Lazy networkers's favorite app just got a facelift
by Fabien HerfrayDisclaimer: I have got no data underpinning the statement made in the headline of this post :)
I was finally able to release Frenl last week after quite a bit of work spent on it. From the feedback I got on IH, I instantly I realized that something was wrong.
My sign up flow was a catastrophe and pretty much nobody could even understand how to join. It was a big form on the landing page where I was asking all kind of information about the user, followed by a small sign up form, with a separation between the two.
Rookie mistakes:
- The form was too big and it seemed like too much work to join the platform.
- The separation between the two forms made it unclear that the user profile would be saved when validating the sign up form.
From there, I followed what indie hackers told me to do and started to convert my form to more of an interview kind of thing. But something was really hard: I had to choose what data I would ask in the "interview" and I couldn't decide.
When trying it, it was just too boring. Not much better than the old big form.
Then I noticed that one of the field of the form was getting more attention than the others: the Traits. These are a few stereotypical qualities that people found a bit funny.
So I decided to try to go full steam in that direction and replaced the whole landing page with a trait selector.
I just released it and I would love to get on feedback on it :)
Thank you!
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I just signed up. I updated my profile and clicked save and nothing happened. I was expecting to be redirected to the homepage so after seeing that the save button was disabled I assumed my profile was saved so I refreshed the page and I was back at the same spot. I would suggest that you redirect after the form is saved to a different page. Overall I'm excited to see what comes of this.
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Thank you! In fact the form is not an onboarding, it's just the "my account" page. That's why it stays there afterwards. I'll try to make it clearer in the future with a real proper multi step onboarding. So many things to do haha.
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I tried out the signup, like the concept, and the signup is now pretty easy. My hesitations would be around not knowing who I'd be introduced to or why. I found the traits of people a bit confusing but also engaging, think it was a good idea to focus on that. I ended up choosing the everything one though because hackers didn't display the sort of matches I wanted. Perhaps you could ask which trait they have, and which ones (plural) they want to match with instead?
After signup on the longer form, I wasn't sure what 'Field aspirations' or 'Focus aspirations' were, but filled them in anyway, I guess they are what you want to be but are not at the moment?
It felt a bit weird that the home page frenl.com was just serving my profile settings after I updated them - I'd expect this to show a gallery of people to match with, or previous matches, or anything other than a profile update page. Perhaps to drive engagement after signup you could do something there.
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Thanks for your detailed feedback it's really helpful. Also it just made me realize that making the traits a big thing on the landing page would lead to think that it's actually important during the matching process. It is not really right now haha.
The matching is still rough around the edges for now. It basically just takes all the different aspects of the profile without particularily pushing one.As for the profile update page, it is also the bare minimum now. I'll tackle the different aspects one after the other:
- First I want to really find the perfect angle for the landing page and get a high conversion rate. Won't be able to do anything interesting without gettting a lot of people in. I'm still in this phase.
- Once I'm good enough on this aspect, I'll focus more on the quality of the data and the matching.
- Then I'll think about building more features and in particular the "in-app" aspect like you said.
It's all on the roadmap and I'm sure there's a lot of fun things to do. I'm just trying to do things in the right order :)
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I just signed up, sounds like a cool concept and I like the design, slick ;) Just one small thing that got me was that I couldn't deselect traits, moods, etc. I didn't save though, so I just refreshed and they were deselected, maybe a "clear" button or something would be useful?
Looks really cool though, looking forward to seeing who I get matched with :)
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Thanks for signing up! Arf yeah it's because these selectors are radio buttons. You cannot unselect anymore once one is set. But there shouldn't be a reason for unselecting theoratically 😬. You couldn't find an option that fit you?
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Yeah, maybe a null option could be added or something?
I guess, I didn't feel like either of the moods really fit me and wanted a half way between the two, I'm indecisive like that though :p The traits part was similar, I would fit somewhere between hacker and bulldozer, but I didn't like that hacker meant I was taking shortcuts (I guess I perceive shortcuts as a bad thing, even though I see it can be good). I can be indecisive about things like that though, so it could very likely just be me lol.
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I see. Maybe I could allow it to be a muti selection then if it could be less frustrating. I will also change hacker to "like to take shortcuts" or "knows when to take shortcuts" to make it sound more reasonnable :)
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