
Ask HN: Review our webapp (Sproost); team met on HN - rtc
Semi interesting background - part of the team behind Sproost met each other here on HN.<p>We always respect the HN community feedback.  Thanks in advance for your comments on what we've built so far...<p>http://www.sproost.com
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biohacker42
I liked it a lot.

But I did stop at entering my email address.

Sites like HN have spoiled me with their fast and easy signup. I'd make giving
one's email optional.

Remember signup is one of the biggest hurdles any website has. The easier you
make it the more people will do it.

Especially if someone is just playing around and has not created dozens of
rooms, the worst that could happen is they take the test again.

And I must say the test is fast, short and fun, perfect.

P.S.

Browsed around some more and came back to add to my comment.

If I'm going to be buying furniture over the internet I am going to need A LOT
of technical information.

And A LOT of pictures, not just different angles of nicely made bed, but the
assembly process as well.

P.P.S.

Bug?:
[http://www.bobbyberkhome.com/product/bedroom/19393/modloft-w...](http://www.bobbyberkhome.com/product/bedroom/19393/modloft-
waverly-platform-bed.html#)

~~~
yangyang42
I disagree on the signup.

I think the placement of the signup is quite nice. Why? because my test result
accurate depicted my taste and I was curious to see more.

Needless to say, I signed up.

Didn't buy anything though... everything was way expensive.

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fallacy
Great start!

I've got a few comments:

First, as someone pointed out, you should not switch your quiz interface
between the first question and the latter questions. I don't see that you gain
anything by switching and it is a little confusing. I would stick with the
first question layout, because it is simple.

Second, I'm not sure that you need the "Most recent results" feature. The
investment your seeking from potential users is so small, I don't think I that
you need to prove that you have traffic, and I don't really see this as
morphing into a social app (if it does, I think you are straying too far away
from what will make you money). Further, I think it detracts from the point,
which I assume is to get people to take the quiz and click through to buy
products. Removing it will make the interface cleaner.

Third, as someone has stated, I would make it clear how many images have been
rated and remain. A simple "1 of 10" would do the trick.

Fourth, if you go with the second layout for the quiz interface, I would do
away with or hide the "How to take the style quiz" text, like you do the "like
or hate something."

Fifth, after the quiz, I would take people right to the "room" of stuff that
they can click and buy. As it is, you are going to have a lot of people
navigate away at the end of the quiz and they will never even see your money
page.

Lastly, I noticed that you are using some magazine images. Although you will
likely fly under the radar, that is copyright infringement. I see that you
source it at least, and that may be enough to get them off your back.

All in all, good start for sure.

~~~
sciolizer
Why do you think the first question layout is simple? I preferred the second
question layout because it requires fewer mouse clicks.

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Jasber
I thought it was confusing how the quiz controls changed after I answered the
first question.

You should make that consistent.

Otherwise nice work.

~~~
cjc
Agreed. Specifically, moving the controls from the right hand side to the left
hand side was jarring.

~~~
rtc
this is an artifact of our previous quiz interface; the comments here make
sense and we'll change it to be less confusing.

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alex_c
Good implementation!

I ran it past my gf (who watches a lot more home decoration shows than me),
she didn't like the quiz results. She felt that they were all over the place
and a bit contradictory.

I felt that the quiz was too long :p I was also a bit confused about how many
more questions there were - I didn't really understand the
potential/eliminated stuff.

I agree with run4yourlives, the objects in the room were really mish-mashed.
Having it as a simple 2D representation of the furniture isn't very satisfying
- the most jarring example being that the rug is just an upright rectangle...

I'm not part of the target audience, but I think you have something pretty
interesting.

~~~
ks
I stopped taking the quiz because I thought it didn't have an end :-) Perhaps
I should have looked more at the user interface, but a progress bar or
something would be helpful

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jollyjerry
I liked how I could immediately start using the StyleEngine. The navigation
was great and I had no trouble using it. I thought the 'ruled out' could be a
little more prominent so I could see my progress. Definitely a slick site
though. Best of luck!

