

Please review my startup - Flowshark - hajrice
http://www.flowshark.com/

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kgrin
Random feature idea: export to blank properly named templates for Balsamiq,
Mockingbird, etc.

It seems like once you have a good idea of the interaction flow in Flowshark,
the next step is to actually wireframe the individual pages - having something
save me the 6 minutes it would take to essentially outline the pages in (e.g.)
Balsamiq would be nice (though it's obviously a pretty random request).

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bentlegen
No videos, a single screenshot, beta invite only. Is this another minimum
viable product experiment?

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run4yourlives
You (and those that upvoted you) seem to thing that this is a problem. May I
ask why?

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metachris
The current title feels misleading as it suggest you already have something
working. A better title would have been "Review my startup _idea_ ".

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bprater
Agreed. There is nothing to review but a concept here. I don't want to be
jaded, but it's possible that you hacked this page together in an hour. To me,
it feels like you are simply using Hacker News to draw some eyeballs to your
site and generate some leads.

In my mind, you ultimately are hurting future folks who want serious reviews
of their products from other hackers. Smart people who frequent Hacker News
will get tired of doing these kinds of lead-generating "reviews" and won't up-
vote them into the homepage.

My suggestion to others who want to use HN for feedback: you get one good shot
at a review, so time it wisely.

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JangoSteve
I think what would be really cool is if you could make this process so
incredibly simple that my non-programming customers could actually tell me
their ideal workflow in my application (for new and existing features and
such).

~~~
spking
Absolutely. That's the big idea here. Flowshark will help everybody really
think about the user experience and how to optimize it by providing a
collaborative high-level view. We're working hard to make it what I'll call
"playfully intuitive" enough that pretty much anyone can get started using it
right away, including your non-programming clients.

~~~
grandalf
This is awesome. I actually built a very similar tool about 9 years ago and
it's incredible how effective it is for selling/managing business consulting
services. It's amazing how many barriers can be overcome by simply getting
everyone involved to visualize the discussion in terms of simple, changeable
work flows.

The one I built had the following features:

\- people could make suggestions for how to improve the flow \- email
notifications when a flow was changed \- document uploads tied to each step \-
tracking whether each user had viewed new flow changes, etc.

I have gone into a sales meeting and sold thousands of dollars of consulting
services just by drawing out how this tool works on a napkin or scrap of
paper. The idea is so simple and powerful that it is extremely valuable for
businesses that care about process improvement.

I strongly recommend against listening to the 1% of people who get mad that it
doesn't do all sorts of complex branching, etc.

I no longer work with the company I built it for (I was a minor partner) but I
believe they still use it extensively, though it's focused only on supporting
business/management consulting services and not on UI design, etc. We would
routinely get $15-20 per user/month for it.

~~~
hajrice
I'd love to talk to you more about this. Would you mind shooting me an email
at hajrice@gmail.com ?

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NEPatriot
As soon as I read the header text it resonated. My eyes went from the header
to the text on the left. Then on to the screen shot.

But since the screen shot is kind of small - I tried clicking on it to get a
better view. But there is no click to zoom functionality. Reviewing a larger
screen shot is what would sway me from signing up or not. So either make it a
click to zoom, or just post a bigger pic of the app. or something along these
lines.

~~~
spking
That's fair. We're working on a screencast to go in its place.

~~~
notahacker
You might want to reduce the sharpening of the text in the next version of the
home page too, some of the the edges look very jagged on my monitor. The
actual home page layout is pleasingly simple and clear.

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pclark
"A better way to visualize and plan user experiences."

IMHO: "A better way to visualize and plan user flows."

then sub text: "Create, share and collaborate on creating beautiful user
experiences with your team."

Your primary message is: _this lets you create user flows_

and the secondary message is: *collaborate & create great UX"

whereas currently it's the other way around.

The screenshot when clicked should lightbox and add some more details

I'm not sure what the text below is meant to mean, honestly. "Built for people
who build software" but then you list various other job titles in addition to
developers...

As I mentioned above, was hoping that I could use it today, I think posts
where you can't actually "review" a product (because it doesn't exist) should
be titled as such on Hacker News.

Why does your contact google map zoom in on the ocean? :)

Love to get in the beta though, signed up.

~~~
hajrice
Thanks for the feedback. The google map is zoomed in on a shark :)

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fookyong
Naysayer alert!

Just my opinion (or perhaps I've misunderstood) - but this solves a problem
that is better solved by a paper and pencil. Or a whiteboard.

On my mac I have a few different tools that I could use to make these sorts of
diagrams.

I never use them.

I always revert to a paper, pencil and frantic scribbles - that's what works
best as an individual and collaboratively, I've found. It's unintuitive and
adds hurdles to the design process when you have to keep clicking "edit"
"save" etc - I just want to rub things out and scribble.

