

Ask HN: Please review our personal finance Web App - Can I Afford It? - hariis

http://www.caniafforditnow.com<p>The App<p>Can I Afford It? is an affordability calculator based on your financial data that you provide. The data is stored completely anonymously.
Use it before you make any major purchases as a second opinion.<p>----<p>This is our first application getting released - 
We have a couple of other apps under development for a year 
that we still think are not "good enough" but 
we have been drinking the HN Koolaid for a while now
that we believe this app has hit the MVP status and that it should get some users.<p>We would like your much esteemed opinion on the utility of the app,its execution and of course, any other ideas you may have.<p>We have been looking forward to this day.
Thank you HN.<p>P.S.
The core of it was completed during the Rails Rumble competition (in 48 hrs) and
since then, we have cleaned up some things with no features added.
======
pzxc
1\. You say it's an affordability calculator, but it seems like it's based
mostly around getting an opinion from the community. I finally found a "View
Expert's Response" button which seems to do the automated calculation. You
should either continue to describe/market it as you do and make that automated
calculation more visible/central to the site, or leave it as it is but
describe the app differently, as a community response app. Right now it's
mixed messages.

2\. The design is ugly to me. The fonts are all over the place with various
font faces and sized, there is no consistency. The colors clash somewhat and
also lack consistency -- orange and red and 2 shades of green and orange don't
go that well together. Maybe they CAN go together but with the rest of the
site's design (kind of haphazard), they don't blend well.

3\. You have some buttons that are orange and some that are normal form
buttons, and some links that maybe should be buttons but aren't. Some buttons
take you to a different page and some don't, some links activate a javascript
expander and some take you to a different page.

4\. On many pages there is no padding on some elements meaning no whitespace
on the left and right side, so they abut against the edges and look clunky.

5\. The Home / Login rollover buttons on the top nav bar aren't apparent as
links, they just look like text until you mouse over them.

6\. There appears to be no way to browse or search other people's questions,
all you have is the recent questions on the homepage. I understand if you've
only got a few questions in your db at this point but you should already have
space to be filled, at least different ways of finding questions, by newest /
most popular / searching etc

7\. To answer people's questions you have to look at their raw financial
numbers and draw your own conclusions. Most people can't even do this for
themselves, that's why they live paycheck to paycheck because they have no
idea how different numbers affect their affordability. Maybe provide some
hints, based on how the affordability calc figures things, as to how certain
numbers impact certain other numbers? Plus it's all on multiple tabs, you
can't view the financial info all at once so you have to flip back and forth
and try to figure out which numbers are important and how they affect each
other.

8\. The site is called Can I Afford It, but the domain is caniafforditnow.com.
I know sometimes you have to make compromises because a domain you want isn't
available, but this inconsistency makes it obvious to visitors that it's kind
of a thrown together site and not a professional app, especially with the
design of the site added in.

9\. View details and X responses from the community on the homepage go to the
same place. If you click on details, it should automatically take you to the
question AND show the financial details of the person at the same time. If you
click on responses it should go directly to the responses, including scrolling
down the page to where the responses are (by using a # on the url)

10\. Now that I think about it, the view/hide financial details seems
unnecessary. Why not just show the financial details of the asker on the page
all the time? It's not like you have a lot on the page, that would give you a
reason to use the # on the view responses links on the homepage to scroll
directly to the responses :)

11\. You aren't really addressing why people would use your app. All you say
on the site is "Get a second opinion before making your purchase." Well
anybody can get a second opinion on a purchase just by asking whoever's
standing next to them. Why use your site? Because of the community? Because of
the automated affordability calc? Say that.

12\. Your community is obviously lacking because it's a new site and you don't
have a userbase. It's like showing a subscriber count on your blog when you
have 3 followers. It immediately says to everyone that comes, "Hey I'm a
nobody". Which is of course reinforced by the lack of consistency in the
design, lack of consistency in the site name and domain, etc. Maybe either
hide the numbers better until you get more users, by not showing how many
responses for each question on the homepage, or simply make several fake
accounts and have them answer many questions so each question has at least
half a dozen answers minimum.

13\. Why require people to log in/register to give their opinion? If you could
answer yes or no (and comment why) anonymously, you'd get more responses for
each question over time. Lots of tirekickers have opinions on things but will
never register on your site just to do some bean counting / pencil pushing
(accounting analysis basically) when they can barely do it for themselves, but
they might at least give an opinion. People will register to ask a question,
but most people won't register just to give an opinion unless they plan on
sticking around to give many opinions over time. Of course you may have to
moderate the responses more heavily if they can be anonymous to make sure
people play nice.

14\. Maybe you should explain better how your affordability calc does what it
does. It's nice that it analyzes and gives an answer, but purchasing decisions
are emotional. If somebody wants something but isn't sure if they should buy
it, they've got emotion invested into it and aren't going to go to your site
just to get a yes or no by some black-box algorithm that they don't
understand. But if you say, made an article page that explained how it
calculates everything, why certain factors are more important than other, what
deal breakers there are, etc, and linked to that when the "expert opinion" is
given, they might appreciate the advice more.

15\. You should have the verdict of each question on the homepage as well as
any browse/search questions pages, anywhere a question appears. It makes the
user more involved if he can not only see the question but also immediately
see "The community verdict is NO" or whatever, then he might be more inclined
to investigate the ones he disagrees with, or even the ones he agrees with.

16\. Little things -- you have no favicon. You have no meta tags. You have at
least 5 external JS files loaded on the page, not even counting your jquery or
analytics usage, plus 2 different style sheets. No big deal when you have no
traffic like now, if you ever intend to have a lot of traffic you should
combine these css / js files and only have 1 of each.

Basically, if I was writing your app from scratch, I would have every feature
you have and then some, but would use half as many pages or less, half as much
screenspace or less, smaller fonts, more consistent fonts/colors, and then
would have room to add more and more features later, to get people really
involved/viral (gamification) like badges for people who answer the most
questions on the site, people who are most likely to give a "correct" answer
(versus the automated calc or versus the rest of the community), more
interaction like more space for followup comments on each question, etc etc.

This is a very simple app that could live on screenspace the size of a mobile
phone, but you've obviously added it a piece at a time so it's gotten bigger
and more inconsistent over time. Not necessarily a bad thing -- you're
probably learning a ton! I've got plenty of projects myself that look this bad
or worse (or did for a long time before I went back and fixed them).

Actually that would be my best advice -- take the site as it is now, list
every functionality feature, every UI feature, etc, and make up a whole new
design for the site that integrates everything you've done and learned so far,
then release it all at once as a major redesign so everything integrates/fits
better as a single whole instead of this haphazard melange you've got going on
now.

(And don't take anything I said personally, I can be kinda harsh but if you're
serious then this is probably the kind of feedback you want!)

~~~
hariis
Whoa! Thank you. Back to loving HN now :)

------
hariis
Please review our personal finance Web App - Can I Afford It?

Clickable link: <http://www.caniafforditnow.com>

------
nickl
App seems pretty neat. Ask other peoples opinion of things. I def can
understand how business may want to know how much people pay. For 48 hours it
seems decent.