~~~
sh1mmer
_I thought the 'ruled out' could be a little more prominent so I could see my
progress._

This is totally important. This is why almost all shopping carts these days
use 1-2-3 style steps. The technical term (from User eXperience) is scent, and
it's what gives the user a continued incentive to keep going.

I almost quit the StyleEngine until I saw that, but I almost didn't see it at
all.

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webwright
Love it. I'm about to buy a fixer upper and this would be really valuable.
Also, it's an excellent market for advertising (lucrative niche).

Seems also very valuable for remodeling-- not just furniture. The most
commonly remodeled rooms are kitchens and bathrooms.

The site is agonizingly slow. You are serving up _200k+_ images scaled down in
HTML. Seriously? Make it as fast as hot or not and you have a winner.

I'd also break it down by room. Kitchen, Living Room, Bedroom, etc.

Of course, as with many sites-- there's no build in marketing. How are you
going to get visitors?

~~~
rtc
yes, we'll optimize for speed soon (but we hope to optimize at the right
time). bedroom and dining room are next on the list. getting visitors is
indeed the big challenge. SEO, viral/social, and SEM (in that order) are what
we'll focus on. would love feedback in this area as well.

------
sh1mmer
My wife points out that it would be interesting to do something for couples
because she likes radically different stuff to me. So something that could
marry (boom boom) our styles would be helpful.

~~~
rtc
we hear this from users - you can "force" style combinations now by choosing
styles manually and then seeing the rooms that result, but we should probably
make this function more obvious.

~~~
sh1mmer
I was thinking more about letting two people do it and then try to identify
the overlap rather than the product of the two preferences.

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okeumeni
Nice implementation, good concept. My only suggestion you should not force
people to take the quiz to get to the point of what is that the app does.

One thing surprising is not the fact that the team met on HN, it is the fact
that only David is a hacker. I didn’t know that HN was also a meeting spot for
interior designers. Really good to know : - )

~~~
davidjeffries
The application is just as much (actually, probably more) about the interior
design than the engineering :)

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sachinag
I like the business - help people figure out what to buy, then make
commissions on $1,000 furniture. Brilliant. And I like the approach a lot. So
you're in the top quartile, for me, of Ask HN stuff here. Praise aside, let's
get to the helpful specific crits:

You really need to Photoshop the pictures in your quiz to make them as
standard and innocuous as possible. Telling people to ignore the floors,
walls, etc. is just impossible. Ideally, you'd be able to stage your own
photos.

Also, the interface needs to be 1) consistent and 2) less cluttered. I'd
recommend really blowing it out with whitespace to figure out what you need
and don't, then incrementally making it tighter. CrazyEgg might be super-
helpful to you given that you have a very visual site.

As for "going viral", having quick page loads is necessary but not sufficient.
You can make the page load quicker.

------
rmason
Now I know it wouldn't occur to most of the people on here but when I tried to
take the quiz with IE7 the site hung as soon as I answered the first question.
So 80% of your visitors will never know what it's all about.

~~~
rtc
We recently released a new version of the quiz, and looks like we had an IE7
bug which we'll fix right away. BTW - 55% of Sproost visitors have been FF,
only 25% have been IE7/6.

~~~
ins0mniac
using FF 3.0.5 here. I get stuck on the 2nd step of the quiz. The spinner
spins forever. However the funny thing is it appears to work fine in IE 8.0.6

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sam_in_nyc
Don't pay too much attention to:

    
    
        * Windows, floors, wall material, and other architectural features
        * Color — it's easy to change color combinations
        * Layout and arrangement — also easy to change
    
    

That's a monumental challenge for me. I vote basically based on what my first
impression is, and these items inevitably have a play into that.

But I suppose if I were actually looking to redecorate, I would put more
thought into my votes.

------
run4yourlives
Not Bad.

I wasn't sure what it was all about until I actually completed the quiz and
started looking at "rooms". You may want to fix that somehow.

Also, I found some issues with the way the room objects were displayed (after
you have a style)... seemed a little mish-mashed.

