming. Stick "Security", "Requirements" and "Privacy" at the bottom of the sidebar (or on a separate FAQ page) to keep the flow of the page about the core benefits and use cases of the product. Your flowchart looks better above the fold too
- General look and feel
It's professional but a little lacking in whitespace, especially since you've chosen such heavily saturated colours.
- Home page
The three key points at the top aren't as eyecatching as they ought to be. Oddly, they work better in IE without the drop shadow (which appears to shift the block visually upwards away from the dynamic content and into the header). shifting it ~10-20px down the page might help a bit, as might rollovers if you want most users to click to learn more.
My attention gets drawn away from the text on the left. Possibly a box (with curved edges and ideally vertical dimensions to match the slides might help) and/or a pastel background colour might help here.
The animated slides are effective, but possibly a slightly reduced size would give you the scope to make other changes (most of the graphs would still be clear at much smaller resolutions)
I'd revise the "Secure" text - developers might be interested in knowing that passwords are securely hashed, but Joe Manager just wants to know that it's "password protected and private" and even more importantly "you decide who can see what level of feedback". Customer permissions sound like they could be an important feature depending on the level of openness within the company. Some companies might be comfortable with everyone knowing exactly how each colleague voted for each peer, whilst others might want to anonymise all the votes even to management analysing the results.
Minor point, but there should be an apostrophe in the possessive "each other's" (there seems to be some consensus amongst pedants that each others' is incorrect as both "each" and "other" are singular")
- About Peerleaf page.
Text is a little overwhelming. Stick "Security", "Requirements" and "Privacy" at the bottom of the sidebar (or on a separate FAQ page) to keep the flow of the page about the core benefits and use cases of the product. Your flowchart looks better above the fold too
Wow, just terrific. This is the reason I posted my link here. Thanks notahacker!
It looks great to me, though the "recognize points of conflict early" slide was really confusing until I stared at it for a little bit.
On the mechanics side of thing, when I view the demo (using Opera 11), mousing over the average score bar next to names makes the horizontal black bar flicker a lot, which is really jarring.
The first graph actually seems redundant in light of the table with the names, average scores, and best areas; the table is the best display for me since all of the information is right there and easy to read. I kind of wish that instead of the bar graph, the pentagram were displayed above the table so that I could mouse over names and see the pentagram change, or select two (or more) people to have overlapping pentagrams for easy visual comparison.
The review matrix display seems slightly awkward because of the horizontal scroll.
Overall, this seems like a very useful tool!
Edit: The about page is really cluttered with lots of duplicate data...
On the mechanics side of thing, when I view the demo (using Opera 11), mousing over the average score bar next to names makes the horizontal black bar flicker a lot, which is really jarring.
The first graph actually seems redundant in light of the table with the names, average scores, and best areas; the table is the best display for me since all of the information is right there and easy to read. I kind of wish that instead of the bar graph, the pentagram were displayed above the table so that I could mouse over names and see the pentagram change, or select two (or more) people to have overlapping pentagrams for easy visual comparison.
The review matrix display seems slightly awkward because of the horizontal scroll.
Overall, this seems like a very useful tool!
Edit: The about page is really cluttered with lots of duplicate data...
Great feedback -- I really appreciate it. Will work on fixing some of these soon.
No problem. Best of luck!
Nice touch with the sample report - I particularly like the 'interesting results' tab under each member's drop-down menu.
Thanks. Glad that seemed good -- let me know if there's any sort of data that would be interesting to add.
Clickable: http://PeerLeaf.com/
It's in private beta now - let me know if you or anyone you know would like to participate.
Any advice from established guys on how to get more private beta users for a service like mine?