

Ask HN: Please re-review my new website www.favilous.com - sw1205
http://www.favilous.com/default.aspx

======
NEPatriot
In your responses here you state you are aiming this product at the masses. So
I'm going to attempt to review your site from this angle.

Before putting on my typical user hat let me say that I like the concept quite
a bit and the site design is very nice.

I am putting my 'mass market consumer' hat which means I'm pressing the back
button in 10 seconds unless something good happens.

I see discover. bookmark. share. But these are kind of vague... (I would A/B
test this heading) But intriguing enough for me to checkout the tour.

Next I see what looks like a movie/slides. I press play and see the
instructions are "click on play icon to view". I press play and get to the
"what is favilous?" slide but then nothing happens. I don't really see another
play button anywhere. This happens when I remove my mouse from the play task
bar and unless I go back over it don't see it again. The play button to the
lower right of the mouse if quite small and hard to see. Maybe think about
either explicitly stating to keep pressing play or clicking the screen to keep
the slideshow going or turning this into something more like a movie.

The slideshow itself is of very high quality but the initial slides highlight
features. The entire time I was asking myself... I want to see this thing in
action. Take me through a typical user experience with the app. What can this
app do for me? This doesn't happen until much later on. I would make the
slides more into a story about what a first time user would do and how this
would be useful to me - a casual user.

Feel free to email me if you have additional questions.

~~~
sw1205
Thanks very much for this.

I can see that quite a few people are struggling with the playing of the tour
- we will have to make this more obvious. I don't think Prezi offer an easy
autoplay option.

You are right with regard to the user experience and this is something that
again we are rolling out in the next two weeks. We have made a video of a user
bookmarking, discovering and doing other bits and pieces to do with the site.
We will post this somewhere on the site (still to be decided!) and hopefully
this can solve this issue as you are right from the homepage you still don't
get a complete feel as to what Favilous does.

May well take you up on the email option - thank you for this. Also, we are
offering a yammer style service to the worker (see my comments below). Would
like to know what you think of this?

thanks

~~~
NEPatriot
I would post this video right smack on the home page. To the right of the
signup/tour buttons and try to make it btwn 30-90 seconds. Maybe with a
heading like... See it in Action. And to stay consistent with the high end
feel of your site I would try to make the video high quality.

Yes. Email away - I love providing feedback. While I do think a yammer style
service would be useful I would try to focus on one thing and really knock it
out of the park. If you are making the choice to pivot your product towards a
yammer/bookmarking combo product that is new tech this is a new hypothesis and
should be part of your overall strategy. As opposed to adding bells and
whistles.

In my office, we all have common links... email, time tracking, bug tracking,
PM web app, etc. And having a centralized bookmarking network would be useful.
Especially if I could publish a bookmark to say all the sales people and say -
read this o sales people it's useful. But you would have to ask people in
management (which I am not) for a more important opinion since they are
ultimately the ones making this decision. Or aim this new product at the front
line employees and move it up the chain verses down.

------
sw1205
It has been a month exactly since we posted Favilous for review.

You all gave us such excellent feedback and we have been working through each
of those to try to enhance the site. We also have a lot of exciting new
features that we are working on in the next month or two.

We have redesigned the homepage in line with your comments and we still need
to tweak it some more.

We now have over 275 users (more than Reddit in their first month) and have
over 7000 links bookmarked.

Any further help you can give would be much appreciated!

Thanks

Steve

------
nandemo
Cool.

Bike-shed-color style: when I tried the tour, I was told to click the "Play"
button. I did, but then I found it doesn't really "play" it. It's a "next"
button, you have to keep on clicking it.

------
metamemetics
Impression:I'm not sure why I'd sign up. It says something about bookmarking,
but like most people I already have a bunch of bookmarks in my web browser and
wouldn't want them in two different places. Does it integrate the two?

Or is it another sharing stuff with people site? If so how does it differ from
facebook, twitter, reddit, stumbleupon, delicious, digg, mixx, technorati,
etc.?