Looks like a good thing to present to Architecture digest or House and Home or
one of those magazines... timing might not be the best with the recession
though.

Good luck to you!

------
rms
I like it. To me it seems more obvious to do this for clothes rather than
interior decorating. Are you planning on applying this to fashion?

~~~
apgwoz
As far as growth is concerned, fashion seems like a great idea. As for actual
value of the interior decorating, have you ever looked at hiring an interior
decorator?

~~~
rtc
one of the founders previously started an interior architecture/design firm;
subject matter expertise is key to the implementation. personal fashion is a
possible expansion, but home furnishings is a $100B+ market in the US alone,
so we'll focus there for a while...

~~~
apgwoz
I agree. I was commenting on rms' thought that fashion was potentially a more
viable market. I would completely agree that home decor will net you more, and
probably more easily.

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joshsharp
I did the quiz but stopped short at entering my details. Then I came back and
read all the comments here and decided I did want to create an account after
all.

Kudos for using cookies and keeping my quiz results; I would've been very
irritated if I had to do it again just because I didn't sign up at the same
time. :)

~~~
joshsharp
Also, once I save a room, it would be nice to have the option to share it -
I'd like to be able to email a link or something.

------
midnightmonster
This is clever, and I think it gets a pretty good read on me, but my _real_
style (as judged by actual purchases) is cheap and/or used--so I'm probably
not a target consumer here.

In the room display (which is odd, but the problem is hard), my apache area
rug showed up somewhat smaller than my great plains porcelain table lamp, and
a throw pillow dwarfed a sofa. Giving some better sense of scale is the only
definite improvement I can think of. That and don't let pictures almost
completely overlap, as some candle holders do on a leaf bowl the second time I
loaded the page.

ETA: Clicking to buy a "Deep River Rectangle Cocktail" table went through the
affiliate program link and to the retailer, but it dropped me on the front
page.

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NoBSWebDesign
Wow, I really like this site. Some of the graphics leave a little to be
desired (the logo and the greater than sign on the "see your results" page).
But, I really liked the flow and interaction. It did take me a second though
to figure out what was going on when I started the quiz, because the buttons
jumped from the right of the image to the left and were replaced with a bunch
of text on the right. I thought I had been taken away from the quiz and was a
bit confused.

Very sweet though. I'm going to pass it on definitely.

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pedalpete
I too wasn't sure what it was all about, but (and most sites should take a
hint here) you made it very easy to figure it out. I clicked the button and
off it went.

I'm curios as to why you went with two different styles though. When I start I
have radio buttons and a submit on the right of the picture, then you go to
the voting blocks on the left of the picture. Why the change? It would maybe
be better to go with the more familiar (Hot or Not) style of selections below
the picture.

------
paraschopra
Actually, I liked all the rooms. Put in some of the messy ones as well. It is
hard not to like a perfect room like the ones you have in the pictures.

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fauigerzigerk
I like it a lot. Will show it to my gf as well. The style of the website is
very nice and clean. I love the sproost logo! I have a few criticisms though.

The quiz is very long and it seemed to my european eyes that there's an
overhang of traditional styles and little differentiation among contemporary
options. Modern seems to imply asian.

I didn't like most of the rooms, but after making my choices the system
summerised my style pretty well. Very well actually.

The "design your room" page suffers from some layout quirks (Firefox 3). One
of the items in my room got stuck when I switched to selecting more items from
the sofas category. That rug just kept hovering on top of the sofas and only
went away once I used the budget slider. I wasn't able to repeat it later
though.

I love the budget slider but sometimes it didn't stick. It kept snapping back
to the greatest price range.

My room looks a little jumbled because the pics aren't aligned at all. I
understand that I'm supposed to arrange the items as I see fit, but that
doesn't make much sense to me since I can't possibly make the whole thing look
anything like a real room. The sizes and perspectives are just too different.
I suggest you pre-align the items next to each other. People can still move
the items around if they want to.

