Looking for feedback on my latest project

[udiudi]

Hey,
I’m Udi, a developer from Israel.

I’m working on doneli.st for the last few months, and it reached a point where I really want to hear your thoughts on this.

DoneList allows teams (both remote and in-house) to stay up-to-date with what everyone is doing. It also takes into account timezone difference.

DoneList sends an email in the morning to everyone showing a digest of what was done yesterday by all team members. In 5pm it sends another email to request an update from everyone (for tomorrow’s digest).
You can also send emails during the day whenever you finish something.

The digest is not the usual digest many web-apps offer (links to tickets, summery of commit messages…).
DoneList allows you to define what is more important to you, and what is not. If Joe from marketing waits for development team to finish a feature, in the digest he’ll see more about that, than for example what sysops have done.

I think this way a digest can actually serve its purpose, be more productive and not something people just ignore overtime.

What do you think about it?
Is the message in my landing page clear?

Question #2

How good the bootstrapped app should be designed?
That’s what I’ve got so far, I really want to make it nicer but I’m not a designer. Do you think its good enough for the first few users?

Thank you!

[dgrigg]

Hi Udi

The idea sounds interesting in the explanation above. If I only saw your website without the info above I’m not sure I would understand exactly what it offers. Personally I would keep the design simple at this point and worry more about the message. I have tweaked my site for http://www.pageproofer.com quite a bit since it first launched, but the core message has mostly stayed intact while I built up reinforcing content and design around it.

Best of luck on your app.

Derrick

[fredguth]

Hi Udi,
I felt exactly like @dgrigg. I liked your idea, but I don’t know if I would understand it from your landing page.

I don’t know if you need a beautiful design to start. An image of the app would be great. For instance, I haven’t tried @ian 's Snappy yet, but I get a good sense of what it does from his landing page. A beautiful design helps give you credibility.

The main problem, in my opinion, is the message. “Making Team Communication Better and More Productive” is too generic for me. Also, I am not an english native speaker, but it just does not sound right. I can’t explain further in this feeling, sorry.

The second line is better: “DoneList is a tool for teams (in-house and remote) to share their progress, get customized digests and stay on the same page no matter where each team member works from.”. I would try to make it shorter… what about:“DoneList is a tool for teams share their progress, get customized digests and stay on the same page”.

Hope this helps.

[udiudi]

@dgrigg, @fredguth thank you!

I’ll add screenshots of the app to the landing page, I’ll tweak the message as well and post the changes here.
How much of the explanation I wrote in this post should be on the landing page? Perhaps I need to write more about the features so visitors could understand better what’s being offered?

[udiudi]

I’ve updated the landing page with screenshots, “How it works” block and changed the title.
I’ll put more thought into the writing on the landing page, if you got any tips I’ll be glad to hear.

[shazow]

A few thoughts on the screenshots:

• I like how you link to the full size screenshot, but the thumbnail sizes are actually fairly hard to make out what’s going on. Maybe instead of having resized thumbnails, have zoomed-in cropped versions on the feature that you’re showcasing? Then that can link to the full screenshot.

• The carousel is typically not the best way to showcase something like this. More on this here. I would suggest making the zoomed-in cropped feature screenshots a bit smaller and putting them side by side. Bonus points if you add a little annotation around them to what each one is show-casing. Maybe things like: Collaborate with your team <screenshot> | Daily Email Digests <screenshot> | Built in discussions <screenshot>, etc.

• One often-recommended thing to do is to create a separate SEO-optimized landing page per feature, this also lets you better measure the visitor’s intent when they land on your page (did they care more about email digests? or collaboration?). That’s another great place to put a fuller-sized screenshot that you can link to.

I’m probably better at giving advice than listening to it myself. All of these are things I need to do on my own project, too!

Also look at other products’ landing pages for inspiration. I will typically take bits and pieces I find from various sites and incorporate them into my own design. Lastly, you could always contract out to a designer—my partner helped me with the design of Briefmetrics, her portfolio is here: http://www.limedaring.com/portfolio/

[shazow]

… Couple more thoughts!

I like the copy in “How it works?” Fairly clear, nice to have something like that.

I’d cut down your intro tagline a bit so it’s easier to read.

DoneList is a tool for teams (in-house and remote) to share their progress, get customized digests and stay on the same page no matter where each team member works from.

Maybe something like

Easy progress updates for teams.

And then toss the rest (digests, remote/in-house, etc) in a feature list. Though that might be too extreme of a change, up to you. At the very least, I’d get rid of the parenthesized bit since it’s fairly interruptive when you’re reading the sentence.

Take a look at landing pages of things like Trello, Asana, etc.

[udiudi]

@shazow thank you! all are great points, I’ll work on that!

[davidw]

Another point of view is that no matter how cool it is, tons of people have done TODO lists. I know, I tried one several years ago! I think it’s a fairly crowded market with a lot of things that are already free.

There are things I don’t like about my current effort, in terms of the niche, but one thing I am proud of is having made a leap away from stuff I would use myself to a product/service for non-technical people. It can prove frustrating at times, but people are also happier to pay when the alternative is doing something technical and ‘scary’ themselves.

[shazow]

+1 to what @davidw said, but you can still work around the crowded market by targeting specific niches. You could make special landing pages and possibly custom templates/workflows for different kinds of users. Imagine “Task Tracking for Real Estate agencies”, “Task Tracking for Python Developers”, “Task Tracking for Architects” etc.

You’d need to have expert knowledge of the niche and how to create a specialized solution for it that is better than all the generic solutions, but there could be something there…

[mcgwiz]

Just a minor point. The screenshots are crucial; a picture is worth a thousands words. However, the content in them is a bit small. A simple way to improve them might be to zoom the pages in (Command +) before taking the screenshot.

[udiudi]

Thanks everyone! already implemented some of your suggestions.

Regarding the product itself - I know its a crowded market and all, my main focus with this product is not a todo list/project management. My focus is get everyone on the team to know what’s going on, and make it as great as possible (that’s why the digest can be customized, customers define what is important to them). But we’ll see, you guys are right, and I might need to get into specific niche, who knows.

[misterparker]

I realize this thread was started almost a month ago, but thought it would still be helpful. I understand this is not a todolist. it’s a done list. You make the list after you’ve done it, not before you do it.

But with that said, I also already understand how it works because of idonethis.com - probably your biggest competitor (also read role model) - I would use some ideas of verbiage they used to communicate their idea clearly. But just because they are so similar, don’t take it as discouraging, there are plenty of people on the internet to go around.