Congratulations on getting this out there. My favorite hacker news posts are always Show HN so this is really cool. I love seeing what other people are working on and having a single place to find new tools could prove really useful.
That being said, in my opinion, product discovery doesn't seem well suited to the hacker news format. A new product's relevance lasts a lot longer than the average new news article does. I'd love to see tags added to each product and a way to browse by tags. Boring and probably done, I suppose, but I think it'd be more useful.
Thanks! Hacker News and "Show HN" is responsible for some of the market validation and product design of Product Hunt.
While we want to keep the product simple and useful, we do see value in adding more context and "searchability" with tagging. It's definitely on our radar.
The ability for people with certain domain knowledge or active interests to subscribe to tags, or customise their front page based on tags would be pretty nice.
Example, I'm interested in travel related ideas/products, but I've really no great interest in much of the stuff on the front page at the moment. But if something travel related does hit the site I don't want to miss it.
This might also allow for higher quality of comments, less eyeballs but more interested eyeballs so to speak.
It emphasizes the product name, rather than the description, which I'd argue draws the reader's eye to the wrong place; that emphasis would be better placed on what something is, which information the reader will find useful in deciding whether she cares what something is called.
Obviously we should strive for better design, but greatly exaggerating is not a useful method of critique. The original post makes it sound like this information is almost impossible to find, when it is actually the second most prominent information on the page.
I don't think it's exaggerated at all. I looked at the page for like 30 seconds, thinking to myself, "What is this? I thought it was supposed to be like Hacker News, but for products. It appears to just be a bunch of people posting half-sentences that make no sense."
Seriously, the first post is "Go Dish HotelTonight for restaurants (SF)" WTF does that even mean? It's just a string of words that make no sense at all. It's literally incomprehensible to a typical reader.
The original post may have overstated the matter somewhat, but in the responses it received, the underlying issue was clarified to the point where it is easily recognizable and can be trivially addressed by the site developers if they so choose. That being the case, I can see a reasonable amount of utility in the original post, if only in that it prompted the analysis it did.
In general, I'm not fond of seeing "now, then, let's not be too harsh, shall we?"-type fussing on HN. Welcome to the Internet! People here aren't always as nice as you'd like them to be. This does not mean the things they say, however rudely, necessarily lack value.
I'm not suggesting that criticism shouldn't be harsh. I'm just suggesting that it should be accurate. The original post gave me the impression that either the poster hadn't looked at the site or else the site's design had been updated since it was written.
It's an example of poor design; the font color and weighting draws the eye straight to the product names and away from the descriptions, which are the real meat of what the site has to offer.
Sure, it only takes a moment's squinting to figure out what's what, but requiring your would-be users to put in that effort, or indeed any effort, to figure out the most basic nature of what you have to offer, strikes me as an excellent opportunity to limit your support and public relations commitment by reducing your user base.
The memory anchor is the product name though. I go back to PH often to find products I didn't have time to check out and to jump back into discussions, and the product name is the thing I'm looking for. I can find it in seconds, and I can also see how certain products have moved up the leaderboard in seconds. Sentences as the visual lead would greatly complicate that behavior, one I think is a primary one.
Said another way, the atomic unit is product names, which I actually think is more effective than the Show HN model. Some tagging/categories would really help overall, but I think this design actually helps beyond a cursory first-glance at the homepage.
You could more or less have your cake and eat it too, if you align the site names and their descriptions in two floated columns, so it's still - fairly - possible to scan whichever column you prefer.
This may feel a little harsh but I do agree with the sentiment. I loaded the site, skimmed through a bunch of product names and had to go back and read the much less emphasized description which felt like a pain in the ass. My eye kept being drawn to the bolder, darker product names. I then closed the site. Mind you I'm very interested in the topic.
Why do HN readers have to always complain, at least start your negatives with some positive congratulation sort of phrase, I bet most of people who post their newly created website or service want some sort of approval by HN which will give them a huge boost of positive emotions which will allow them to make service better. Just put yourself in his shoes, you just posted a service you l've spent lots of your free time building it, and the top comment on HN has nothing positive in it...
Agreed and it's often really hard to get someone to criticise and tell you what could be improved - everyone just dishes out the usual "yeah, looks nice".
I agree! I think we should be balanced in our feedback, point out the positives and negatives. It starts to get real old when it's nothing but negatives.
Negatives are easy to point out. Similar to how "People don't know what they want", if something is working right, people may not notice it because it just works. However, if something isn't working right, it's often easy to spot it.
For what it's worth, I see a lot of positive feedback, though they're more about the service itself rather than something that the service (or UI) does well.
