I'm a designer that worked with Mike on a short project for the science team. The 4 of them are a huge pleasure to work with :) Very scrappy and analytical when it's time to get things done, but playful and generally funny fellows to be around. Interesting problems to work on when they're #4 in US's peak traffic count, after much bigger guys like Netflix, Google, Apple (and an underdog story beating out Hulu, FB, Valve) [1]
Twitch's office is very thoughtfully designed with fan art and game-themed interior and murals. It's a nice testament to the community that they're built around. The office manager, Ashley, has done an equally thoughtful job with amenities -- makes it easy to be productive.
I really like the idea--a low-maintenance and (almost) hassle-free way of tracking feedback of my web projects across the internet, as opposed to supervising a multitude of individual social media accounts/platforms for data.
However, I wasn't happy with the execution or the results for 2 reasons:
1) I felt mislead with your description that I could try this out "in a single click". It's not a single click. The first click is the initial submit button ("Compile Free Report"), followed by a link to download the actual report. I automatically get turned off whenever I'm required to download something in order to try out a service/product. I think it's worse than requiring an e-mail signup, because I feel like its encroaching on my computer's security on the local level. The only reason I went through with it anyways was to provide some feedback.
I feel like you may lose a lot of users this way because you're asking them to do YOU a favor (download an unknown file from a not-yet trusted source), without even offering a reason/incentive to them to begin with. I have no idea what's in the report, or if it will even benefit me. It sounds scammy. It would be helpful if you at least included a preview of the report prior to the download link, so that I could determine the value of the report and decide if I'm interested in downloading the rest on my own accord.
2) 50% of my report is blank, and 100% of it is inaccurate. I submitted my domain willworkforamac.com . My Mixpanel and Google analytics data from the past month indicates that I've been averaging a couple hundred of unique visitors a week, from various regions among almost all continents. The report indicated I had 0 results from today to all time. Did I enter my domain in the wrong format?
And output files as pdfs? That seems to be the norm, and doc files aren't as universally compatible (I run an old version of MS Word, for example, so I was notified of format/layout deficiencies when I opened the file)
I'm not a developer and I'm pretty inefficient at marking up webpages (it took me hours of trial and error for parts that I feel like a normal web designer would take half an hour to do), so it's not something I'd advertise--and that's for your benefit rather than mine =P. But I am definitely willing to help as much as I can, with what I can of it =)
Yeah! I wanted to have a thanking board or some sort of real-time donation tracker (a la humble bundle), but I'm not a developer/didn't know how to implement such a thing that linked to my PayPal/WePay =(
I've donated on similar cause-funding platforms like kickstarter.com before, but I decided to make my own website because I wanted to get some hands-on experience in building my own site, marketing my site, and understanding my user feedback and analytics--things that I'm interested in doing professionally in the web industry. So the project is a challenge for myself to validate and improve on my marketing/copy skills, and also a kind of social experiment because I'm generally curious how the whole thing will turn out =)!
Sorry for that usability peeve! I originally set the slider to pause whenever the mouse is hovering over a slide, but I didn't forsee that the short timeout session would be bothersome in case the cursor was elsewhere (like on the actual buttons, oops!)
I've just quadrupled the timeout time, so viewers will have more time reading a more stationary slide.
I hear some mean things about PayPal sometimes too! Unfortunately it was the simplest donation process I knew how to implement (I was checking out Stripe but there was a lot of API/developer stuff I didn't understand--my friend had to help me install my Mixpanel trackers because I didn't really understand Javascript either), and it seemed like a convenient way for people to donate.
I just checked/validated my site on w3.org after googling what you might have meant by valid html, haha. (What a neat tool!) 31 errors .. ! Uhoh. Will get working on those, thanks for your review =)!