I don't know what it's new big feature or innovation is. Or how it's different
at all. Explicitly tell me what your new big innovation and feature is. Or if
there is no distinguishing feature (which is fine), at least tell me "we are
different than other sites because we are NEW, BETTER, and AWESOME"

~~~
johnconroy
True... there are a ton of sites which do almost exactly the same things. But
in a non-saturated market there's always room for a usurper with some kind of
hook. Be it better usability, just a more stylish interface, or simply better
marketing. So I'd say its got a chance. Saying that, the service is far too
invasive for me, or probably most other people on here. We already have enough
goddam firefox extensions etc., and already know 1m places to get buzz and
social-driven recomendations. But pitch this at the n00b-level, and pitch it
well, and it could be a winner imo.

~~~
sw1205
One of our ideas that we are thinking of is 'work networks' - very much like
Yammer. We aim to position ourselves, in the next couple of months or so, as a
Yammer for bookmarking.

We will still offer the same 'personal service' for our users but we will also
go down this other route. Like Yammer people will be able to create and then
join a private work network. You will be able to bookmark work links and
documents as part of your work network and build up your Favilous work page.
You can share these with other people from your network and your network is
private - you cannot see out and other's cannot see in.

Would this feature be of use do you think? As I say we are a couple of months
away but I know I would use it and find it useful so I am hoping others may
feel the same way!

Any feedback on this would be most welcome...

------
cjg
I couldn't immediately get the video to play (IO_ERROR), looked around for
something else that would tell me what the site did, failed, gave up. My
recommendation - add a text based explanation of what your site is for.

------
jbbarnes
Hi guys,

I have gone back to your last submission and think you have, largely, done
well.

You have taken the comments on board and implemented them pretty effectively.
275 users is pretty good going too.

I would like to be able to convert my existing bookmarks however before I sign
up with you..

Keep up the good work.

------
jaydub
I think the design looks cool. Personally, I would like to see the fonts in
the main graphic a little fuller & "fatter" if you will. I think those bullet
points are part of your key selling points, so they should probably be bold
and strong in order to draw more attention.

~~~
sw1205
That is a fair point - these bullet points are our key sellers and this is
something that people felt we had failed to do last time we posted. Do the
bullet points give you a flavour of what the site is/does?

------
Jim_Neath
The bookmark tools slide down animation is incredibly jerky is safari.

Also the front page doesn't tell me enough to get me excited about your
product. How does it differ from Reddit/Delicious? What makes it special? Why
should I sign up?

~~~
sw1205
With regard to your first comment I will look into this and try and fix it -
works fine in IE, Firefox and Chrome (I believe) but I thought that to be true
of Safari too. I will look into it and fix it.

With regard to your second comment - Favilous is aimed at the mass market. We
feel that Delicious, in particular, is a bookmarking site for 'techies' and we
are keen that anyone can use Favilous. We also want to focus on the
bookmarking and not just the social part of social bookmarking. We also feel
we fit well with the IPhone and IPad markets - our site is particularly
visual, clean and simple. Added to that the fact then when you are browsing
from any browser be it IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari (on the IPhone or IPad) you
can bookmark any link using Favilous

If you're somebody who thinks "I like this article but I haven't got time to
read it now, I'll read it when I get home", you might email the link to
yourself for when you do get home. With favilous you can click one button and
it saves it for reading later.

We wanted a visually compelling site that focused on bookmarking and the ease
of bookmarking. With additional touches such as being able to have your own
background image, sending links to your Favilous followers, seeing what is
popular on Favilous and discovering new sites and reading descriptions of
sites.

We are also going to be offering a big feature in the coming weeks that we
hope will give us a niche in what is a very competitive market.

------
whyleyc
Here's a link to the original feedback -
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1060022>

------
FreeRadical
The tour looks beautiful!

~~~
sw1205
Used a neat tool called Prezi to do it - very cool site, check it out! We
wanted a tour that was a bit different and one that matched our ideals - I.E.
very visual..

------
johnconroy
stylish. I like the idea of saving a bookmark to look at later... does the
service email you at your primary email address???

~~~
sw1205
Funny you should say that. We are rolling out a bunch of features in the next
week or so and this is one of them! Along with some enhancements to our
bookmarking tools...So just to clarify you would like to click 'view it later'
and it would email you the link to your primary email address? Is there any
other features like this that you would like to see?

thanks

