I don't like to be that guy, but your landing page is a tragedy.
It's visually gorgeous, yet completely fails at explaining what the product does and how it's different from the two dozen competitors. Remember rule #1: Show, don't tell (hint: screencast, live-demo).
Don't promise "LET'S CUT THE VAGUERY" when all that follows is cropped screenshots and breathless marketing copy.
ALL YOUR TEAMS ARE A CLICK AWAY, TEAM STATUS & PRESENCE AT A GLANCE, MINIMALLY DISTRACTING GROUP CHAT ...
I can't help but respond: O RLY?
Skype has all that. Minus the breathless marketing copy...
In a medium of strictly words, "show, don't tell" means that you should use your words to illustrate something, not just describe it.
In a visual medium, I really think that a bunch of screenshots does exactly what "show, don't tell" is trying to counter; you're just 'visually telling', not 'visually showing' (if you'll allow me to bend words). This landing page shows me that this product is something I want to try.
I think you make some fair points. 100% agree we desperately need a better demo on the front page.
I think the landing page needs help, too, but we've gotten mostly positive responses to it. I personally didn't expect this, because I wanted a nice demo and we just flat haven't had time to put one together.
We launched it on the same day as our realtime web app conference (krtconf) and I wrote the bulk of the copy at about 2 a.m. the night before. Not my best work, but no excuses--sometimes you just have to ship! :D
"Our team at &yet has been building &! for a year, using and improving it for nearly 6 months."
Approximately %0.00023 of the time spent was on the landing page copy on the night before the deadline. Perhaps a project management system would help here.
Points taken and rest assured my criticism was only about your landing page, not about the product (I didn't bother to sign up for the above reasons).
Keep up the work, if your product quality can match that of the visuals then you might be onto something. :-)
Edit: Despite the criticism from others in the thread I still like the visual appearance. I just think you overshot a little and forgot that the even the nicest form still needs to follow function.
You also need a front page that doesn't flip me off for not having a browser that supports web sockets.
Even if your app (whatever it is, I can't even view _text_ about it) requires web sockets you can explain that somewhere else in a less… 'gtfo old man'-kind of way.
(I know you guys tried to soften the blow with the whole we heart websockets cuteness but it was very much a case of "… well, sweet then. Closes tab")
It's even worse if you arrive at the landing page with an old browser: Then the most important thing the team wants to tell you with their single shot at your eyeballs is that they are uber-geeks who love web sockets. Like I, as a potential customer, should care about that.
I'm guessing here, but they should be able to build a landing page that tells me what their product does without needing web sockets to build it. Without it I'm not even going to make the effort to come back later on a browser that they might support just to find out what on earth their offering is.
Maybe, but it is also based on very simple common sense rules, like "if you want your words to be read, put them is a font size that is neither too small nor too big for common user at common screen distance with common screen size".
Opening this one landing page in the morning, the words are so big, it is really hurting my eyes. Closed the page. Same with ifttt.com, by the way.
This is why it's good to read books that have editors, because editors know stuff like this and will make sure the final form uses the real word. Then you, as the reader, will learn the word too.
(I was reading the Steve Jobs biography today, and noticed that they wrote the expression "the idea jelled in his mind", where I would have written "the idea gelled in his mind". Thanks to some editor somewhere, I can now look less illiterate when I use that expression.)
i also do not get it (without having to signup ) , also each of those links (4 of them ) may seem to point to more information at first yet all of them link to the register page
Here's a landing page from Trello which made me sign up: http://trello.com/. It tells me why I need them, what they do, and, lo and behold, a video demo right on top.
I signed up with trello right away. I haven't used them since, but at least I signed up. &! just makes me go ?!.
Here is Copy-Paste from the home page. At what point should I start understanding what this is? I think I get that there is a suspense point and make me curious, but not strong enough to make me sigh up. In fact I will rather never sign for anything unless I have to.
TONS OF TIME GETS WASTED
KEEPING YOUR TEAM
ON THE SAME PAGE.
MEETINGS STRANGLE PRODUCTIVITY.
