I think the demo on the landing page should be in the form of meeting minutes, rather than someone messaging a load of tasks to their (I assume) direct reports.
Why? Because the feeling the demo evoked for me was: "Uh oh. This looks like a micro-managers wet dream".
So rather than just have "@John please !phone client" perhaps the demo would itemise the meeting minutes with: "@John said he would !phone client and discuss requirements".
Perhaps this is simply because I have had the unpleasant experience of working for panic-driven micromanagers before. But I think you really want to make sure your landing page is resonating with "Awesome - this is going to make my life easier" vs. "What pandora's box of hell will this tool unleash in my organization and work life".
Product definitely looks useful though, and the above comments are about making sure you present it in its best light. Good luck!
Hi rurounijones, you're right in pointing out the important difference between imperative vs. descriptive form. In our application we intend to accommodate both - hence the inline syntax within the free text.
So you could write in a very succinct way "@John please !phone client" like when you drop over a quick note on Post-It to your colleague-friend sitting next table. But you could also send as a more polite request, something like "@john, can you be so kind to !phone the client". Or what you just wrote "@John said he would !phone client and discuss requirements". These all refer to the same action: John should phone the client.
P.S. In the video we were of course limited by keeping the text as short as possible so it remains legible.
The landing page is fantastic. I know exactly what this product does, and I can see where it would fit into our organizational needs, all without any effort on my part (I didn't even need to scroll, although there is more detail when I did).
The product is sure awesome, but since you're discussing the design of the homepage, I think the typography might need some more work.
And if you look on [this page](http://www.opp.io/About), the color palette as well :/
Hi Humpt, thanks for the comment. We will definitely iterate on the design including typography, colours in the mockup, color/whitespace balance etc. For now, most important to us is that people get the concept of the product.
I get the feeling that this product would be really good for people who are moving about quite a bit - delivery folks, plumbers, surveyors, etc. Are you going to call out specific types of people who would be best served by this?
Also, minor grammatical nitpick: "LESS MESSAGES" should probably be "FEWER MESSAGES".
Hey taprun, thanks for spotting the typo. We tried to adapt the popular quote "LESS IS MORE", popularized by Mies van der Rohe, to the given context. Any idea how to say this? "LESS MESSAGING IS MORE" (sorry for the capitals)
Regarding your question about our target user segment. Currently we target coordinators, project managers and workteams but haven't identified yet a more narrow segment within that.
I am really excited that you are working on this. I began working on an app extremely similar to this (down to the Twitter/IRC like notation) due to my own frustration with the inefficiency of taking meeting notes. I never finished the prototype, but I'll share my ideas that I felt were important:
* Make integration with outside parties easy (i.e. Don't force everyone in the meeting to use the app to get the benefits.) Allow me to add aliases to meeting member's e-mail addresses (i.e. @joe = joe@example.com) Allow me to e-mail a link to the minutes when the meeting is over to all parties.
* Scheduling
I should be able to send calendar invites to participants of previous meetings / define recurring meetings. If I open up the app it should know what meeting I am in by my schedule.
* Continuity
Many of my meetings are recurring meetings. At today's meeting, I want to review the open/closed items from the previous meeting. Though I still want a way to delineate what happened in today's meeting.
* Self-hostable option
For legal / contractual / paranoia reasons, I may need to keep my data in-house. For several of the groups in my company, a cloud-hosted app is a deal breaker.
* Plugins
I should be able to integrate the user directory with my company's LDAP server. I should be able to promote tasks to real tickets in my project management software. I should be able to reference items from other meetings.
I comment on some of them:
- Emailing will be automatic, people receive the memo via email and also access the full document via a link.
- We thought on importing last week's items, and have options to bulk hide the items done etc.
- Data privacy is definitely a concern of organizations, especially larger ones. That's a hard nut to crack.
Hey, I love your take on meeting minutes and subsequent collaborative task manager. I feel that your project would benefit significantly from identifying a niche and a customer segment that is most sympathetic to your user experience.
Perhaps a "Succinct Team Messaging for Developers" or a tongue-in-cheek "Meeting Minutes DSL" would be a message more inline with a general feel of the app. At least special symbols in your meeting texts demos give a strong programming language vibe.
If you are a meeting minutes app made first and foremost by engineers and previewed on HN, you really should think about paying more attention to your early adopters -- programmers, hackers and engineers. Just a customer development thought.
Like others in the thread, I'm also impressed with how quickly and clearly the landing page video demonstrated the basic functionality.
I think you hit the sweet spot with the simplicity of the functionality shown. As you add features in the future that you'd also like to demonstrate in a video (such as calendar events, integration, etc. as suggested in the thread), just be wary of adding them all to one video and consider separate videos if they take long enough. At that point I think an A/B test would be a good idea. But back to the present, I think the current video is great!
The page works nicely, the video shows what you offer using the precise amount of my time.
What feels strange is that the UI you show in the video is not the same as the one that appears below, in the outlined iphones. My mind had to stop and guess; "ok, this is the same thing i watched in the vid".
Overall great job on the page, and the product looks interesting too. Wish you luck.
It's nice but I had similar questions as other as to whether it's usable from a web browser. Google Apps integration even just for auth would be key to using it at my company. Apparently I'll have to wait for the 70,000 people ahead of me in the invite process though.
My first thought was, can I use this on a computer. My second thought was, how I'm going to get others in my office to use it that maybe don't want another account.
