Ask HN: review my app

by hotshothenry • 18 years ago

13 23 18 years ago

Hey guys, so I decided I wanted to make an app to connect sdk/api developers to people looking to have stuff built. So I built devjungle.com. Developers can go register which takes a few seconds, fill out their profile and select the technologies they are familiar with and then show up in search results.

I just launched it so it's still pretty raw, needs a few adjustments here and there. Looking to get some feedback from you guys, and hopefully those developers that wanna sign up might find it useful.

Thanks.

rokhayakebe• 18 years ago

How does a first time visitor know what your site does?

evannyx2• 18 years ago

Exactly! At least add some kind of tagline..something along the lines of "Search for developers etc". See the freelance boards (eLance / RaC) for more ideas.

light3• 18 years ago

seems pretty self explanatory, just type in iphone like it says ;)

pierrefar• 18 years ago

Live search of what? I assumed Twitter because you have a prominent link to your Twitter profile.

And the searches I tried didn't get any results so a message saying "Searching..." and then "Nothing found..." would be good.

hotshothenry4• 18 years ago

Working on that!

hotshothenry4• 18 years ago

Yah that's the next thing on the agenda, will have it done by tonight

mattj• 18 years ago

You might not want to have your e.g. (iphone) return no results. Makes it obvious you have very little content (which makes me very confused what your site does).

tptacek• 18 years ago

I don't understand why this is better than any of the other 40 sites that match developers with patrons.

ryanwaggoner• 18 years ago

1. As mentioned, there's no way to tell what this is or what it does. Very confusing.

2. Why should I register?

3. The login link doesn't work from the register page.

4. It let me register without providing a valid email address or either of the passwords. I registered with email address 'asdfasdf' and left the password blank. Interestingly, I was able to login using this :-)

5. There's no error messages on the registration form when the validation does work.

6. On the profile form, if I leave a required field blank and then submit the form, it erases any of the values I did provide.

Hard to provide more without knowing what you're going for...

arthurk• 18 years ago

7. It's possible to enter a blank name by inserting an html tag (which then gets stripped from the text) in the name field.

hotshothenry4• 18 years ago

Thanks for the catch Arthur, i'll patch that up

bemmu• 18 years ago

Unfortunately, this is one of those things where the content really matters all that much more than the UI. Not to be overly negative, it would be a nice simple way to discover devs if it had that content. If you want to really impress me, show which developers are online right now and willing to talk to me about taking on the project.

evannyx2• 18 years ago

1. Change "iPhone" to "iPhone developer"..would make much more sense

2. Add live chat ability with devs (meebo style)

3. Add more content..so far its empty. I realize it's a chicken / egg problem, but but you need to find a solution else nobody is going to post there.

4. The green logo does not make sense

5. As mentioned before, registration form validation

bprater• 18 years ago

3 sample data points and you want a realistic review? Really, seriously?

This could have been hacked together in an hour. Should we all ask YC to check out our weekend hack sessions?

Is it a real business model? What is it? Give us some details about WHY you want us to look at the site.

This is the type of thing that turns people off from doing "check out my website" type of things.

hotshothenry4• 18 years ago

thanks for the feedback so far guys, I still have a bunch of things to improve upon

jackowayed• 18 years ago

I second/third/24th the motion that you need to tell people what your site does. You can have the listings there too if you want, but higher and more prominent should be a few bullet points or something saying what you do and what makes you special.

Also, your search box doesn't show up at all when I have you noscripted.

satyajit• 18 years ago

I spent 1min:30secs on the site, and few searches other than those given (iPhone, Facebook) didn't return any result (eg. Ruby). Or may be it was doing something in the bground (doesn't tell that if its doing something, like a spinning wheel or hourglass or something). And moreover site doesn't have an 'About' page, and is so minimalistic that, its hard to know what it is about. So I got frustrated and writing this ...

paul9290• 18 years ago

For me this was very easy to understand, but as you see others think there should be more text to explain.

I suggest in the search box have the words, "Find a web or mobile developer for your project."

pclark• 18 years ago

always inform the user as to whats up - if there are no results, tell them. I'm sure you read the story of Google having to add the copyright line at the bottom of the page because users thought some of the page simply wasn't loading. I just did the same on your site - I typed "Ruby" and it went blank .... NO results? Fetching results? broken?

immad• 18 years ago

Name is good, idea is reasonable.

You need to explain where the content comes from, does one have to register to be listed as a result? You should be scraping various sources to get content and saying at the top what the sources are. I feel like dev contractor search engines must exist already but I can't think of one.

tower10• 18 years ago

I second the UI needing some user feedback. I was expecting a Google Suggest style dropdown and it took me a few seconds to realise I was filtering the results already in the page.

It didn't take me long to figure out the purpose of the site but - then again, I shouldn't have to work it out / think. Check out Steve Krug's book on UI design, Don't Make Me Think. The title says it all.

Correct me if my assumptions are wrong but I sense some scaling issues just around the corner. The live search doesn't make any AJAX requests - will the app always start with every listing on the homepage? How will it behave when you have hundreds or thousands of listings?

The Technologies taxonomy is not what I would expect (no programming languages). Is MySpace really a technology you'd list on your resume? Perhaps I've not quite got who the site is aimed at. If that's the case then (as others have said) you should make that explicit, in bullet-list style on the homepage.

Link the logo to the homepage. Lose the icons. Bump up the font size. Add some visual hierarchy to the listings to make them easier to scan (the dev's name isn't the most important piece of information in the listing).

crickets Not sure what that is/means.

What's your strategy for filling out content?

SingAlong• 18 years ago

Add a contact page or detail (other than twitter). How would people contact you if they want to?

P.S: I was looking to contact you for a collaboration (like possible exchange of data). I didn't find any details on your profile too.

modoc• 18 years ago

A) The search appears to be jQuery driven and just does a text search of the records that already appear on the page. This won't scale

B) I can't do a useful search: "Ruby developers with an hourly rate under $150 with over 2 years of experience"

C) You need standardization of the rate format to make it useful/searchable. Dollar per hour or something similar.

D) The technologies list is weird and kind of useless. I'm an expert in "friendster"? You either need a really comprehensive list of programming languages, technologies, APIs/Frameworks, etc... or you need an auto-suggesting free-input field basically like tags.

E) As other people have mentioned you can register with an e-mail of "a" and no password. Basic input validation is usually a given...

I'm not trying to knock your effort, but basically you're shoving all your DB records on a page, and using a jQuery plugin to search them. This might be a nice way to demo how jQuery works, but there's not much there, and you'll have usability and scaling issues very very soon.

You're also missing basic stuff like input validation, informative information, useful search, etc...

If you're just learning some web site design and development, then this is a great first site. However, it's not really a startup/web-app worth reviewing here at HN (imho). There's no business model, the functionality that exists is sparse and not really polished, there's nothing here that couldn't be replicated in an hour or two by someone else. The "find a coder" space is already served by a large number of sites that have a much more mature feature set and large existing user base. What is the new thing you're doing to compete?

Ask HN: review my app

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