NOBODY GETS IN THE ZONE WITH MORE EMAIL.
NAGGING IS A DRAG FOR EVERYONE INVOLVED.
WHAT IF SAME-PAGIFYING JUST HAPPENED AUTOMAGICALLY?
GET READY TO MEET
&!Realtime mind-meldification for teams.
Wooooo! Sign up now!let's do this thing Or read on...
LET'S CUT THE VAGUERY SHALL WE?
IT'S ALL ABOUT SHIPPING
Finishing's the hardest part. &! keeps you focused on the most important things—there's no room for anything else. Ship stuff today!
DON'T ASK,
DON'T TELL
"What are you working on?" and "Are you busy?" are the most pointlessly painful questions when you're just trying to get something done.
With a small feature list and small, extremely-cropped screenshots? Not even close, in my book. Maybe those represent it accurately, but we have no way of knowing because it's just face + icon + snippet - context - content.
It's wonderful that you have "give us feedback" as one of the initial tasks in the first team created. It's less wonderful that there is no obvious way to give you that feedback. Five minutes in and already I'm falling behind on shipping!
On a different note: I actually need to recruit people I don't previously know to my team. Would it be possible to add a landing page for a team that signs up the person and then auto-ads them to that team. This would have a hard-to-guess URL, so I would have confidence that only people I recruited (or their friends) would show up.
I can't seem to reply directly to adambrault. Just to expand on why I asked about MS Paint adventures. The aesthetic is similar -- although of course &! is about productivity instead of kids playing a most dangerous game, the emphasis on awesomeness, the suspense, etc. are shared.
The service itself looks awesome, but let me just say that the landing page is fantastic - just the right balance between humor and information to keep me reading to find out details as they occurred to me, gave me an option to sign up right at the top, but then kept explaining more without making me click to another page to do it.
This is really very awesome. The keyboard shortcuts [1] are particularly well done and worth trying out.
Just a really great version 1. Down the line, it'd be amazing to have some sort of Github/Github Enterprise integration and/or Salesforce integration.
[1] Too few people focus on these, but they are absolutely key to get power users for webapps or apps in general. This is why Gmail is irreplaceable if you need a webmail ui and can't use gnus for some reason.
The funny thing is that it's not that hard to build an app around keyboard shortcuts if you design it that way from the beginning. Hopefully we'll see more of this.
Keyboard shortcuts are awesome[1], though they do tend to interfere with keyboard-based browsers. Right now I use Conkeror, which is Emacs-inspired Mozilla-based browser, and encountered some problems with webpage and browser shortcuts interfering witch each other. Sometimes it's annoying (Twitter, SMBC), sometimes it renders the webpage keyboard shortcuts unusable (&!) [2].
I know that people using keyboard browsers are probably the 0.005% of users and thus not worth optimizing Internet for; however as the keyboard shortcuts become more and more popular among webpages, it might be interesting to talk about how to make them well. Should everyone design their own shortcuts, or are there operations so common across webpages, that it would be better to have universal keyboard shortcuts configured browser-side?
[1] - I got addicted to keyboard shortcuts in GMail, they're great! :).
[2] - fortunately, all of this is (AFAIK) solvable by writing a major mode for given webpage.
This absolutely needs an interface demo. While the page looks nice, I have no idea what the product actually does, and I'm not really interested in giving up my email address just to find out...
I like the pink, in principle; it really draws your eye. The problem is that it draws your eye to disjointed phrases that don't make sense unless you read some of the surrounding non-pink context, creating a confusing effect to readers who are skimming the page.
This looks a lot like a successful project status approach I've used on a previous project: everyone kept their status on a wiki, with a very short list of currently active work and a slightly longer list of pending work. Effectively, everyone shared their TODO list, and from the combined list you could tell at a glance what everyone worked on without having to ask or have status meetings. (Thus, meetings only existed to deal with actual blocking problems, and remained short.) Management within the team learned to look at that TODO list rather than asking for status reports; when management outside that team wanted a report on recent accomplishments, they got a rolled-up copy of completed TODO items with a few highlights called out at at the top.
