

Ask HN: Review My Web App - OnMyMission.com - LDS Missionary Profiles - vyrotek

While our target audience wont necessarily be found here on HN, we would appreciate any feedback!<p>Is the purpose clear? Usability? Design?
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patio11
I strongly suggest you replace your screenshots which hotlink to pngs with a
lightbox style effect. A shocking percentage of the Internet, especially non-
technical users, does not understand how to use the back button. This makes
screenshots into a roach motel -- click in, can't click out, bounce.

Incidentally: less talk about features, more talk about benefits. Nobody will
use your site to "Keep a personal list of missionary pages you have access
to". They will use your site because it makes their lives fuller, because it
lets them keep in touch with their family, because it helps them to support
their community in fulfilling their duties to God. These things matter to your
customers. Implementation details do not matter.

Edit to add: I understand there may be practical and cultural reasons for
defaulting pages to private, but you may wish to reconsider whether that is
the only mode of interaction which you will support.

~~~
vyrotek
Good suggestion for the tour.

So the private/public pages thing gets a little tricky and it has been on my
mind since I started the project. Pages are actually default to public but
that doesn't mean open to the internet. What that public means in this case is
that any registered user can search/find and view the page. In short it
basically works more like facebook and not myspace.

After viewing a few other sites that provide guestbook/forum type services I
noticed that a lot of people (moms/dads/grandma) seem to be more willing to
post emails and other contact information publicly because they trust the site
for some reason. Which means google could crawl that.

Of course, as I mentioned I'm not convinced 100% yet that this is the right
way to do it. There are definitely many people who just want to view the page
and not bother with signing up. The alternative is to make public pages open
to the internet so that any unregistered user can view it.

But that makes things interesting for the private pages. Thats because when we
ask for the 'password' for a page we actually only ask for it once and then
store the fact that you now have permission to view the missionary in the DB.
Maybe the solution is to either create a cookie if they aren't a registered
user or store it in the db if they are?

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fefzero
I think the purpose is pretty clear, but it would be nice to have an actual
demo instead of just screen shots. One thing that seemed a bit off to me was
inconsistent capitalization: "missionary" is sometimes capitalized and
sometimes not (I would suggest that it not be capitalized) and the sentence at
the top (Share your Missionary's Photos, Experiences and More with your
Friends and Family!) seems like it it's too long to have most of the words
capitalized. I think it'd be easier to read in all lowercase.

I agree with patio11 on the lightbox effect, but I still think it needs some
sort of tour or demo instead of just screenshots. I visited a similar site
recently (not for missionaries, but for high school graduating classes), and
I'm leery of creating an account here just because that site had poor
usability and about ten pages for registration.

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omnivore
Really good niche to target, especially for missionaries in places with bad
mail service. I think the design fits the target audience well and it should
be interesting to see how well it takes off for you.

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vyrotek
Clickable Link - <http://www.OnMyMission.com>

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timothychung
It is a good tool. Why don't you rename it to be a trip sharing app?

More general will give you larger market and you will get more feedback. :-)

~~~
omnivore
I actually think, in this case, being a niche app is much better..especially
given the niche he's selected. He's addressing a real problem with an audience
that something like this would be a fantastic boon for. Going beyond that
would make it too general and would change the entire way it's marketed and
approached.

I think keeping it only for LDS missionaries and MAYBE expanding it at some
point beyond that to other youth missionaries abroad would be as far as it
ought to go.

Being the "go-to" site for a particular segment is a winning formula here, not
trying to be an "everyman" site to an audience that doesn't have a compelling
reason to adopt something like this, whereas, the LDS missionary target
audience doesn't have an alternative and it's rare that anyone would think to
target them, so that helps a lot in this case.

~~~
vyrotek
Thanks! Thats what we were thinking as well. The fact that we are also based
in Utah also helps us easily contact local retailers that sell products
(shirts, ties, etc) to just missionaries and so there is a lot of potential
for affiliates.

