

Show HN: Introducing Spaceship - mntmn
http://blog.spaceship.io/2012/1/31/introducing-spaceship

======
sycr
I knew nothing about your product just by reading your title, so these are my
complete first impressions:

1) In the second sentence, I'm expecting to hear the first pitch for the
product.

 _Generally speaking: with Spaceship, we ultimately aim to lift your creative
process to a new level of productivity and fun._

Why "generally" speaking? You don't want to speak generally, you want to speak
specifically about what you're offering. Secondly, you introduce your product
with its benefits. That's great for most sales situations (think of all of the
TV commercials that start with "Imagine if..."), but can be confusing for
technical products like software. I want to know what your product _does_.

2) This is a really strong insight:

 _We found and tried a lot of products that try to simulate analog tools like
note-taking apps or virtual whiteboards. Web afficionados work together in
Google Docs. A forward-thinking filmmaker might manually copy character
mugshots into a Dropbox folder. We heard of people who like the experience of
Evernote._

3) The video is great. You're using the application to demo the application.
Fantastic. But where's the audio? Why aren't you speaking with me directly? If
you aren't comfortable with speaking, hire a friend for cheap.

~~~
mntmn
Thanks!

1) True. I'll do a better job next time. 3) Yes. We'll add audio in the next
iteration.

------
dwynings
My suggestion is to try to distill what you do as much as possible. Nowhere in
the post or on the landing page do you really state what Spaceship is.

Even saying something like, "Spaceship is a collaborative mind mapping
application that supports rich media," would have helped me understand
quicker.

~~~
mntmn
Thanks, that was exactly the kind of constructive feedback I was hoping for
when posting here.

~~~
Codhisattva
So ... could you post here, what it is in summary?

~~~
mntmn
Sure. Please see my separate comment in the main thread.

------
notJim
I would take your example, and show me something concrete that I might use
your product for. Reading the description, and then watching the video, it's
very hard to get an idea of why I would use this product. It kind of looks
like a way of randomly jumbling a bunch of stuff together, which I assure you,
I can achieve on my own :).

Overall, I have to admit that I'm skeptical about the whole enterprise of
contextual mapping, but one of the things that could possibly convince me to
try your software would be if the implementation looked exceedingly simple and
well-executed. One of the reasons a lot of contextual map software fails is
that clicking and dragging things around is extremely tedious, and with most
software, the interactions are not implemented very well. I'm talking about
things like: distinguishing click-moves and click-edits, or boxes in a flow
chart staying connected to each other when I drag them around.

Think about the whiteboard you're trying to replace (I think). The reason a
whiteboard works so well is that it's incredibly easy to put any kind of data
into it, because drawing things on a whiteboard is trivial. You don't have the
ability to draw that way with a computer program, so whatever facilities
replace drawing need to be comparably easy to use.

~~~
mntmn
Thanks for your input!

It's kind of hard to do a concrete example for an audience that has very
different problem domains (i.e. engineers, designers, students, communications
people etc.). But as soon as we're going into public beta, we'll probably have
to produce high quality examples for different audiences, that's right.

We're not trying to replace analog media. I think that's kind of impossible.
But we're working on ways to augment them (for example making it very easy to
capture a white board or scribbled notes).

------
the-cakeboss
Hey, I just wanted to let you guys know that I really like where you are
taking the design of this site. It is really a breath of fresh air considering
the typical interface often seen around the start up crowd. Its feels very
light, and intentional with bold accents calling for attention. In a word, I
might call it crisp. However, I do think you could rework some of the user
generated elements such as the clusters and the inserted images. They feel
oddly out of place considering the rest of the UI.

With that all said however, the page offering explanation leaves much to be
desired. I think there should be more doing and less talking so to speak. Even
the text though feels unstructured and out of place, its placement seems
rather haphazard, and the rag is especially rough. While I do realize this
blog post isn't the product, the typography is seriously lacking there.

------
mntmn
Thanks for the comments so far. At the time of writing the initial blog post,
we didn't want to give the complete picture but instead focus on testing the
first component of our app, which is the Space.

As dwynings figured out quite well, our Space is a mix of a virtual whiteboard
with media sharing, annotation and clustering features. You can use it to work
on ideas, concepts, to review or decide on things.

The next thing we'll be releasing is Processes. These will allow you to work
through projects in well-defined steps, where each step has its own Space.

Currently, we're not in selling/marketing mode (hence the sloppy effort on
that side). Instead, we're trying to accumulate feedback and critique from
potential users and hackers, so we have a bigger chance of building the right
thing.

------
hammerdr
When I need to draft a document that shows visual objects and relationships
(e.g. architecture diagrams), I jump into OmniGraffle. The reason that this is
my tool of choice is because the input mechanism is mainly through an outline
tool. I can very quickly jot everything that I need to say down into an
outline format and OmniGraffle will automagically try to align everything for
me. Only then do I start to drag things around.

So, my feedback for this tool is to make input much easier. Instead of "click,
type, move" over and over again.. smooth that process out by having a type-
only input mechanism.

Great work so far!

Edit: Grammar and last line.

~~~
mntmn
Thanks for this insight! I remember now that back in the day, I used
OmniGraffle the same way. We'll definitely give this some thought.

------
mvkel
The description is incredibly ethereal. Figure out how to describe your
concept in a sentence that you can yell into the valley. The "tl;dr" folks
don't have the patience. Unfortunately, they're your audience.