I like the idea of having a tool built around the same approach, assuming I've understood it correctly.
A few bits of feedback on your launch page: While I found phrases like "mind-meldification" amusing, the first instance of such a phrase occurred when you said "same-pagifying", and that one in particular didn't so much strike me as amusing as pointy-haired-bossish; I almost closed the page right then. Also, do you really want to use the politically charged phrase "don't ask don't tell" in marketing copy? And finally, while I liked the repeated links to the register page, the one with the text "Try using it right now!" somehow made me expect an instant demo page without having to sign up; this seems like the kind of interface where 30-60 seconds playing with it will tell me if I want to use it.
(One other thing: you say at the bottom "absolutely free for teams of 2", but honestly this looks like it might make a perfect TODO list application for a team of 1; have you considered that use case?)
We built the tool based on a completely stripped down paper process we created. We made a set of Post-It notes that we put on a shared space. Then we would put what we were actually working on the door to our office. It worked really nicely, except you had to physically be in the office and it required you to get up from your desk a lot. &bang was literally taking that approach and making it a web app.
Thanks for the feedback on the launch page. All valid points. We plan on making it easier to try out as well.
Regarding your last point, we are going to improve the one-user experience, too.
Can't even see site intro because my mobile browser doesn't support websockets. Please fix so I can at least read about why I might want to use your app when I get to a pc with a modern browser.
You should fire your web developer... How can your homepage not work with IE9? Seriously - WTF do you need websockets for on your homepage? I can maybe (notreally) see it for your application but product sites should be available for all browsers and not discrimiinate.
I'm disappointed it pissed you off so much. But I made that call.
Why? Because we were getting people pissed off that they didn't find out until they went to sign up. We flat haven't had time to do a more complex and friendly/informative solution, but we want to. Forgive us.
"The 10,000 people on the planet that care about Web Sockets are not your customers, and while using Web Sockets might get you mentioned on TechCrunch, supporting only Web Sockets is a great way to cut your potential audience in half."
But it all depends on who you're looking to as your market. I'd go as far to say that the group of people who DON'T support web sockets is exponentially bigger than the ones who do...
As PG has said more than once, it's better to make a small group insanely happy than to make everyone "meh" about your stuff. The geek side of me is really happy to see long polling finally getting thrown out the window like the hack that it is, and if you want to make a stand against it, I'll love you more for it.
Pragmatically, though, you probably want to eventually have a fallback mode in this case, with a note telling people that they should probably use a better browser. Team apps are one of those least common denominator problems, after all.
I was also surprised that it does not work in IE9 - to make matters more annoying, the back button decided not to work (it just kept flashing me back to the 'We heart websockets' tagline.
Lack of IE9 support is an irritant (one fixable with fallback, bout your business, your call). But that annoying back button issue that resulted in me having to close my browser and reload just to get back to HN to make this comment is on my short list of web behaviors that make me never wish to visit a site or vendor again.
It does surprise me how many web sites, especially ones in many cases geared towards dev teams, either explicitly cut IE8/9 out of the picture, or render so horribly that they make me wonder whether they intentionally degrade the experience to be 'clever' or if they really just do not care about that much of their market share.
For the record, I have the most current versions of IE, Chrome, and Firefox on my PC, and run Win7, Win8, Ubuntu and OSX on other PCs just to make sure my web properties are useable for 95%+ of my visitors (I've cut IE7 support recently, but IE8 is still about 20% of my traffic).
What are they doing that has to absolutely be done with sockets? I can't comment on the product they're offering but this is annoying to say the least as I can't see the site.
(I'm not saying I like IE, but it's the only browser that works great with higher DPI settings and scales properly for using a browser on a laptop with a 1080 res.)
I test drove it a few days ago. I really liked the UI (with keyboard shortcuts!) but found that it really didn't add value since we already use Pivotal Tracker. PT already has a notion of the story you are working on along with tasks for each story that you can quickly create and check off as you complete them.
The group chat feature feels pretty simplistic and isn't even in the same ballpark as Campfire or HipChat.