I appreciate that it's very difficult to actually let people design a room
that looks like a room. It would work a little better if I could zoom
individual items so I could at least put that lamp next to the sofa and make
them look proportionally sized. To take this further you could figure out the
sizes of the pieces from the vendors' sites and automatically zoom them
accordingly. I know, I know that's a massive amount of work and maybe it
wouldn't help enough to make a real difference.

I'm not sure why the "saved rooms" and the "design your room" pages are
separate pages. I would prefer a drop-down to select other saved rooms right
on the "design your room" page. The cost rundown could be placed on the "buy
your furniture" tab or dynamically displayed by clicking somewhere next to the
total. In my opinion, there are too many pages and menu/tab levels.

The "to be added" section isn't very useful I think, but if it's there it
should at least let me remove stuff from it.

The signup process is OK. No confirmation emails, no nothing, just an email
address. But I would still let people see the room designer before making them
sign up.

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hussong
I usually don't fancy those quizzes (e.g. for music and movie tastes), but
yours was actually interesting. Very good pictures, fun to look at, but they
took too long to load to keep me involved til the end.

Scaling of fonts / liquid layout could be improved, looks a bit funny on
FF/Ubuntu. Layout could use more white space for clarity.

I still like the idea. Good start, keep it up!

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paul7986
Yes nice that you allow use of the site right away which then takes you
further into the site.

I kept answering like, hate and what not for like 20 rooms, but then got
tired.

I thought it would stop, analyze the rooms I liked and give me a personality
or the app would design my perfect room with perfect furnishings.

good job and good luck!

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mikexstudios
Very nice. Excellent design. The quiz was fun and easy to complete.

I would like to see a list of specific styles and their representative
pictures though. That way, I can see the names of other styles that I might
like or dislike.

Like biohacker42, I stopped at the signup.

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wensing
Well done. I learned something about myself and I can't wait to share this
with others.

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cmos
I really like it. But I have no interest in your topic of furniture.

I also got tired of looking at pictures.. perhaps a little more reward after
going through 5 or 10 images?

Can you take your engine + make it work with different categories?

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mixmax
In the style engine I would move the options (love it, like it, etc.) over to
the right of the picture, or underneath it. And make it look more like
clickable buttons.

The placement and design makes it look like a menu.

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sgrove
Just wanted to post a quick message - very cool! I don't have time to go into
details, but the site is very slick, and strangely enough, something I would
use.

Well done! I'll try to add some more details later.

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mhashim
great job guys. I like the minimalist and clean design approach. I took the
quiz and got my wife to do it too as we have just redecorated, and the answers
were quite accurate about our style inclinations. Good to see a quality start.
I think the tough part now is to integrate this with multiple channels that
could create the revenue. I would suggest to start by approaching
fashion/interior designers as they would find immediate value to provide their
clients with the use of this tool. Good luck.

------
rokhayakebe
I recommend you use the Polyvore model. Let people pick items from different
categories and create their own furnishing style. You are definitely in the
right space.

------
sidsavara
I liked it - fun! Tweeted it

Is there a way to tell my friends my results? Not via email, I want a direct
link to tweet/IM etc

~~~
rtc
we're working on just that - sharing/comparing/combining your style profile
results with others. stay tuned...

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0x44
I went to signup, but your application would not permit it. The '+' character
is valid in an email address.

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tptacek
Every one of these rooms is so much more expensive than my living room that
I'm finding it hard to judge.

~~~
rtc
we have a "budget slider" feature for each product category (e.g. show only
sofas below $XX). do you think a budget slider for a room makes sense?

~~~
tptacek
Sure. It's not a huge deal, it's just that my immediate reaction was always to
the room first, and the furniture second.

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rscott
I really liked it. Maybe at the end provide some links to stores specializing
in certain styles?

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gsmaverick
I definitely bookmarked this site. This is the best webapp I have seen on HN
in months!

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daveambrose
Why did you choose a lightbox for sign-up/login?

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andrewljohnson
Pretty great, it was spot on with me.

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DJN
Lovely site.. well done

