
Show HN: Nuclino – a lightweight and fast real-time wiki for teams - kiejo
https://www.nuclino.com
======
kiejo
Hey there, co-founder of Nuclino here!

After having tried countless knowledge management tools that were either too
bloated and slow or focused on single users, we set out to create a
lightweight wiki optimized for teams.

Some of the main features include:

* Everything is shared in real-time

* Instant fuzzy search

* Markdown commands

* Easy linking of pages using "@"

* Automatic tagging based on page titles

* Graph visualizations of tags and pages

You can think of it as an nvALT + real-time collaboration + rich content.

We've been dogfooding and testing this with a few startup teams over the past
few months and would be happy to get your feedback and to answer any
questions!

~~~
alphapapa
I'm not joking: much of the light gray text on your site and your screenshot
becomes literally unreadable when my LCD monitor is viewed at certain angles,
not far off perpendicular; it becomes the same color as the background. My
monitor may not be expensive, but it's not a cheapo, no-name one either.

I absolutely detest this current fad of thin, light gray text on white
backgrounds. Instead of using high-contrast, easy-to-read text, people are
using gray-on-white, white-on-gray, even gray-on-gray, and always with thin,
narrow-stroke fonts and enormous amounts of whitespace.

And if it's hard to read indoors with no glare on a full-size screen, imagine
trying to read it on a mobile device, outdoors, with sun/sky glare, or indoors
on a reflective, glossy screen with fluorescent lights' glare.

I mean, look at the bottom of your page. One of the most important links on
the page, the "Contact" link, is _very light_ gray, thin text on white. When
the cursor hovers over the bottom of the page, the links become _slightly
darker gray_. And when the cursor hovers over a link, it becomes an even
darker--wait for it--gray. You've effectively made the "Contact Us" link
invisible.

And the screenshot of your product exhibits the same problems: the UI fades
into the background to such a degree that it is difficult to see. This is bad
enough when talking about a web page whose primary purpose is to look stylish,
but your product's primary purpose is to be a usable tool. Are you trying to
make the wiki equivalent of Das Keyboard?

Where do these fads come from?

For a good illustration of the problem, I just discovered this web site (which
also lists HN as an example of the problem):
[http://contrastrebellion.com/](http://contrastrebellion.com/)

~~~
bjoernm
Thanks for the feedback. We didn't test the landing page under lots of
different conditions yet, but we'll continue to make improvements. For
example, I just deployed a new version with an improved contrast of the
footer.

Regarding the product, themes and customizations will most likely be the best
option to maximize the usability for each individual user. This way, users
could choose high contrast themes if they are not happy with the default.

As for the general design question you are proposing, my opinion is that there
is no one-size-fits-all approach that pleases and maximizes the usability for
everyone. For example, making all text larger might increase readability for
people with below average eyesight, but will punish users with normal eyesight
by decreasing the information density. I think that adaptive design, which
software can uniquely offer to some degree, is the only hypothetical solution.
However, this is obviously limited by the context-awareness of systems in that
it doesn't help that a system could automatically adjust it's font-size if it
does not know the state of the users' eyesight.

~~~
alphapapa
Well, the footer is slightly improved, but what is arguably the most important
link on your page--the one that lets potential customers contact you--is still
at the very bottom of the page, on the fourth (4th) screen. According to the
Nielsen-Norman group[1], anything below the first fold gets less than 50% as
many eye-tracking hits, and by the time you get to the fourth screen, you're
at basically 0%.

So the most important link on your entire web site is effectively still
invisible. What message does this send to your potential customers? It's the
Internet equivalent of leaving a message on an answering machine without
leaving your phone number.

I don't understand how you can post this screenshot[2] and talk about
information density. The information density of your current product is very
low.

But the worst problem is the incredibly low contrast of your UI. Look at that
screenshot again. Look at the links on the right side of the screen. They are
barely readable on a full-size, matte monitor indoors. Now imagine someone
using a glossy monitor facing a window during daytime. Imagine someone using a
laptop with a glossy screen on a desk with fluorescent lights overhead.
Imagine someone using a tablet outdoors. Might as well try to read a cloud
floating overhead! The NN Group also has an article[3] about this, and your
screenshot looks as bad as or worse than all of their examples of what-not-to-
do.

Where are these professional "designers" learning to make these horrible
mistakes? Why are they still employed in the field?

1: [https://www.nngroup.com/articles/page-fold-
manifesto/](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/page-fold-manifesto/)

2:
[https://www.nuclino.com/img/screenshot.png](https://www.nuclino.com/img/screenshot.png)

3: [https://www.nngroup.com/articles/low-
contrast/](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/low-contrast/)

~~~
bjoernm
I am sorry to hear that you are upset with our current experience.