It's a promising design and feature set but still needs a lot of work to justify the high price.
Since the landing page point has been beaten to death, here are a few things I think about the app itself after messing around: the keyboard shortcuts are awesome and just make the application fun to use, but the amount of real screen estate being wasted is criminal. With the window maximized on a 1920x1080, the taskbar is crammed to the left side while the rest of my screen is simply a gaping gray hole.
On the task management side of things, I tried to add a task for both members of a team using "$ @all task description" but it seemed to just go to my shortlist. It was difficult to distinguish, as a result, between different shortlists and the team shortlist. I was also confused by the presence of a lightning bolt icon next to one of my tasks that I might have accidentally added when messing around with keyboard shortcuts. The icon seemed to have no clear meaning and there was no helpful tooltip waiting for me when I hovered over it. I also wish there was some way to rank my tasks based on their priority.
That being said, this actually looks really cool, and I'd love to support it as the kinks get worked out.
&! user here. Try it as a Fluid app if you have a Mac, then size the window to fit the app so it takes up the space of a slightly larger IM window. I actually zoom it out using Fluid so it takes up a little less space. &! sends Growl notifications for tasks and directed chat through Fluid which I like as it lets me background the app and still use it.
Something I've always wanted at work is an "internal Twitter" so that people can share quick status updates without forcing anyone to read them. I would personally just write a quick script to archive and webify the IM clients' status messages, but I suppose if you don't want to program and don't like your current chat system, you could use this.
I think one of the problems with this, though, is that only people younger than 30 feel the need to tell a computer what they're doing with their day. Most people would rather go home five minutes earlier than communicate with their team electronically. That's the hard problem to solve here.
(Incidentally, automation could work. I remember writing a CPAN plugin that detected which module you were installing and it changed your IM status to show that, kind of like the plugins that show which song you're listening to. Enough incoming data like this and enough filtering for humans, and you could get a pretty good idea of what your team is doing without requiring them to explicitly communicate.
very minimal and simple. it's basically a chat + to-do-list... i'm not gonna compare it to Trello but that's what we use right now and so far it has turned out to be great not to mention it's free.
$10 a month per team member is WAY over priced for such a minimal app. for a 10 member startup it's $80 a month or $960 a year for a chat app!
Agreed, we use Trello (with the Scrum plugin for estimation) and find it really fits the bill, especially for price.
We just use one list for 'Doing' and that takes care of the current status thing. It's a pretty great way to work, best interface I've found yet to manage stuff in an Agile way with the interface really getting out of the way.
This has a lot of the same things going for it, but ya, for the price is a non-starter. Maybe I'm getting old but all the whiz bang stuff is getting tired as well. (I feel Wufoo does a great job of balancing the cute factor there, but this is is a bit in your face)
To my cranky old self, the overbearing similarity between this product (aimed at productivity) and services like Twitter and Facebook (aimed at fun), combined with the overly cheery, flippant color scheme, make it difficult for me to take my work in &! seriously and actually get things done.
> "What are you working on?" and "Are you busy?" are the most pointlessly painful questions when you're just trying to get something done.
So true. I don't believe this solves the problem though. I rarely got asked those questions. But when I did, the person just wanted more and more information: so how long is it going to take, when did you start, at what stage are you, does anyone else need to get involved, is there something to be prepared, etc. This is crazy and tools could not help.
Everyone else knew that, yes, everyone is busy with something and that they can just look at what's "in progress" on the bug tracker... Technology won't always solve personality problems.
Also - Teambox seems to be similar and also provide the facebook/twitter-like status updates.
Ajax username checking makes the field sluggish (https://andbang.com/register with FF 8.0) - when I type username fast, most of the letters don't show at all. I believe the reason is at: register.js line 24 =)
The short version:
+ The graphics are great.
+ The usability can be improved.
+ Add a graphical button to access the shortcut/hotkey guide.
+ Add tooltips for any non-conventional icons (sections, thunderbolt, rocket ship)--include shortcut [esc], etc.
+ Add non-modal feedback/confirmation when stuff happens:
+ After adding a task: "woebtz added 'Research cheese puff API' to shortlist."
