

Ask HN: Review my startup, PeerLeaf - irrelative

http://PeerLeaf.com/<p>It's in private beta now - let me know if you or anyone you know would like to participate.<p>Any advice from established guys on how to get more private beta users for a service like mine?
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komlenic
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?

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irrelative
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.

~~~
notahacker
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

~~~
irrelative
Wow, just terrific. This is the reason I posted my link here. Thanks
notahacker!

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atgm
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...

~~~
irrelative
Great feedback -- I really appreciate it. Will work on fixing some of these
soon.

~~~
atgm
No problem. Best of luck!

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instakill
Nice touch with the sample report - I particularly like the 'interesting
results' tab under each member's drop-down menu.

~~~
irrelative
Thanks. Glad that seemed good -- let me know if there's any sort of data that
would be interesting to add.

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instakill
Clickable: <http://PeerLeaf.com/>

