
Get a review of your website. Launched today. - bilus
http://www.criticue.com
======
huhtenberg
Oki-doki. It's a good start, but you need to take it a notch up to make it
actually useful.

Specifically, let say I am on a receiving end of reviews made by some random
people. I don't really care what they have to say unless it's credible _or_
representative.

Let's look at latter, as it's an easier one. The way to ensure a review is
representative, is to ask other people to look at the review and say if they
agree with it or not. Once it gets 10-20-30 meta up/down votes, it'd be more
or less possible to say if the review is meaningful or if it was a brain fart.

Make the meta reviewing process mandatory. You want to get your site reviewed,
pull a "meta" duty on a dozen of past reviews and (perhaps) write a review.
When selecting a review for meta, do it randomly, but favor those with low
vote count and controversial ones (over those voted way up or way down).

This would be an MVP of your idea. Without this, it's nice, but it's generally
useless.

(edit) Oh, and perhaps simplify reviewer's life a bit and have 3 sections -
"what's good", "what's bad", "free-form comments".

~~~
willtheperson
"This would be an MVP of your idea. Without this, it's nice, but it's
generally useless."

But you've pointed out at least 5 new features. Let's say they add all of them
and it fails.. Could they have learned that with only 4? 3? 1, new features?

To me, the MVP of this idea is that someone can review a site and have their
site reviewed. Everything else is just a feature. Not to say they wouldn't
greatly enhance the product, but MVP literally means minimum viable product;
not minimum awesome product.

~~~
bilus
Thanks, that was exactly the idea -- solicit feedback on something that works
but hasn't too much 'chrome'. I received more than 200 really useful
suggestions (and bug reports) and the tool will definitely evolve. It already
is.

------
user24
I need a terms and conditions link. I want to submit my company's website but
I want an assurance that the feedback won't be visible by the general public;
i.e. through a google search for "example.com review" or something. and Ts and
Cs page or data policy would clear that up. As it stands, I'm reluctant to use
this service.

~~~
qnk
What prevents anyone from submitting your website on your behalf? Do they use
some kind of "put this HTML file in your root folder" or something similar?

~~~
user24
Oh, nothing at all. I'm just saying that the reason I haven't submitted it is
because there's no indication of what will happen when I do. I just don't want
"example.com uses criticue" plastered on their twitter/facebook/etc, and
there's nothing reassuring me that it's semi-private.

I also wasn't specific enough; I'm talking about the website of the company
that I work for, not one I own. So the reason I'm reticent about using the
service is that I'm merely casually interested in what people have to say,
rather than submitting the site in an official capacity.

~~~
bilus
You're absolutely right. TOS is badly needed as well as stressing the point of
the site -- reviews are private. Thank you for pointing that out.

------
chintan
Loved the concept. And kudos for a frictionless onboarding process. Just
submitted 3 reviews. Some suggestions:

\- I forgot to submit the "star" ratings. Just entered the comment. May be you
can have 1. give rating, 2. provide specific feedback (I would not use the
word "comment")

\- It would be nice to see the reviews I submitted and edit if needed

\- Also, I'm not clear if the reviews will be made public. make it clear
upfront.

\- Not sure if you already do, I would like to see "Rating" of the reviewer.
That would help to judge the feedback.

Keep it up!

~~~
eps
To each his own, so the star ratings are absolutely meaningless if you think
about it.

~~~
bilus
Many people like them. :)

------
facorreia
Very nice idea and it's something I'd definitely want to use.

Just one issue: it would be great if the service allowed me to accumulate
credit by reviewing other sites, and have my site reviewed by many people when
I launch it (using my credit).

~~~
hucker
Good idea :)

Perhaps submitter should be able to score feedback as helpful or not, so
people can't spam asdf on every site to gain "credits"?

~~~
msteigerwalt
It'd be more interesting to allow some sort of optional rating system which
feeds into something like a gaming matchmaking system. People who consistently
send out good reviews will get a rank of "A", for example, and be matched to
others with similar rankings.

That way, even low-quality posts ("i liek that u have a logo") can be
accounted for, without treating them like spam. As the reviewer becomes better
at reviewing, they will see an increase in their ranking and better reviews.

~~~
bilus
Nice one, thanks!

------
bilus
OP: Hi guys, I'll do my best to reply to all comments posted here a bit later.

As it is now we're barely handling the flood of reviews. :) It's a good thing
and very exciting but we had to scale up the number of heroku instances the
second time in a row. So please bear with all the errors for a while, we're
working on some issues esp. screenshot generation as it is not coping with the
load.