I really like the idea, because nobody takes meeting minutes besides me and I'm the only one who follows up on them.
You say meeting minutes made useful but the header on the website is "Succinct Team Messaging." I actually didn't see anything that looked like meeting minutes presented anywhere.
Was hoping this would take minutes from Word as 95% of secretaries will use, somehow extract action items, and then help communicate/track them.
Everything shown here I would just use email to manange. It's not outdated, it works and it's an LCD. I run a small nonprofit organization and was hoping this might be helpful because action item followup is a pain point. But I wouldn't use this.
Agreed. The demo is a top-down management wet dream. A meeting where people get instructed in details to do specific tasks? No deadline, no ambiguity? Those guys never attended a meeting.
UX wise, I'm not ok with the "red/orange/green" codes and "fail/done" tags. Even for a small startup, communication is not that blunt, for a reason. Red in the demo seems to stand for postponed, canceled, rejected or badly executed. Yet "red" means bad in most cultural contexts. The color code implies too much and would really harm any group using such a basic code.
Also, if every team member could assign tasks, send requests and questions using this syntax, would that change your perception of this being a top-down management tool? Because our intention is to build a tool that allows a more horizontal communication among team members - but that's more difficult to visualize in a single video.
We are also aware of the cultural-contextual association of colours. This is one thing we are actually struggling with. While colors are a very easy and effective way to communicate status of tasks, especially to give a quick overview of many tasks - they have severe limitations, just like you say, red evoking associations with something as being "bad".
Hey ams6110, we are midst iterating on the key messages we should use on the landing page - hence the difference.
The video is supposed to show a use case of writing meeting minutes. Of course, making text legible within a video has some limits. But still, reading your (and others') comments make me learn that the video has became way too abstract and simplified.
If the mini demo on the home page is accurate, be careful with those colors - light red & green specifically. Full protanopia is present in approximately 1-2% of males. Deuteranopia (less severe than protanopia) is present in some form in up to 5% of males of certain European descent.
For a reference, this is an approximation of what light red & light green look like for someone with protanopia: http://i.imgur.com/EGSlsmB.png
Interesting idea. Speaking as someone who manages a bunch of folks I don't find assigning action items w/o due dates very helpful. Is there a facility to specify a date?
This is a good idea and I'd like to use it, but it needs presentational work for adoption, I suspect.
In particular, I don't think that people without a software background are going to be comfortable with the abundance of syntactic sigils. Even in the twitter-native world, I think it will makes the product seem intimidating and un-natural (at least at first).
This is especially a concern because the value of using them is not immediately clear (excepting @person).
I see that Sarah says that "As you may know ... " so presumably everybody is on the same page to start, but going forward it seems that only Sarah has a holistic view of the situation. Is this not the case? And are dependencies handled? For example, in a more complicated case, should Task A be done before Task B, etc.?
The free text editor allows you to enter any information to bring the team to the same page. Deadlines and dependencies are obviously on our roadmap. :)
How is it different from the old "The Deadline"? (a startup from the now defunct http://hackfwd.com/ which has been trying this for a few years). They changed their name to:
Our approach is somewhat different, more focusing on email compatibility, on the free text editor experience and more systemic. (We'll post about that later.)
As a non native speaker, I had to look up the definition of succinct, which was the very first thing I saw on the page. And I consider myself a very good English speaker.
So you might want to change that word to something a broader audience would understand.
This product looks pretty cool. I think i'd want a way to then take this an export the todos into an already existing workflow. Say into Trello or Outlook etc.
There are plenty of people out there who "know" the less/fewer grammar rule, and those people are going to find this landing page a bit unprofessional.
And I'm not a grammar prescriptivist, but "Less messages are more" still sounds wrong to my ear -- it's based on the phrase "Less is more", but putting "messages" in there forces the "is" to "are", and that clashes unpleasantly. My brain wants to fix it to "Less messages is more", which is then also bad.
"Fewer messages are more" isn't any better -- we lose the "less is more" echo (which was the whole point!), and it has a whiff of "my English teacher told me it should be 'fewer'." :)
Alternatives (none perfect, but better):
- Just use "Less is more" as the heading (and possibly tweak the copy below to start with the word "messages").
- Change "messages" to some non-plural word so you can preserve the "is" -- there may not be a good option here, though ("communication"? ugh).
- Just toss it, and capture the idea in some other phrase. "Don't drown in messages", "No message flood", or whatever, then you can even put *"Less is more" when it comes to messages" in the copy below.
[edit: dumb errors in a post about grammar and word choice tend to backfire]
Doesn't mention opium, but a quick google says that it takes 10 kilos of opium to make a kilo of heroin, which admittedly is near the top of the list. There are lots of prescription drugs based on opium, no?
hey trumbitta2, yes we are aware. We actually found out this after we got the domain and... just laughed. We say if we fail we sell the domain for high price.
Why? Because the feeling the demo evoked for me was: "Uh oh. This looks like a micro-managers wet dream".
So rather than just have "@John please !phone client" perhaps the demo would itemise the meeting minutes with: "@John said he would !phone client and discuss requirements".
Perhaps this is simply because I have had the unpleasant experience of working for panic-driven micromanagers before. But I think you really want to make sure your landing page is resonating with "Awesome - this is going to make my life easier" vs. "What pandora's box of hell will this tool unleash in my organization and work life".
Product definitely looks useful though, and the above comments are about making sure you present it in its best light. Good luck!