

Ask HN: Review my site - Rate Expectations - karzeem
http://rateexpectations.com

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synnik
I have the same complaint about almost every other new site I visit - I don't
immediately know what the site is about.

My screen is filled with "Movies Coming Soon."

The actual point of the site is barely visible at the very top, and the very
bottom. And massive displays of rich media are drawing my eye to the center,
so I didn't notice.

Were I a casual browser, I would have already closed the window, and totally
missed the point.

In short, make your point visible, center-stage.

~~~
karzeem
Good point, I just pushed a fix for this — a nice, big title right above the
featured movies.

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sam_in_nyc
Very cool idea and concept. However, I'm not convinced of the utility of
rating a movie compared to it's trailer. If the movie has a shitty trailer,
but is actually an OK movie, it will get high ratings. If it has a great
trailer, and is a great movie, it will get average ratings. Why should I care
about the "quality of trailer" to "quality of movie" ratio? What's the
advantage over a rotten tomatoes rating, for example?

What I think stands out the most is the super easy access to the trailers. I
would come to your site just to see what movies are coming out and watch the
trailers. The other sites that offer trailers, at the moment, are barely worth
going to because of how much spam they have everywhere.

As far as my first impression: I was confused at first, until I saw the top
tagline. The google text ads at the top were very disorienting. It looks like
navigation, and immediately causes me to question the legitimacy of the
website. I basically ignored the slideshow thing, I'm not sure why.

Scrolling down I notice names of movies coming out. Ok, and so what? Further
down I see ratings. Ok, I get it. I think you should put popular movies with
ratings first. (Perhaps take the top 10 grossing movies, and only use those
that are at least a week old... odds are everyone has heard of these) Just
seeing a movie name with a screenshot was confusing at first.

When I watched a trailer I was pleased at the trailer quality and speed at
which it started. Now, where do I vote? I have no idea. I can become a fan or
follow you on Twitter, but where the hell do I vote? Do I have to sign up?
There's no login anywhere... Eventually, after two or three trailers, I read
that text that said I need to login with FB or Twitter to vote. You should
make that text stand out, for sure. I just assumed that it was the standard
"share on Facebook and Twitter" thing that I see elsewhere.

Finally, were I to commit to your site and actually want to browse around
(which I have), I would expect more content and more means to sort it. What
are the highest/lowest/most voted movies? That definitely needs to be there.

That's all for now... sorry about the disorganization in my post. Best of
luck.

~~~
karzeem
A lot of great points, thanks. I removed all the text ads, so it's just
display ads now. And on the movie pages, I enlarged the "log in to vote" text
and cleared it up.

A bunch of your organizational points are good ones, and I'll probably be
changing the structure of the site as time goes by. Thanks for the guidance.

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javery
Great design, clever idea. I would signup for this:

<http://www.fandango.com/affiliateprogram>

and add a nice big button for "buy a ticket to see this movie". Seems like
that would deliver better than adsense.

~~~
karzeem
Fandango makes you apply for that on Commission Junction, and they've turned
me down twice so far. I'm going to keep trying, and I figure now that the site
has launched publicly, they'll be more open.

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lpolovets
Awesome name. I like the design, but I think it would be better if you had
more movies that were already voted on in the first screen. My first
impression was "okay, here are a bunch of things that I can vote on
tomorrow... not sure what to do now."

Also, I think the font for the 3 headings ("coming out this week", "released
last week", etc) could stand out more.

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aik
Cool. The main thing I find confusing is the rating scheme. It's hard at first
to know what constitutes "good".

The site rates movies where the benchmark is the quality of the trailer. If a
movie has a 58% "voters said the movie is better than the trailer" rating,
that means 42% of people were disappointed by the movie. Is this your thought?
With this, maybe you should adopt more of a rottentomatoes.com scheme -
anything above 50% gets a thumbs up? I'd like to mainly see some sort of
notification of whether the movie is worth seeing based on what I know from
the trailer. You have the power to decide what percentage is sufficient.

~~~
karzeem
Thanks, I'm going to keep tinkering with that, because you're right, it's a
bit less clear than it ought to be.