Wow! We didn't expect an instant success like this. Thank you all for your
contributions.

~~~
astine
I love the idea behind this site and if I get some useful feedback on my
website, I'll be ecstatic.

Anyway, your site not really a success yet. You've just been Hacker Newsed.
Traffic will probably go back down after today. It's happened to me before.

Anyway, it looks like a major bottleneck you are experiencing is that you have
to moderate every review that's written. I don't think that's going to be
sustainable. I'd try having using rate reviews "helpful" or "not helpful" like
they do for reviews on most online stores. And then maybe have an automatic
filter for easily detectable things like foul language or gibberish.

Good luck, I like you site.

~~~
bilus
I absolutely agree, the traffic will definitely go down. I hope to retain some
users but the idea was to get as much feedback as possible.

Yes, moderating is a bottleneck. :)

Thank you for the feedback! Greatly appreciated.

------
jhuckestein
I just wrote a lengthy review about a site that I feel could be improved but
after clicking Submit the button went into a loading state and nothing has
happened since. The comment field was blanked out after I pressed "Add
comment". Any way to get my review back in the JS console?

Re the site itself, I think it's a good idea but I agree with the meta-
scoring. Add a point system that levels you up both by writing a review and
later by reviewing reviews of the same site/commenting on them. The higher
your level or the more points you have, the more your sites will be reviewed.

And please make https sites fail more elegantly. It's okay that you can't load
them in an iframe, but make it look less broken. I submitted an https site and
I doubt many people will review it when they are met with a huge screen saying
"http only" through no fault of their own. Instead say "This site is using
https (learn more), please click here to open the site in a new tab"

~~~
arbuge
Similar experience here. What's the difference between comments and reviews
for that matter? There's an add comment button and an add review button,
apparently tied to the same field.

Also got some after-the-fact request to sign up before getting the review of
my site I was promised... not too interested in that.

~~~
keesj
A review can have multiple comments, and should have at least one. So the
workflow is as follows:

1\. Enter comment. Submit it. 2\. Repeat step 1. 3\. Submit review.

Took me a few seconds as well to figure that out.

~~~
nfm
Yeah, the 'Add comment' link is pretty confusing. I'd consider moving the '1
comment' text below the comment box, and display the truncated comment text
instead. It felt very much like the comment I'd entered had just disappeared
with the current implementation.

~~~
bilus
Yeah, "Add comment" etc. is on its way out. Thank you all for your feedback.

------
smadam9
Cool idea. Great job on launching - I'm sure there were many things you'd like
to clear up and fix for a "proper" launch, but you finished something and you
got people using it.

As many people said already, it would be great to know the difference between
"Add comment" and "Submit review". Seems like they _could_ do the same thing.

Keep polishing it, and then post a changelog somewhere - it's always nice to
see the list of bugs people have worked through at the early stages of a site.
It's also really motivating for the developer as well.

~~~
bilus
Thank you for the positive feedback. I really appreciate it.

"Add comment" is on its way out. There will be no way to post more than 1
comment, as ppl. post 1.1 comment on the average so it's just unnecessarily
complicating things.

I'm keeping a backlog; good idea, posting it, thanks!

------
mtrimpe
You might want to make sure that you're first on queue if you sign up your
site and do a bunch of reviews.

I just did three reviews and it should've been possible to make sure I got one
in return by now, but that didn't seem to happen yet (or is it because my site
is HTTPS only?)

I can second the comment about star ratings as well; the default of 1 star
especially was not in line with my intent for at least one of my reviews.

~~~
bilus
Thank you so much for the feedback. Have you received your feedback yet?

------
karl_gluck
Great idea!

Unfortunately, it looks like you're already getting spammed. I just reviewed
Google.com and what I think would have been nsfw site had I let it load.

Also, it takes too long to generate the screenshot. I waited a few minutes
before giving up on my third review. Why not just open the site in an iframe?

Getting to try it out without having to log into anything is fantastic.

~~~
riffraff
many sites would not work in iframe (they are an increasing number, sadly),
but I second this, as an option at submission time maybe?

~~~
bilus
Actually, the 'increasing number' thing killed the deal for me so I decided to
go for screenshots instead with all their drawbacks.

------
russgray
Great idea, but the UI is a little confusing. After writing a comment do I
need to click 'Add comment' AND 'Submit review'? Or does either do the job?
Also I forgot to set a star rating, perhaps default to zero and prompt user if
they don't set it? Why can't I see the reviews/comments I've submitted on my
account page?

~~~
bilus
Thank you! Two first two issues will be fixed soon. The third has to wait till
a bit later.

------
ig1
Don't to 1-to-1, do n-for-1 as the dynamics work out much better with higher
n.

Look at how other people do it for other sectors (for example Critters for
fiction writing and okcupid for photos)

~~~
bilus
Thank you for pointing that out! I may want to try it in the next release. It
would require a clear point system though. I want to keep things as simple as
possible for the time being.