> So the most important link on your entire web site is effectively still
> invisible.

Where would you like the link to be and how should it look?

> I don't understand how you can post this screenshot[2] and talk about
> information density. The information density of your current product is very
> low.

What would you like to change exactly regarding the information density?

> But the worst problem is the incredibly low contrast of your UI.

Would a high contrast theme solve the problem for you?

In general, I am more than happy to offer you a Skype/Chat session, where we
could discuss the design in more detail. Feel free to drop me a line at
bjoern@nuclino.com

------
waimbes
Really love the idea, we have been struggling with this issue quite a bit in
my office.

For me the one killer feature that I would want is comments. The commenting
feature is the main reason our team uses Google docs, despite the major issues
with it as an information hub.

~~~
kiejo
Great to hear that as we have comments on our roadmap. We're not sure yet how
the best experince for commenting would look like.

Would you prefer inline comments, that appear directly inside the page or
comments that appear on the side like in Google Docs?

------
bgnm2000
This seems really cool - would love to see a demo app I can play around with
before handing over an email address.

~~~
kiejo
Thanks for the input! We might add an open "Test Team" to the landing page.
Until then you're free to use a spam address to convince yourself of the
product ;)

------
MelmanGI
Love that markdown editor, very fast and easy to use. Well done! Although they
could improve the contrast a bit (or maybe my screen just sucks).

Probably will give this a try with a few colleagues and see if it scales when
you accumulate a larger amount of documents.

~~~
kiejo
Thanks for the feedback! It's always hard to get contrast right on all the
different screens, but we'll look into it.

I can say that we've reached about 500 pages in our team and it's still
working great. Nevertheless, we definitely plan on introducing more advanced
organization and visualization features for teams with large amounts of
documents.

~~~
dbyte
The product is sweet. Enjoyed the UI/UX. However I think the landing page
needs a little bit more love (pricing, team, contacts, use case, features
lists) what about importing from existing Wikis or plain documentation text
files (e.g. markdown, asciidoc)?

~~~
MelmanGI
An export/backup feature would also be nice. Don't wanna have to trust your
average SaaS provider keeping your important stuff backed up properly. ;-)

~~~
kiejo
Good point, we have export on our roadmap. (Of course we use replication and
perform daily backups to S3, but I understand your concerns nevertheless)

What kind of export would you like to see? Exporting the whole content of a
team as HTML, generating PDFs for all the pages, generating Markdown files?
Any preferences?

~~~
MelmanGI
Probably something more semantically structured than HTML. Markdown could be
an option. Maybe something that could be reimported for a 'rogue employee gone
mad' scenario?

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alxppp
Looks really neat! Any details on pricing? Will there be a free plan?

~~~
kiejo
We plan on charging a monthly fee per user similar to the premium offerings of
products like Slack, Trello, and Asana. We're also thinking about offering a
free version with a limited feature set, but have not decided how this will
look exactly.

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konart
Wish we could use it on our servers.

~~~
kiejo
Thanks for the input, we are generally open to that, but we still have to see
how much demand there is for a self-hosted solution.

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baseh
How do you add a link? - like a hyperlink to external page

~~~
kiejo
There's currently a bug that forces you to hit Space after pasting a link, for
it to be recognized as a link. We'll fix this soon, but for now you can just
hit Space after the link.

~~~
kiejo
We just deployed a new version which fixes this! You can now just paste a link
into the editor.

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drakmail
Does after release there are will be free version?

~~~
kiejo
We haven't decided on this yet. We are still evaluating how a free version
might look like.

------
jaequery
Pretty neat