The only time I think this would be useful is when doing UX brainstorming with
a remote team, but I think that is a very niche market - too niche to make it
worthwhile building this MVP. Unless you're aiming at enterprise where you
only need a few customers to make it worthwhile ;)

~~~
spking
When you've finished sketching out your flows on paper or on a whiteboard, how
do you share them? Scan them in or take a photo? And then when someone points
out that a change needs to be made to one of the screens or an entire section
of the flow, how do you effectively distribute and communicate this change to
everyone on the team?

Paper sketches are great, but they become pretty inefficient when you have to
keep multiple people on the same page (pardon the pun) during a constantly
changing product development project.

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dotcoma
Looks interesting, but you should have handed out beta invitation codes to the
first 50 of us...

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weixiyen
there is definitely a need for this. I hate sharing word documents. How
complicated will the flows be? Seems like in the screenshot it's just
sequential. Will there be more like Visio later on where you can create loops
and decision points?

~~~
spking
Thanks for the feedback, and I share your frustration around sharing Word
documents over email. Between Word docs and Visios getting flung back and
forth around a team, people tend to quickly get out of sync.

Our mission is to make the flows as visually simple as possible, but robust
enough to support if/then, validation, loops and decision points. We won't
have everything we want in version 1, but enough for most web apps.

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arram
I have an immediate use for this - thanks.

~~~
cloudwalking
I do as well. One thing I am worried about though--the first (cheapest?) plan
has 1 user, which seems to defeat the purpose of the app. The attraction here
is sharing and comments; it's easier for me to draw 10 flows in my Molskine if
I'm not sharing them with anybody.

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tlack
One thing I'd like to see on your homepage is some text highlighting the
differences between your system and other, similar applications that have come
into the market in the past year or two.

~~~
spking
Can you point us to a few of them? We'd love to see how others have approached
the problem. Thanks.

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famousactress
Like others, it's unclear to me exactly how far the product goes.. Is it a way
to lay out state machines and make notes, or will it actually allow me to
mock-up a user interface within the tool? If I'd still mock up the UI in
OmniGraffle, screen-shot it, and upload so that your app will let me lay out
the 'flow'.. that's not compelling enough to me to make it worth the trouble.
If it somehow takes OmniGraffle/Visio out of the equation.. I'd be interested
for sure.

~~~
spking
Great question. The flows created in Flowshark provide the foundation for you
to move forward with your page-level design mockups. In other words, this is a
tool to figure out from a high level what the user will see/do on each screen.
Once your team (or clients) reach a consensus on the user flow, the next step
would be to get into more detailed wireframes and high-fidelity comps. Think
of Flowshark as a central, always-current map that everyone on your team can
reference while they're working on their specific parts of the project.

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wildmXranat
_Flowshark makes it easy to design intuitive user flows for your software
product, allowing you and your collaborators to optimize the user experience,
identify potential trouble spots and know what to design for._ Could be re-
written as two or three sentences.

What kind of export formats are you thinking of ?

~~~
hajrice
PDF and HTML.

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all
You may want to remove the references to AppFlows in the footer on some pages.
As it is, both sites show the same diagramme. Is one an earlier version?
<http://www.flowshark.com/> <http://appflows.com/>

~~~
spking
Thanks for catching that, fixed now. Yes, Appflows was our original name idea
and we decided to go with something a bit more fun.

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Travistic0
I like it.. it looks great man! although I have to agree with others here..
please show more of what the beta can do before I sign up to try it!

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teyc
I'm not familiar with the problem space. Perhaps you could explain some of the
pain points on the web site.

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PStamatiou
Have you seen <http://productplanner.com>

~~~
spking
Hey Paul. Yes, and I think it's great for jumpstarting the process when
talking about a new flow and getting new ideas. We're taking this general
concept in a more collaborative (but private) direction with Flowshark.

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ritonlajoie
I have a font problem on your website,chrome 5.0.375.99

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biggitybones
The font doesn't anti-alias in WinXP (Firefox) - hard to read especially at
smaller sizes.

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brown9-2
Same deal with Windows 7 - I believe that all flavors of Windows do a
horrendous job on html5 fonts

Here is a screenshot (using Chrome 5.0.375.99): <http://imgur.com/aLGBk.png>

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andreshb
Like the name =)

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paulhart
Would love to, you have a great form ;)

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viggity
looks interesting, I'd really like to see more screenshots

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toxicflavor
Nice design - shouldn't be too surprising for a design-oriented site. But it's
a pleasing and simple use of Blueprint CSS.

Just one question: I don't understand why Wufoo Form Builder was needed for
the signup flow. Why not just add a form of your own? Or am I misunderstanding
why Wufoo was mentioned at the end of the signup process?

~~~
spking
Thanks for the compliment. We used Wufoo so that we could spend our time
continuing to work on the product.