------
tobyjsullivan
After some use, I definitely see the direct and immediate value of getting
feedback from an alternative perspective. I'm hearing people question the
credibility of the reviews but I don't think that's the point. If someone
tells me my header graphic is illegible or my site doesn't display in IE6...
that's helpful as is.

That said, this feels a bit like a Ponzi scheme in the sense that I'll only
get reviews as long as there are new/active users... I could see that being a
long-term issue (as with any site following this model).

~~~
astine
There's no reason you wouldn't get repeat customers. That would eliminate the
Ponzi scheme angle.

------
Kellster
Uh oh. I added my website (<http://www.pisoftware.com> in case you want to
look it up) and did a review of another site. Signed up for email alerts, got
no confirmation email, and I can't see the page for my site anymore. Something
no bueno.

That's my immediate critique of a website critique website called Criticue.
It's like Inception.

~~~
bilus
Email probably in spam, esp. if you use Gmail. I counted 5 reviews for the
site. Have they been useful? If not, feel free to email me (martinb __at
criticue __dot com).

------
psikatt
I remember something similar a couple years back called feedbackroulette

------
mnicole
Services like this concern me because I don't know the credibility of the
person on the other end, nor do I know if the effort I put into someone else's
review is going to guarantee that I get an equally verbose one. In the same
vein, the function of a site defines the design and someone telling me that my
content portal "is way too busy" isn't going to help me when I wasn't going
for some sort of minimalistic trend the reviewer may be more likely to rate
higher.

I'm not sure if you're changing things right now or A/B testing, but when I
initially went to your link there were examples of what I could expect. Now
there's no way of knowing what the process looks like and how these viewers
see my site. Is it a screengrab of the homepage, do they get the link and surf
around?

Also, is there anything stopping someone from writing a bunch of useless one-
liner reviews just to get their site seen?

~~~
bilus
Thank you for the feedback. I'm working hard to improve the service as much as
possible.

As far as spamming, reviews are moderated but one-liners are very often passed
through, because they are useful. The idea is to get, say, 10-20 reviews of
your site, very quickly.

P.S. Yeah, it's A/B :)

~~~
mnicole
I suppose as a designer I'm probably not your target market anyway, since I
have other outlets to get critiques. One-liners would irritate me too much. :)

Good luck!

------
hmexx
I like it!

Can you make a version for startup ideas, instead of websites? Keep everything
else exactly the same. Then add leaderboards, scores, etc.

So many discussions here about startups, I feel like we have enough aggregate
brainpower to create a great peer-reviewed top 50 ideas list. Then all we need
to do is create teams and crack on!

~~~
bilus
Thank you for the suggestion.

------
netfire
Like the concept. Just submitted 4 reviews and haven't got one back for my
site after 15 mins. Any way of shortening the queue to provide a quicker
reward for my critiques would be awesome. It'd also be nice to see your site's
screenshot to know what people are looking at when they review my site.

~~~
bilus
Moderating is a bottleneck but it'll improve. There's currently a queue of
sites but the idea is to make it as short as possible. Yeah, instant feedback
would be really cool! :)

------
zupreme
I get the following when going to <http://www.criticue.com/> :

Application Error

An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. Please
try again in a few moments.

If you are the application owner, check your logs for details.

~~~
bilus
This was a temporary problem. Thank you for reporting this!

------
Roelven
I like the idea but I fear for the lack of quality. Whenever you have
"outsourced" n-to-1 projects to platforms like Mechanical Turk you know you
need something to guard the quality of the input that people are entering.
It's good to get positive feedback on your work, but what do the comments mean
otherwise?

"Very clean, I like it" - clean in what sense? Design-wise? Or is the HTML
markup nice & tidy?

"Nice big calls to action" - Nice & big, but is bigger better? Do they work?

Etc.

I am keeping my eye on this one, could definitely evolve in something (even
more) valuable. Keep it up!

~~~
bilus
Thank you for your support despite the site's shortcomings.

