Would this make you give Expressive Writing a shot?
Hello fellow Indie Hackers,
I’m Filipe Picoito Jorge and the stories that I’ve read here encouraged me to get this project so far even after many iterations (nearly 2 years on my spare time).
Seguim is a expressive writing tool that aims to provide feedback on how your mood changes from the moment you prepare to write, to the moment you finish writing as a way to show how expressive writing can be beneficial to your overall mood.
The target audience is mostly people who are emotionally distressed or unbalanced and are trying writing therapy, or never tried it, as my personal goal is to help people try writing as a tool to help them cope with “pain”.
It's been a long ride to get to where the project is right now and I would sincerely love to hear your overall feedback as I am stuck on where to go from here.
Here is the link: https://seguim-dev.herokuapp.com
You're tackling an ambitious goal, but off to a really great start! Some thoughts:
There are a few typos in the copy ("innerself" should be "inner self", the about page has a non-rendered "<br />", et cetera). For a tool that has to do with writing, it's important for first impressions to not have typos like these.
The UX and animation in the flow from sign-in to the actual writing area feel really smooth and natural. One nitpick here is that the "saving" message appears after every keystroke, so as you type it flickers. You want the writing interface to be as distraction-free as possible, so I'd reccommend saving silently in the background (or at the very least changing the text color to a light gray so it blends in more).
The challenge, and the real point of differentiation of your tool, is the emotional prompts. There should be a lot more guidance from these prompts. Every writer's worst fear is a blank page. Instead of letting me choose my starting emotion, then showing me the empty textarea, first display a few smaller, context-sensitive fields. Then, when the user is finally brought to the free-form writing area, you can allow them to fill in some of the blank screen with those small answers they provided ahead of time, which would give a much better starting point.
Other folks can comment on design/layout better than I could, so I'll punt on those topics. Best of luck!
Hello Alex thank you so much for taking the time to see Seguim and your feedback.
Damn, I did miss the <br /> and the typo although I sincerely thought it would be "innerself" - I'll fix those right away.
It took me a long time to iterate over animations, so I'm super glad you gave me a compliment there! Regarding the saving I'm aware it is something I need to think more, and I think saving silently might be the answer here and I thank you for that insight.
I do wholeheartedly believe there should be more guidance through the emotional prompts, It's something that I have been studying but I've put on hold because I don't know whether the project is worth pursuing but my initial idea was to have some sort of examples of how to do expressive writing, much like what Indie Hackers does when you're creating an article by having clear points that say "hey, check these out!".
I would love to hear if you have any example regarding the context-sensitive fields, I am very curious about what you envision.
Again, thank you for taking the time, means a lot :)
The actual prompts should definitely come from the research (you linked to one such research example in the about page), but I'm not qualified to interpret or prescribe what it should be. With that caveat out of the way, my initial thought was something like the following:
Good starting point, but there are only four options for emotions. Seems like these options could be more granular.
Perhaps randomize a subset of questions like the ones above in order to prompt some more specific responses.
Then, show the free-form writing area with the answers entered previously as optional (drag and drop?) starting points. e.g.:
Etc.
I'm spitballing on the specific questions, but the overarching idea is that these prompts would lead to a structured space that the user could write in. The more context-sensitive you can make it (tailored to previous responses), the better.
Hello again,
I totally understand what you mean, you actually brought some very inspiring ideas.
In a way I had thought of something similar but the way you explained yours is much more objective, and much more user friendly, I am truly happy about that and I thank you for sharing it with me!
Edit:
Regarding 5. I would probably just place all that information right into the text area as to have context right away.
Regarding 1. I believe so too, I actually thought on taking out the little egg there and just put a bunch of emotions, but sometimes less is more, but then again sometimes we might need that more bit.
No problem! Again, best of luck!