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harpastum
I think there is great utility in the concept. The most accessible description
of a movie is the trailer, and this site allows people to comment on how
accurate this description is.

The use-case I see is people looking for movies they're interested in and
watching the trailer. They can then use their impression of the trailer and
the comparison of trailer to movie to get a better feel for what the movie is
going to be like.

Rather than a simple rating scale (80% of people liked this movie), there is a
more subtle dimension to the metric of this site: Of the people that liked the
trailer, this fraction didn't like the movie; or of the people that didn't
like the trailer, this percent of people actually thought the movie was good.

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czcar
Cool site, cool name. As mentioned by a few others I run into the same
problem. I enjoyed browsing and watching, good way to waste a little time,
derive a little enjoyment. And I may use it as a way to evaluate my movie
going options, but i'm not entirely sure that I would make a point of
returning to review a movie after the fact. Rather I would use it to choose
from movies, and then not revisit until I next wanted to watch some trailers.
Seems that there might be a huge drop off point, where people don't bother
coming back to vote. Whereas if you can somehow link the trailer=>movie
times=> buy tickets locally? Hmmm not entirely sure as to where you can add
value, regardless cool idea, maybe a good starting mvp

~~~
karzeem
Thanks, I'm working on setting it up with the Fandango affiliate program so
that you'll get a convenient "find nearby theaters/showtimes" box.

~~~
czcar
also a "next" or "random" or "suggested similar movies" button on the video
page would be extremely useful also (instead of having to navigate back to the
homepage)

~~~
karzeem
Excellent idea. I was blind to it because I tend to keep a site's home page
open in a separate tab.

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prpon
Nice site. I would use it to decide which movies to watch based on the
ratings. And I would like the movies playing now to be at the top (not the
one's coming soon).

During the process of deciding, I might encounter a movie that I watched, I
would vote for it.

BTW, what is the incentive for people to vote other than what I have described
above? I would suggest adding comments apart from just ratings. Sometimes a
movie appeals to me so much that I look forward to write something about it.
It works the other way too. I've seen enough horrible movies that I come home
so pissed that I need to vent. :-)

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hughprime
I dunno. I'd prefer it if I could:

a) See trailers for movies coming out further in the future than this week,
and

b) Rate the trailers before the movie comes out (and more to the point, see
what other people think of the trailer of as un-yet unreleased movie)

You could have two forms of voting: until the movie comes out the question is
"What did you think of the trailer" and after it comes out it switches to "Was
the movie better than the trailer?"

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mtholking
Interesting idea, it might help users form an opinion faster by making the
rotten tomatoes score more prominent, and perhaps add it to the white space on
the right of a title on the home page.

It would be nice to integrate the trailers for the 'Coming out this week' by
playing them when the user clicks the large image.

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danteembermage
Of all the movie/trailer combinations I've seen the one I'd predict closest to
0% would be Congo. The trailer is for a completely different film as far as I
can tell, and it looked really good.

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jack7890
What's your endgame? Are you thinking of trying to sell data to movie
studios/theaters/marketers? Might be helpful for them to know what trailers
generate the most excitement.

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indiejade
Cool idea. The name is very clever; are there any plans to expand it beyond a
simple "login w/Twitter or facebook" app?

~~~
karzeem
Not at the moment, but later on, who knows. For now, I'm using the
Twitter/Facebook login as a simple way to keep people from voting twice on the
same movie.

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FreeRadical
Why have you recommended only firefox instead of old browsers, and not chrome
as well?

~~~
karzeem
I figure that someone who's using an old browser is relatively unlikely to
know much about browsers in general, so I didn't want to give them a bunch of
indistinguishable (to them) choices. My guess is that more people will
actually follow through if they don't have to make a choice.

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mitko
it is turbo addicting. I spent last couple of hours watching trailers

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Readmore
I love it, great idea.

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mbrubeck
Nice name.

~~~
vibhavs
Perhaps too long?

~~~
hughprime
Why? It's memorable, and with modern browsers you're only going to have to
type the whole thing once at most (sure enough, now I can just type "rat" and
it will autocomplete)

