Why wouldn't you use my Flipboard clone?
Hello everyone.
I'm building news/blogs aggregation app with clear design and built-in monetization. So it's like Substack + Google News + Pocket. I think it's a great idea, but every time I show it to somebody I get some mixed comments, but nothing substantial. And I can't get why? What's missing?
So here is my tricky question: why wouldn't you use https://whatnot.ai?
p.s. I will review your project in return.
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Hey Slava, this is an interesting idea, but if you hadn't explained it here, I wouldn't know what it was about. There's an opportunity for you to describe what pain points your product solves and how it does it.
Best of luck!
Thanks for review. I’ll do my best to deliver message more clearly
Hey Slava, great job on getting this site out
bradonomics & other people have already commented about the confusing navigation issues so I’m not gonna repeat that. I have experienced the same things. It was also unclear what the site actually did—the onboarding flow helps a bit but generally you should let users scroll & read at their own pace instead of that.
For context I used to be a huuge Pocket fan—they sent me an email once saying that I was in the top 5% of their users. I’m not into content aggregators like Flipboard or Google News, but I do follow a few newsletters in Substack.
I’m not really engaging with your app because, well, your project’s doing too many things and not one thing really well. You’re pitching this idea of a content aggregator, a bookmarking/article-view formatter, and a way to get writers paid all in one. That might explain why you’re get mixed feedback. People are getting confused on what it is since it’s 3 projects combined, and they might be responding to one feature instead of another. What I’m suggesting here is to consider focusing on one thing and doing it well. Can you name your product’s pain point & solution in one sentence? What do you want this site to be?
I’m not telling you to throw out the other ideas. You can do one thing really well first & get ppl really excited about it, and then you can expand with the other features. But to get good at all 3 features you have to get good at one first, y’know?
Best of luck on the project I’m rooting for you
Awesome points, thanks.
It’s even more than 3 projects, but they all suck ;)
Pain point actually is “discovery of new content is hard work for customers, but it should be easy and done by platform”. Solution is clickable tags in articles (tried to replicate Wikipedia experience), recommendation of sources alike and customizable search.
First, I'm not a Flipboard user so I'm not sure how helpful this will be. I do like newsletters and I am a heavy RSS user, but when I visit your homepage, it isn't immediately clear what I'm looking at. If you wouldn't have said in the post here (Substack + Google News + Pocket), I wouldn't have understood even after clicking the button to enter the app.
The back/forward browser buttons do not work as expected. Also, it took about a dozen clicks to figure out I could never return to the homepage and that I needed to use the left arrow to get back to the Discover page.
There is also no obvious way to see the original source. I happened to move my cursor to the bottom of the screen and some options poped-up, but it took minutes—plural—to find that.
After I've selected an article in a category, I can't get back to the main category list. For example, let's say I choose Nature and then choose the first article in the Nature list. I can go back to the main Discover page, but when I click Nature again, all I see is the article I selected before, not the list of Nature articles.
I'm in the same boat. I dont use flipboard either.
The page load took a while, I thought it was broken. Once it loaded, the splash intro was taller than my device, making me scroll to read the last line of text.
I played for a bit an read a few articles and still dont know where the side arrows take me.
I'm a big believer in applying known conventions, don't make users have to figure stuff out.
Overall the site looks nice, I'm just not sure how to use it.
Thanks, @Mvoorberg.
I think you are right: I should make UI/UX more standard.
I'll investigate long loading times, thanks.
Thanks, @bradonomics for your helpful review.
RSS users are my core user base. Really don't get why I'm constantly upsetting people like you. It is an unintuitive interface, I guess?
Based on tracking you didn't see onboarding. It's a popup with six steps: open menu, open search... Am I right?
I'll add "open original" link to post header. Is it an obvious way to open the original post?
I'll definitely fix back/forward buttons.
"I can't get back to the main category list"
It's kinda feature, you always return to the same place you read before. But I think I'll do as you suggest: open articles list and only after you open the same article scroll it to the last line you read.
p.s. Ping me if you need me to review your LP in return
I'm not sure you should try to target RSS users. I think people who like RSS like it because they choose what is in the feed; they choose it because it's not random. Or, at least, that's why I use RSS.
As for the onboarding widget, I'd ask yourself why you need that. What is it about my app that needs explaining? I did see it, but I ignored it thinking I could just figure it out.
Yes, I think adding the open original option to the header meta data would be best. That's where I looked first.
P.S. What is an LP? I assume you're not talking about a record?
It's clear that I mislead you with Discover "homepage". It's not algorithmic feed like Facebook, it's more like RSS, so you can subscribe to sites, authors (as you can with RSS) or themes (as you can on Feedly, if you clever enough). And you don't need to search for rss links, you can just search for sitename (try Axios for example) inside whatnot.ai.
I put that onboarding because people don't get that if you double-click article will be closed and if you move your mouse up search will be opened. And now it's clear, I did it wrong: just should make the interface more conventional and ditch "onboarding".
p.s. "LP" on indiehackers means "landing page". If you ever build something, feel free to ping me to give you a review.
Okay, yeah, I was definitely thinking of this as an "algorithmic feed like Facebook." If I were going to subscribe to an RSS feed, where would I do that? I don't see any way to add a link.
Currently, you can't. And it's because I can't imagine how it can be done in this interface. I think putting URL in a search box wouldn't be obvious :) I thought that for power users would be enough to add "Import your RSS/OPML" in settings. But for individual subscription wouldn't it be more comfortable to just search for TechCrunch, for example?
p.s. As you advised I've added some icons (to make design more obvious), removed onboarding and fixed history.
The interface needs a lot of work...