------
markcbain
The concept is flawed. Getting random feedback from random people is not at
all useful. Feedback needs to take into account the target users and the goals
of the design. The designer needs to ask specific questions, not just "what do
you think?". Maybe this product would be useful if users could put out a call
for people who meet certain criteria (i.e. music-lovers, 25-40), and then
focus their attention on a small set of questions. In this way, there's a
possibility of getting something useful to go on.

~~~
bilus
Thank you for your random feedback. ;)

------
aw3c2
> WARNING: This is a temporary account!

what does that mean? how/when/why will I lose access to that account? I really
want to see my site reviewed but I do not actually want a "proper" account.

~~~
bilus
Good point. It stores the info in cookies so once you clear them, your access
is gone. But you should be able to refresh the browser etc.

I guess it should be pointed out (a "what does it mean" link). What do you
think?

------
nostromo
Love the idea! However it doesn't seem to be working currently.

I click "get review" and I'm prompted to review someone's website first --
which I already did several times over.

~~~
hissworks
having the opposite issue - submitted for review just fine, but it won't pull
anything up for me to review. running chrome on winxp.

~~~
bilus
Thanks for the heads up! Did you get any error messages?

There were some temporary problems because the site got overloaded, I boosted
the number of heroku instances so the problem should no longer be there.

------
sweentrepreneur
I also love the idea. Seams to be some problems when I first click the button
"Add comment" and then rated and submitted by clicking "Submit review".

------
john-n
Would be nice to be able to sign up and submit feedback without having to
submit a site, there doesn't appear to be any way to do that at present?

~~~
bilus
Thanks, will be taken care of soon!

------
stinky613
I like where you're headed with this. I'd really like it if you provided an
interface for marking and critiquing specific parts of a web page. For
instance: let me draw boxes and drop pins and write comments specifically on
those areas.

In short, having a single comment as you would a typical Amazon product review
provides less depth than I'd like to see from peer reviews in this domain.

~~~
bilus
You're absolutely right about this and I too think this would be really cool
to have it. Thanks!

------
ahardin
Well done. Good concept. I look forward to seeing you make some of the
enhancement that others have suggested. The meta-reviews is a great idea.

Also, signup email went to Gmail spam for me.

Additionally, a feature of perhaps marginal utility would be to see all the
sites that I've reviewed (e.g. I want to take another look at a cool looking
site that I remember reviewing but can't remember what it was).

~~~
bilus
Thank you for the suggestion and for the heads up about spam. The latter is a
royal pain.

------
__alexs
Similarly <http://commandshift3.com/> but you know, not entirely broken.

~~~
smadam9
How is that similar? I didn't see any opportunity to compare websites on
criticue.

------
boyter
Only Issue I have is that all the feedback I get is "can't click on any
links". I know that its a screenshot (hence you cannot) but you might want to
add that its a screenshot other then the loading message somewhere. I suspect
a quick check of your feedback logs will show a lot of people with the same
comment.

~~~
bilus
Thanks you!

------
dizzystar
The button says "Go to [website]" but points to the same page.

I think this has a lot of potential, but it should be easier to offer better
UI controls and testing. For example, I may want users to sign into a dummmy
account or see specific pages. The home page of a website is rarely good
enough to get meaningful impressions.

~~~
bilus
I agree, thanks. The only issue is that there are other sites that do it
pretty well. Usability testing is tricky in general.

------
CrankyPants
What about reversing the order? Make it so you can't submit your site for
review until you've reviewed another. Obviously quality may suffer, as people
will just type garbage for the sake of getting theirs submitted, but with
volume that can be fixed via other means down the road.

I'll also second the n-for-1 suggestion.

~~~
bilus
Will think about it for the next release. Thank you so much.

------
josephjrobison
Good concept because professional review sites charge an arm and a leg for
just pointing out the obvious (for the most part).

I was stoked to review my first site but the first thing I got was a shitty
image porn blog. If you want it to be legitimate you gotta weed out the smut
for people to take it seriously.

Great idea though.

~~~
bilus
Thanks! Added a way to quickly flag site as spam and get another one. Please
let me know what you think.

------
nosecreek
I agree with all the others who say this is a neat idea. I've reviewed several
sites, but there doesn't seem to be any confirmation of this on my dashboard.
There is a button to "Get review" but in reality I should already be inline
for a few, right? The dashboard should say so somewhere.

~~~
bilus
Good point!

------
josh2600
Something is very broken here. I keep trying to put our website in
(<http://www.2600hz.com>) but I'm getting completely different sites loaded.

I believe there's some database error that's serving other people's sites and
that's really not good :(.

~~~
bilus
You get _another_ website for review. Once you post your review of that site,
your review -- 2600hz.com will get queued for review by another designer.

If that explains it then I'm sorry -- I'll try to make it more intuitive in
the next update.

