

Offer HN: GUI redesign - retro212

To jump on the bandwagon of helping fellow HNers, I'm offering to redesign one screen of your GUI for free. Requests will be processed by first come, first serve principle. Also if there will be a lot of requests I might not be able to do all of them, but I'll try to do as much as possible.<p>You can see some of the stuff I did on my blog at http://retroaktive.hibreedcms.com<p>Note: I will focus on application design, if you need design help there is another thread at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1831960
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dfabulich
Our website is a collection of interactive novels (aka "Choose Your Own
Adventure", but that term is trademarked).

Specifically, <http://www.choiceofgames.com/romance/> could use some sprucing
up. There's a lot of clutter on that page, but it's hard to decide how to trim
it down. Those "share" links are pretty important to our business, but they're
so ugly where they are...

(Obviously we need visual design help, too, but I recognize that's not in the
scope of this offer. Over time we'll certainly want to customize the visual
style for individual games, like we did for
<http://www.choiceofgames.com/dragon/> but having a nice "out of the box"
design would be fantastic.)

Thanks!

dan at choiceofgames.com

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wacheena
Wow. This would be _really_ helpful!

I have an Android app that I've been working on. The primary purpose is to let
users see the apps their friends have so they can discover new ones.

You can see screen grabs @ <http://www.appadvocate.com/screenshots2/>

But the one that I really need help on is the home screen:
<http://bit.ly/ackPgK>

The most important things for a user to look at are Friends (shows a list of
friends and how many apps they have) and Friend's apps (shows a list of apps
the user doesn't have but are being used by friends).

And I'd also like to figure out a way to encourage people to invite new
friends to join them.

~~~
roryokane
Quick comments on the home screen from an amateur who doesn’t even own a
smartphone:

The people in the Friends icon are too vertically staggered. It looks like one
friend is apart from the rest. Maybe show one person front and center (the
user) with two people behind and on either side of that person.

It’s unclear where the boundaries of the buttons are. Add borders, or a
rectangular gradient behind the button.

The colors don’t match, especially the orange people and the background. I’m
not sure how to fix it, but I think you should at least darken the button
label text, because black matches better than gray, and it would increase
contrast against the similar-brightness background.

It’s confusing how a green check represents an app, but a green plus means add
a new friend. I think an app would be better represented by a rounded-corner
square, or a square with an upside-down “V” cut into it like the silhouette of
an “A”.

It looks like there is too much space at the bottom. Make the buttons taller
to fill the screen, or show them as 5 items in a list. Showing them as a list
would also solve the problem of the excess whitespace next to Find Friends;
alternatively, you could center that button, but that might draw too much
attention to it.

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ntulip
It would be awesome to get some help on this website i am working on. My wife
is a Realtor and I've been motivated recently to work on something which
allows people to find realtor's that live in proximity to their neighborhood
and so on. What I haven't been able to come up with a design for the Realtor
profile pages.

the website is: <http://www.nearagent.com> \- i would be interested in trading
services also.

~~~
mattmiller
I have a real estate themed project as well: <http://www.agentshowroom.com>

~~~
ntulip
Matt

I would be interested in integrating their MLS data into the profile pages.
What do you think?

~~~
mattmiller
MLS data has a lot of red tape attached to it that I learned the hard way.
Send me an email and I may be able to catch you up on how that all works. It
took me a while to figure out a legal way to get that data.

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lfadmin
Thanks for the great offer.

Our website is <http://www.longlongago.in> an online library for children's
books. Two of our common questions are (esp. new users to computers) is how it
works, what plans you have. Of course both the information are available in
home page! So our design is not reaching out to all users. Would be happy to
see a redesign. Thanks.

~~~
retro212
I'm not expert on landing page optimization, but there are few things that
will surely help.

1\. Remove animation on frontpage. As you said, your customer want to know how
it works and how much does it cost. Leave only how it works slide.

2\. Add call to action

3\. Create FAQ page where people can read about your service and put very
visible link on frontpage.

I created a mockup of this solution and you can find it at
<http://212labs.com/retro/longlongago.png> . I think this should already help
with bigger conversion, but you should probably do some A/B testing to find
right formula for your customers.

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jsarch
Wow. This is an amazing offer of service. A SaaS company I just launched
(<https://www.seqcentral.com>) could use some UX/UI help on the internal
application pages. To see the internal pages, you can simply create a free
account. The jobs/dbs/collabs pages are all similar and a common layout/theme
would help immensely. Send me an email if you need more info.

~~~
retro212
Can you please send me some screenshots of problematic pages to my mail
(konjevic at gmail com). I've created account, but honestly I don't understand
anything about your app, and it would be great to see how layout looks with
data.

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lulin
If you still have the time, it would be great if you could take a look at
wadokukogo.heroku.com (for example:
<http://wadokukogo.heroku.com/search?q=aka>). It's a classical japanese -
german online dictionary, and I don't really have a good idea how to display
the results in a way that's easy to read and still nice to look at.

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natep
Thank you for this!

One side project I'd like to get back to is my fork of JSettlers. Here's a
screenshot of the game screen: <http://imgur.com/aAokt.png>

So far, I haven't given the UI any love, but hopefully your comments will
inspire me.

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hariis
Thank retro! Mighty nice of you. If you still have the bandwidth, can you
please take a look at the home page of <http://caniafforditnow.com> and offer
an alternate design.

If you need anything, my email hrajagopal(at)yahoooooooo.com

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danielnicollet
Thanks retro. I hope it's still time. I need some help. How can I contact you?
exorbyte AT gmail.com - our site is at <http://commerce.exorbyte.com>

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kevinelliott
Hey, I'd REALLY love if you could redesign an iPhone app for me.
<http://musedapp.com> ... Mused 2.0 offers a ton of new data and I want it to
look stellar!

~~~
retro212
Unfortunately this is beyond scope of this offer. I can help you with one
screen that you are not satisfied with, but design of application takes a lot
of time.

~~~
kevinelliott
The detail screen is what I really need help with specifically. I could send
you screenshots of the current state of the app (as the website is not
reflecting this properly, they are about 6 months old). My biggest challenge
has been presenting that one screen in an effective manner to end users.

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kabuks
<http://bettermeans.com> The welcome page after you first signup could use
some love but I've maxed out my design chops. Thanks!

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nischalshetty
Can you please try your hand at <http://justunfollow.com> ? The page after you
login and click 'Show Non-Followers'

~~~
retro212
Here you go: <http://212labs.com/retro/justunfollow.png>

One note: You should show tweet form on click. It uses unnecessary space, and
there was duplication when form is shown below the logo and link is shown
above the logo.

I hope you like it.

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zohaibr
We just got our application online yesterday, would love some feedback:

<http://www.hiringsimplified.com>

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retro212
Hi guys. I can see there were a lot of replies over the night (in my time
zone). I'm starting to work on them and hopefully I will be able to process
them all.

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Concours
Thanks for the great offer retro, I need a redesign for my site:
<http://www.mcsquare.me>

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sainib
Great offer, thanks!! I have been wanting to redesign my site's homepage -
www.biznus.tv . I will appreciate if you can help with that.

~~~
retro212
Here you go <http://212labs.com/retro/biznus.png>

I've added some whitespace, rearanged some elements, and slightly changed
colors to get more vibrant look and feel.

Also videos are now displayed in tabs so you can have short description about
each video. I hope you like it.

~~~
sainib
Very nice. Thanks a lot!! Its amazing how the rearranging makes the page look
so better and user friendly. Good Work!!

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iconfinder
Can someone tell Reddit about this offer?

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sandGorgon
thanks a lot !

