

Show HN: A web app for creating interactive people plots and family trees - alexkearns

I submitted this earlier today but go no response. So am trying again. Last time, promise.<p>I am shortly to launch our new product - www.peopleplotr.com (web-based software for creating interactive people plots and family trees). Would love to hear what people think of the product. Bit of background: Used to run a boutique web dev agency (me and my wife and some freelancers). Decided to make the move into a product company in April last year when we launched www.tiki-toki.com (software for creating web-based timelines). PeoplePlotr is our second product.
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chetane07
Haven't used it yet, but definitely will given how smooth the demo is. However
I have two big concerns.

1\. Are there options to backup/save an offline copy of the tree? Or a print-
friendly version?

The reason is that family tree are meant to last over generations, and
potentially longer than your web service (hopefully not, that would be a good
sign for you :P). It is a bit scary to upload all my family tree, and update
it without having an option to make a private copy should the website ever
dis-appear. Printing a family tree would be pretty cool too IMO, might be an
interesting revenue stream to look into, maybe?

2\. Pricing: This is super expensive :( I have a family tree I would like to
create, with more than 25 people, but really can't afford 7.50$/month. In many
ways, it's more of a product than a service. I won't look at it everyday, or
update it everyday. Only very incremental changes a few times a year. A fix
cost, or 'yearly cost' would be more adequate in my opinion.

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chetane07
Regarding the "super expensive" -- doing the math, it's not that bad ^^ But it
"feels" expensive when given a per month billing price in my opinion.

One more nitpick: The website is really nice, pretty and lightweight, and the
background images in the samples are pretty. However, in the pricing section
those "0101010101" make it suddenly feel "old school"/not as elegant. I'd
suggest using a prettier less flashy background image.

~~~
chetane07
Also, for the free signup at the top right of the page.... Please make the
password input field a password input. It's scary to read my own password as I
type it, and makes me feel a big unsafe.

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dclaysmith
Congrats on the launch. A few thoughts... After registering, why not skip the
"Create Your First Plot" step and throw the user straight to their plot. Just
make up a name "Your First Plot" and let them know how to edit it.

Honestly, I don't know why I would use this (beyond maybe creating a family
tree). I'm not saying there aren't loads more uses--I just don't know them. On
your landing page, maybe you could show some of the use cases (show one
embedded on a web page or used in a school project, etc).

My main recommendation would be to remove any functionality that really isn't
necessary. I found the edit interface a little overwhelming with all the
settings you can change (colors, images, etc).

Good luck!

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alexkearns
Taking people straight to a new peopleplot when they sign up is a good idea
that we had not considered, and would remove one more form for them to fill
in.

With regards use cases, we are not entirely sure what people will want to use
it for yet. Family trees are the obvious choice but it is a crowded market. We
have outlined some possible use cases on the home page, though have not got
any hard examples to back that up yet.

We'll just see what our users (assuming we get any!) have to say.

~~~
chris_dcosta
I think your app looks great, and behaves well even in IE8.

The problem you rightly point out is that family trees space is crowded
(although there are posts here which argue that that doesn't really matter) I
think your idea doesn't yet know what it wants to be. Is ist a family tree
machine or an organisational plotr?

Perhaps to distinguish yourself you need to make a choice at first, at least
to clarify the message.

~~~
alexkearns
Or create two sites - one for family trees, other for organisational charts.
Identical except for the branding. See which takes off and focus on that.

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adunsmoor
Here's my feedback after playing with the demo tree that's on your front page.
The demo looks _very_ nice. It's attractive and makes me want to interact with
the page. That's great.

The one time I built a family tree graphically was when my kids had a school
project to do. We wanted to print a nicely organized diagram but couldn't do
it with the tools we found online. We ended up printing out the information
from a text file and organizing it ourselves on a sheet of paper. I don't know
if I'd have paid for something or not at the time. It definitely would have
been a one time use, though.

Overall I expected the interaction to be more like a modern maps interface
(think Google maps) - zoomable with scroll wheel, click and drag to pan, etc.

The click to navigate seemed outdated. If I want to move up and to the right.
Click the button on the right, now click the button on the top, now to the
right a few more times...

Same feedback for the time line. It's a neat idea but I expected to be able to
navigate by dragging it around.

Also, the zoom +- would be easier to use if they stayed in a fixed location.
Having them centered based on the size of the zoom scale meant they kept
jumping around. Really hard to click, click, click to zoom in.

If navigation were a little easier and more fluid I could see using something
like this to create hierarchical diagrams. Right now it was too frustrating to
examine larger trees.

I hope the feedback helps.

~~~
alexkearns
Thanks for the feedback though I should point out that you can drag both the
family tree and timeline. Just click and drag. The navigation buttons are just
there for people who don't like dragging. Zooming is something we are
planning.

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ashamedlion
I was looking at the pricing, and I don't know how willing people would be to
pay per month for this... Have you considered making it a one-time cost
instead of that?

~~~
alexkearns
We are happy to experiment with pricing. This is however Software as a Service
so I think a monthly fee is probably more suitable.

The problem with a fixed price for SaaS is that you only receive a one-time
fee but you have ongoing costs. You are guaranteed to eventually lose money on
that customer which for a small start-up like us is not viable.

We will probably develop a downloadable desktop version that people can use on
their own computers. This would just be a one-off cost.

Thanks for commenting.

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marketmonkey
Beautiful app. You deserve some attention here. I was worried for a second it
was going to be flash heavy. You proved me wrong. Great work.

~~~
alexkearns
Thanks for your positive comments. You are right, no flash. Thanks to hard
work by browser developers, you can achieve pretty impressive stuff using just
JS, CSS and HTML. I am indebted to them.

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akaak
Congratulations on a great new product. One thing that I would like to see is
have a small context map (plot area and the window that you are looking at) so
that it helps the users while dragging the plot.

I see that the product is not timeline friendly unlike your timeline product.

The use cases are not as evident as your other timeline product.

Good luck.

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alexkearns
Clickable link: <http://www.peopleplotr.com>

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sidcool
Clickable <http://www.tiki-toki.com>

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nabilt
Very polished UI. I would prefer a bit more contrast on some of the controls,
but the product looks solid otherwise. Is it possible to export the data into
a standard file format (if one exists)?

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alexkearns
You can currently export to our propriety JSON format. We're looking at more
export options: CSV, and maybe the GEDCOM family tree format,