------
lominming
Overall a good idea. Screenshots sometimes takes quite long to load. Would be
great to integrate Notable or allow annotation on the screenshot.

Add Comment vs Submit Review is confusing. After adding comment, it just
disappeared. You have no idea what happened.

~~~
bilus
Thanks, will fix it! Thanks for the suggestions too.

------
brendanib
Great idea, getting close on execution. I've reviewed 5 sites so far though,
and all of them are awful. Would be great to put together a list of 1000 great
websites and let users review those, because it makes being a reviewer more
fun.

~~~
bilus
Thank you, suggestion noted. :)

------
azilnik
The star rating seems almost unnecessary, compared to the rich feedback you
get from the comments. I notice my time incrementing, but what does that mean
to me? Overall, nicely done. LOVE the on-boarding process.

~~~
bilus
Thank you!

------
dreamdu5t
Great job on the UI and UX! I think it would be more valuable if the reviewers
are from the target customer/market, not just random people on the Internet.
That would be a review service worth paying for!

~~~
bilus
Agreed. No idea how to entice them to review sites though.

------
tobyjsullivan
Smart idea. I hope the feedback is ultimately constructive in practice.

~~~
bilus
Thank you.

------
benwerd
Just requested and posted my first reviews. This is super-awesome, and I
expect I'll be using it a lot. Thank you.

Scrolling down, I did also forget to leave a star rating. Maybe that can be
clearer?

~~~
benwerd
I want to submit more reviews! Can I do that without having to submit another
site?

~~~
bilus
"Get review" on your account page.

------
twog
Im getting an error when trying to use my .co domain. Heres a screenshot
<http://cl.ly/image/3Y0r2w2Q0j3t>

~~~
bilus
Thank you for the bug report. Using a url shortening service as a workaround?
Sorry about this.

------
gburt
<http://cl.ly/image/3q130N1x303H>

I don't think this is how it is supposed to look. Chrome under Mac OS.

~~~
bilus
Does it still show up like this?

I'm actually using a Mac to write this on with Chrome + Safari. There was a
problem with too much traffic (fixed now by scaling the site up), I suppose
CSS might not have loaded. Do you think this could be the case? Thank you.

------
tstegart
Hmm.. it doesn't seem to check if the website you're reviewing is actually
there. The window just sits there, and if I go to the site it is down.

~~~
bilus
Thank you for the feedback!

------
hmexx
Seems it defaults to 1 star if you don't remember to rate a website? If so,
that will drag down the ratings. I already forgot to rate a couple.

Nice work!

~~~
bilus
Yes, it'll be fixed today or tomorrow. Thank you!

------
hjay
Not sure if this is the same site from like a week ago. I signed up for a free
review and it never came.

~~~
bilus
Pls. tweet me or email (martinb _at_ criticue _dot_ com) with your URL and
I'll be happy to look it up for you.

------
bebraw
Great idea! I would love to review sites while waiting a review on mine.
Please make this possible.

~~~
mebymyself
This was possible long time ago: feedbackroulette.com.

~~~
vickytnz
Yep, was going to mention this site, never looked as nice but great mechanics
for doing reviews (I blew through about 10 on my first go!)

------
user24
I got an error when I tried to submit our two-letter dot com domain, sans www
or protocol.

~~~
bilus
Could you post the name of the domain here?

------
tjosten
I do always get a "Invalid website address." error when entering my URL - what
to do?

~~~
gaetan
Same for me, I get "Invalid website address" when entering my URL.

~~~
bilus
Could tell me what the address was?

------
stcredzero
Is there a Rotten Tomatoes of web app reviews?

------
blaze33
Your mails got in my (gmail) spam folder...

~~~
bilus
Thank you for the warning!

------
joshmoskovitz
can't submit my email on the homepage. saying it's invalid although its just
my gmail address. Anyone else?

~~~
Fletch137
It's asking for the address of your website, not your email address
(mydomain.com rather than me@mail.com).

------
fookyong
silky smooth onboarding process - loved it!

~~~
bilus
Thanks!

------
wilfra
I got a free one. Submitted two reviews and have gotten three back so far :)

Idea: take a page from the Yelp/Quora/HN/StackExchange playbook and gamify it
by letting people build up some kind of reputation points/karma/credits or
whatever. You'd be amazed how much time some people will invest in your site
just for some pixels on their profile.

~~~
kevinyun
+1 to this idea.

Also, this is awesome OP. Got some genuinely honest feedback and it's much
appreciated.

~~~
bilus
Thank you!

------
crowdmatch2
As a designer/front end developer I might have a few reviews for
critcue.com...

