| Dear hackers: Whether English is your first or nth natural language, you may be familiar with this vexing experience: You encounter a flowery word in a book, podcast, or HN comment; you endeavor to memorize it to hone your speech and writing; you purge it from your synapses by the next day. Flowery (https://flowery.app) streamlines vocabulary building by: • Rendering a typographically pristine Oxford dictionary and thesaurus.
• Conjuring up the stochastic parrot to eliminate the tedium of flashcard creation.
• Scheduling the flashcards with a spaced repetition algorithm. About the tech stack: The server is built on Rust, Axum, and PostgreSQL. The client is built on Google’s Lit. We are betting the farm on the web—you won’t find Flowery on any app store. We have gone to great lengths to polish UX, especially on iOS where we rolled our own virtual keyboard, textboxes, and text selection. We strive to make Flowery an exemplar of the quasi-native web app. Non-obvious features to try: • “Add to Home Screen” on iOS.
• “Add to Dock” on macOS Sonoma.
• Install on Android and desktop Chrome.
• Append an ellipsis to search by prefix.
• Touch a flashcard’s blank for a hint.
• Keyboard navigation inspired by the one true editor. Give it a whorl [sic] and share your thoughts! Florally yours, The Florist |
I think you need to make it more obvious that this is a preview and today you can only use words starting with S.
Changing the initial text in the search to 'Try searching for a word beginning with S...' would go a long way.
I'd also explain the product to people a bit more when on the landing page (without the copy above I would have been baffled) rather than launching them straight into it.
The login / sign up experience is a bit confusing. UX wise the view conflates sign up / login with information about the browser extensions. In my view, it's also a bit early to force people to use passkeys as the only way to login. Regardless, the whole button should be clickable rather than just the key.
The flying text is quite distracting.
On desktop, it's really not obvious that there is a button at the bottom right which has a lot of settings.
I also think there are very few people who would commit to spending $15.64 a month (1564 is Shakespeare's birthdate - nice) without some sort of free trial or at least having more of a go at using the app with more words than just daily one.
Sorry if that's harsh but that's my honest view. As I said, I like the idea overall. There is very little chance I'd spend $15.64 on this as it stands or if ever though.