+ After thunderbolting a task: "woebtz is working on 'Test meatloaf' now."
+ After rocket shiping a task: "woebtz shipped 'Deliver milk to client!'"
+ Keep up the great work.
I applaud you for having a business model. As well as one that does not involve ads. That said, I can't see myself (or anyone else for that matter) spending $10 a month (per user) on the current version of service. Basically, you've implemented a relatively basic 'wall'.
There really just isn't enough there to warrant spending that much money. I think you need to spend some more time on adding features than repeatedly posting to HN as a way to drum up business and feedback.
We didn't post this. I was a bit surprised and it made for a completely unexpected and a bit stressful day.
No doubt, it's a nice surprise for anyone to be pinned to the top of HN for most of the day, but we haven't put out a press release for &bang for a reason: we have some things we kind of wanted to do first.
As far as price goes, businesses spend money on software that they use when they get value out of it.
We've bootstrapped our way from just me to a team of 15+ and while we carefully watch our budget, we don't handcuff our team when it comes to hardware and software expense.
We subscribe to web apps that run $15, $25, even $45 per month per user. At the end of the day, all of those combined are a ridiculously small part of our budget and we don't even think about the expense. They help us get the job done and that's what we care about.
With &bang, we're going to work hard to know our customers and deliver them value by making it easier and more fun to work together efficiently.
I absolutely appreciate your sentiments and believe me: we have a lot more we are excitedly eager to do with this product. :)
Just signed up and the user interface isn't clear to me. The jumping left bar is terrible, I don't understand how to use this (and I really wanted to for some reason).
Put in more effort to make clear to your users how you want them to use your site. I wasn't able with the starting version to make something appear on the right side and the annoying left menu kept on jumping.
As it is now, I'm really not going to use this (even the free version).
I'm using this with some projects and enjoying it. Overall I agree it's a very fast way to know what everyone's doing. It is suited for a desk environment since it is desktop-only. (It's closest to working on the iPad but has some bugs.) The price seems a bit much, but we haven't fully ramped up usage and we'd happily pay for anything working well for us.
Hey cool! We're a team of two so I'll be trying this out for sure. Your landing page lured me in perfectly. By the way, your <article> tags are rendering with a white background-color, but I assume they're meant to be transparent/#202020. I'm using FF 7.0.1.
Yep, and then, if I recall (and without looking), it removes the background on Chrome entirely (leaving it transparent and grey and unreadable instead of white in the center).
I messed with it for a couple hours to get Chrome and Firefox to render the same and eventually gave up and moved on to more important things, but it's on my list to investigate.
I signed up, created a team, skipped watching the screencast/demo and can't find it again. Now I don't even know what I'm supposed to do. The UI is just confusing. I imagine you have spent a lot of time working on how it looks and not on how it works.
I agree with some of the sentiments here regarding launch page copy. I found the repeated use of words like "awesome" a little annoying. I would cut it to to basic "here's what it does and why it's better..." type copy and limit all the hype text.
Lol, this screencast is horrible. It's just one guy talking, but they edited the cuts so close to each other that he's overlapping himself talking. I guess it's "saving time" or "is stylish and cool". Obviously it was a conscious decision on their point, but it's a horrible idea. I don't think I'd trust a company that would put out something this bad as an official video.
just signed up and so far it's working great. really appreciate the teams of 2 are always free mentality. didn't realize how many tag-team ventures i had that actually make sense with this model. looking forward to giving this a good run.
It's visually gorgeous, yet completely fails at explaining what the product does and how it's different from the two dozen competitors. Remember rule #1: Show, don't tell (hint: screencast, live-demo).
Don't promise "LET'S CUT THE VAGUERY" when all that follows is cropped screenshots and breathless marketing copy.
ALL YOUR TEAMS ARE A CLICK AWAY, TEAM STATUS & PRESENCE AT A GLANCE, MINIMALLY DISTRACTING GROUP CHAT ...
I can't help but respond: O RLY?
Skype has all that. Minus the breathless marketing copy...