Our startup (Seekler: community-built lists to help you find new stuff) goes beta. Feedback please?

by bhb • 19 years ago

9 15 19 years ago

bhb7• 19 years ago

We released our alpha a few months ago and got great feedback from this community. Now we've added some new features, fixed bugs, and most importantly, anyone can create an account.

We'd love to hear any and all feedback. Thanks!

bhb7• 19 years ago

Oh, if you'd like to see an example of a list that's got a number of contributors (and some good information and tags), check out

http://seekler.com/lists/Anticipated+Movies+of+2008

Ideally we'd like to have a ton of lists that have this much info.

davidw2• 19 years ago

Something about it looks sort of... spammy. That's my first impression, no real motivation behind it.

Maybe there's just too much text?

For me, it doesn't have any... "oomph" that would make me interested in coming back.

bhb7• 19 years ago

We have heard that during our alpha as well. Do you mean the home page or when looking at one of the lists? Or both?

One of our challenges has been to present a lot of information without, well, looking too spammy. We'll continue to work on it.

davidw2• 19 years ago

The whole thing. Which is odd, because the information isn't actually that spammy, it just looks that way for some reason. Sorry I can't give you a real reason.

webwright• 19 years ago

It looks well-implemented... Design is slick. In the "build something people want" vein -- why does anyone want this? If you can answer that question, you should add benefit statements to your home page... Or example use cases.

My gut response is that your most common use case is that a person wants to build a "best of" list that other people can contribute to... The end benefit being that you might discover stuff that you weren't aware of, right?

If I'm passionate enough about a subject area that I want to make a best-of list, is discovery a huge motivation? And if it was, wouldn't I head to a destination site centered around that subject area for that discovery? Or just google for "best sci fi books of 2007" or somesuch? It seems that you'd have a better chance finding great unseen movies on IMDB instead of creating a list on Seekler (given that movie buffs are likely to hang out on movie-centric sites).

This seems like a classic example of trying to appeal to all audiences. I'd suggest creating a 3rd level domain for the most list-centric audience you can find. If it's comics, create "comics.seekler.com" and see if you can make it fly.

bhb7• 19 years ago

Well, I'm pretty passionate about comics, but I'm always having trouble finding the next really great Batman graphic novel. We're trying to appeal to consumers who know something about an area, but are still looking to find new stuff within it.

The scenario we imagine is this: I'm looking for a new Batman comic. I google 'Best Batman Comics' and Seekler appears in the first page of results (we're not there yet, but we on the front page for a few of our lists). I go there, and hopefully quickly find something I hadn't heard of. But, during this process, I find that 'Batman: Year One' is ranked above 'Batman: The Dark Knight Returns'. I think that's obviously wrong, so I create my own list to rank the Batman comics I have read, putting TDKR on top and adding another Batman comic that wasn't even on the list.

So in our mind, the scenario is reversed - most people will come just to find new stuff on lists built by experts (who will be us and outside sources, initially). Eventually a small percentage of them will start contributing back to the site and make the lists even better.

Thanks for the feedback. You're right that we need to clarify the benefit on the home page - and narrowly targeting a list-centric audience is a great idea too, we're planning on doing exactly that.

wastedbrains• 19 years ago

We are planning on adding some example use cases on the homepage, a box like "What can I find on Seekler?"

best movies featuring Morgan Freeman

best batman comics

favorite female American Gladiator

and having all the examples link in to the lists that answer these qeustions. Do you think that would help get the idea across?

ashu• 19 years ago

Alignment is broken. The title does not align with anything else. Similarly for the three boxes (featured lists, etc.) - they don't align with the title, etc. Just put things in a simple (invisible) grid and everything might just look much better.

Also, the list-details page is very crowded. When I go to the list-details page, I am interested in that list, not everything else. The left and right columns could easily have expandable boxes (unopened by default) for Popular, Featured lists, etc.

bhb7• 19 years ago

Thanks for the feedback, we'll continue to try to simplify the page so it's less crowded.

kyro• 19 years ago

I'll tell you why it looks spammy.

First, you have the nicely designed part of your site sitting in the background, and your main section enclosed within a box, which separates it from the rest of the site as if it's disconnected content, and making it look like a huge ad placed in the middle of your site.

Second, building off of the first reason, your design is discontinuous. You have nice web 2.0-ish designs with the logo and the pinstripes in the background, but your foreground content is a white box with text of various colors and sizes, versus designed boxes that section the site, text that is styled well (like the seekler logo), and an overall design that promotes unity.

Suggestions: take your content out of that box and mesh it with the background in general. Take the login/create an account/search bar and place it in the upper right. Make the pinstripe background permeate throughout your main content and vice versa. I almost expect an 'X' in the top right of that box that would let me 'Close this box,' like many ads I have seen.

Our startup (Seekler: community-built lists to help you find new stuff) goes beta. Feedback please?

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