Ask HN: Review my app HelloBar.com We just released Hello Bar in private beta. http://www.hellobar.com We wanted to create a fun, unobtrusive, yet highly visible bar that engages users to take action on your site. It's purposely MVP right now. I'd love to get your feedback on the site. -What other features would you like to see? -What do you think of the interaction/UI design? -Would you use this for your site? If not, why not? Use the beta key "hn" to create an account. Thanks! |
Wibiya seem to have done a very good job with their toolbar, and I've been seeing their toolbar more and more across the web. The market is seemingly large enough for more competitors.
I might be entirely wrong here, I really have no idea what your product does as I didn't actually fill out the form on your website to try out hellobar. Why not include a demo right on the homepage, and why not allow me to try it without having me fill out an obnoxious form? I'm sorry to sound harsh, but it really bothers me when sites force me to sign up to try something out, especially when I could easily be shown a live demonstration.
I've also previously used that space for notification bars that hover over where your product would go (for errors, successful actions, etc.) So your product wouldn't fit on my site because that real estate is taken.
The main thing is finding something useful for this. This isn't a solution to anything, its just a piece of javascript. IMO having one of those floating around gets in the way of my user's experience.
Website owners typically have one important message or call to action that they would like each visitor to process. Since we don't have consistent design standards, the user has a inconsistent visual experience ingesting web content and messaging.
This happened with digital display ads. Services like The Deck have provided solid improvement with engagement through conformed ads in a single dosage per page.
We want to bring simplicity and consistency to the web experience. We hope that a thoughtful design, one well-crafted sentence and a call to action is what we need to increase engagement on your website.
In general it looks like it's a nice library, but how about some more information before the required registration? Why do I want to use this over a freely available JS library? Does it cost money? Etc.
However, I agree it is a little to MVP. To be useful I need more control over what is displayed in the bar ... and I probably want to host all the scripts on my own server too.
I want to be able to set the content in the Javascript code that instantiates the bar so the message is relevant to a user action.
The only feature(s) I would use would be conditional messages.. (if logged in, if paying customer, etc..)
I will use this as-is and plan to implement asap.
Well done.
Right now I won't use it as there is no way to see what it can offer. Also how are you different from the others out there?