Ask HN: how would you design this app?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1543973

by paulsingh • 16 years ago

7 12 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

My wife and mom are notaries public. Basically, they get calls from banks that need someone to notarize loan docs and get paid ~$100 for their time.

I didn't really pay much attention to their stuff until I realized that their side gigs pull in a few hundred bucks a week. (I realize that's not a whole lot but this is "beer money" on top og their FT jobs.)

Anyways, I built a ghetto app in a few hours one night last week (notarycrm.com) and I'm trying to figure out how to make this whole thing easier on the eyes. (Since quietly launching it to my wife and mom, I've reached out to other notaries on Twitter and have managed to get a bunch of people using the app multiple times each day to manage ~$100K worth of business already.)

On one extreme, I guess I could spend a few days trying to sketch something out, figure out AJAXy stuff and tinker until I get it right. On the other extreme, I'd find some with some experience building niche B2B apps and pay them for their front-end experience/instincts. (FWIW, I started coding for fun about 18 months ago. I use RoR for pretty much everything now and, while I can hack together little ideas like this overnight, I can't help but feel like my projects traction could be better if a better UX/UI was in place.)

What would you do? Any suggestions on alternatives?

RiderOfGiraffes• 16 years ago

Clickable: http://notarycrm.com

JangoSteve• 16 years ago

I did my own design on my apps (for both myself and clients) for a long time. Hell, RateMyStudentRental still has my old design (I've since had it professionally redesigned but not yet implemented the new design).

One thing I can say is that the quality of my sites, and my pride and satisfaction in my work, has increased dramatically since I've started to contract out the design to professional web designers. Not just because they look better, but because I believe in their potential enough to spend money to make them better.

That being said, here's a specific suggestion. You need screenshots. I can't tell a thing about how the app actually works or what it does (other than simply taking your word for it), and I can't visualize any part of the app without signing up. I'm not a notary, so I'm probably not going to sign up.

paulsingh4• 16 years ago

This is great feedback. I'll start working on that today and see what I can knock out today.

alain94040• 16 years ago

Let me get this straight: you spent a few hours last week to build an app, and it already generated $100K of business? Did I miss something in that story?

paulsingh4• 16 years ago

Sorry if I implied that I made $100K from a few hours of work -- that wasn't my intent.

NotaryCRM users are tracking $100K of their money in my system.

Subtle, but important difference. :)

donw• 16 years ago

That's still a thousand transactions, in a very short order of time. Not too shabby.

Given your profile, I feel a little weird giving 'advice'; did both of those companies happen in the last 18 months?

Regarding NotaryCRM, I'd start by fixing the layout so that it renders properly in Safari; the signup button requires a horizontal scroll for me.

Don't sweat AJAX too much; it's a useful tool in the toolbox, but a lot of people go nuts on making everything load dynamically, which gets irritating really quickly.

Your contact page is a form; I don't know about other people, but this always puts me off a bit.

mahmud• 16 years ago

Don't ask us, ask your users how you can improve it, while at the same time tracking their usage habits. Analytics + feature requests is a win.

The most powerful tool for improving web apps is actually a telephone. Get yourself some headsets and a $10 Skype credit. Should last you a month.

Implement the feature and expose it to 10% of them. Watch how they accept it, then push it to the rest. Make a blog post about it and release a PR statement. Let industry publications aware of your existence. Then take a few weeks "off" getting more clients. Then repeat.

Try to keep a "how can we improve" button clearly visible, but not distracting. Make yourself reachable. Get a Google Voice number and put it on the opposite side of your logo.

Something as "simple" as extending the session timeout for everyday software can make a huge difference. People hate it if they kept getting logged out, specially for non-critical and non-financial applications. Go overboard in building trustworthiness; put the app on SSL, show lock icons, never show them their credit card back (if you're stupid/big enough to take it to begin with.) Any sensitive information should be shown in non-editable GUI elements (labels mostly) and show the last few digits to disambiguate. If you ever charge their accounts, or processes payments for them, send an email confirmation ASAP. Payment confirmations are the least annoying form of email; it shows you're willing to leave a paper trail (irrational, I know, but it gives them the fuzzies.) and it's a good opportunity expose them to your branding/message/identity.

If you ever keep a "purse" for users, where they can add and withdraw funds, never EVER send them an email containing their balance figure; some people have email notification widgets that popup a dialog with the subject and first few lines of the body ("$20 Payment Received, you now have $20.15" might seem like benign feedback, but not when your user was on a projector in a meeting. No seriously, people, kill them damn notifiers when you speak publicly. Nothing distracts like seeing a nastygram from your speaker's wife flash across the screen.)

aamar• 16 years ago

Your basic pitch seems to be to make administrative work that was previously tedious into something that's relatively fun, easy, and quick. UX improvements might help, but are there instead ways to automate administrative tasks away? I'd second listening to users, since I don't have any sense of what the pain points are (but understanding pain points beats feature requests).

Didn't sign up, but some concrete thoughts on the marketing site: avoid very high contrast, e.g. true black (#000) on true white (#FFF). The orange text on blue vibrates visually and is somewhat hard to read. Overall, really like the simple, benefits-focused presentation. Great idea and good luck on it.

exline2• 16 years ago

The site looks good to me. I don't think the "NotaryCRM will save your day (and your sanity)." stands out enough, especially since it is your tag line. There is not enough contrast.

I noticed you say it is a free service on the website. Do you intend to charge in the future? If so, you might say 'Free while in Beta' or something. Something to clue people in that there will be a cost at some point.

Overall great work in a short amount of time. Both the product and getting a large number of users quickly. Did you do anything else besides using Twitter to reach out to other notaries?

paulsingh4• 16 years ago

Yep, I plan on a freemium model that I actually want to roll out ASAP to make this "real" in my own mind. Basically, they'll be able to "manage" their notary business for free. If they want to use us to invoice their customers and track payments, they'll pay. If they want to build teams of signing agents and manage them, they'll pay more. My key action item is to get a pricing page up immediately - thanks for that.

Nope, just Twitter. This weekend I've begun compiling a list of contacts from my wife and mom - I'll start cold calling next week.

exline2• 16 years ago

Could you report back how the cold calling works? I've been thinking of doing some of that but I have no idea what the ROI will be on it.

Ask HN: how would you design this app?

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