We're currently limiting contributor growth as have a few changes we need to make to the product to scale. If you're interested, please add your info here and we'll send you an email once you're added! :) http://bit.ly/ph-contributor
Huge congrats to Ryan & team for getting this out there. It's a great, focussed source of news on product launches that might not provide incredible traffic (yet) but that provides valuable, constructive feedback from smart people.
I really hope it retains this quality as it (inevitably) grows. We launched SupportKit for Zendesk (http://supportkit.radialpoint.com) on ProductHunt yesterday and the response was great.
Had one of my apps featured on PH and was amazed at the quality of feedback. Ryan himself wrote a detailed review and a designer from Pinterest pointed out a UI flaw I'd never even thought about.
PH has been a pretty great resource for me. There aren't enough hours in the day to keep up with every company that launches. Quality > quantity any day of the week.
Once navigating to a sub-domain there is no link back to main. That's really frustrating so a small link at top or bottom back to techendo.co would improve my experience greatly.
The way that Product Hunt has been helping me to discover new products is by the collective curation, by people that provide a lot of insight and are users themselves, just as it would on HackerNews. Above all, it allows me to get involved with the community (founders, PMs, designers, avid users). I used to go to the App Store for my discovery, but now I do it faster and easier on PH. That's why I really like it. Kudos!
* Some of the images are broken, you should fix those
* You should add all the product images from every site. Not having multiple angles is annoying
* You should consider making the thumbnails rotate when I move my mouse across the image on the search pages
* Would be nice if there was a larger selection of furniture
I have been enjoying PH for awhile - congrats on the launch and getting the word out.
I would say that sometimes it is a little overwhelming to get through every service, and I look forward to a time where you are classifying/organizing the products that come through. Knowing there is a searchable repository of products would be a great resource.
When @nbashaw first launched this, I told him they should limit submissions to 10 products a day because they'd run out of new products after a few weeks.
It's been amazing just to see how many new products are out there-- more than any (productive) person could really check out on a daily basis.
Excited to see where @producthunt goes in the future.
Here's a few things I couldn't easily figure out on your site:
What is a best new product?
How is this different than a linked list on a blog?
How would I find the best X app? e.g. Best new iOS note app?
Is this site for me or for someone else? Am I a product person?
Shame you can't open the comments in a new tab - I usually use Hacker News that way. I realize javascript things popping up in odd strips down the side of the page are trendy but not very nice to use if you want to actually read stuff. Otherwise nice.
Congratulations Ryan, I feel lucky to be an early part of this (user #3 baby!) when you just sat down to think about doing it. It's come along a long way already, I can't imagine where this is going to end up in a year.
I really enjoyed this site, at first my reaction was 'meh' but as I was starting to go through services and recognized some, I am seeing great potential. Startups as a rule need all possible ways to get the word out.
How do you intend to balance the need for high quality with the desire of users to get involved in the community? Are you worried if someone can't post/comment for months after joining, they may lose interest?
Great question! Honestly, that's one of my least favorite parts of Product Hunt. I hate turning away people that want to contribute but to keep the contributions of high quality and not overwhelming, we need to curb our contributor growth.
We will be making product changes to grow the community, opening it to more people.
Congrats to @nbashaw and @rrhoover, absolutely insane that you built this over Thanksgiving Break! It's been amazing to watch it grow in this short amount time. I always expect big things from the two of you.
Tell HN: It is a great website but hella addictive, so be-aware specially those who complain about HN sucking all their time, now you have 2 addictive websites to deal it. I personally would stay away from it.
Dear Product Hunt, please fix "switch to weekly emails or unsubscribe" feature.
I was trying to switch to weekly emails 3 times and unsubscribe as well.
It doesn't work at all.
I found out about you guys last week when you linked to -my- project, Geocodio, from -your- site (came up in my Google Analytics). Since then I've been checking it daily. Nice work!
Tease? I was just wondering if you'll improve the mobile experience - because now I have to scroll through a big header, newsletter signup, tweet button, the voters avatars and related links before actually viewing the comment thread.
I shared much less before Product Hunt but most of these discussion happened IRL. Products are watercooler topic and particularly interesting conversation starter for many techy, early adopters.
Online, I did and still share cool products on Twitter and occasionally Facebook. I've also written about several early products.
That being said, in my opinion, product discovery doesn't seem well suited to the hacker news format. A new product's relevance lasts a lot longer than the average new news article does. I'd love to see tags added to each product and a way to browse by tags. Boring and probably done, I suppose, but I think it'd be more useful.