Ask HN: Review our webapp (Sproost); team met on HN

[rtc]

Semi interesting background - part of the team behind Sproost met each other here on HN.

We always respect the HN community feedback. Thanks in advance for your comments on what we've built so far...

http://www.sproost.com

[biohacker42]

I liked it a lot.

But I did stop at entering my email address.

Sites like HN have spoiled me with their fast and easy signup. I'd make giving one's email optional.

Remember signup is one of the biggest hurdles any website has. The easier you make it the more people will do it.

Especially if someone is just playing around and has not created dozens of rooms, the worst that could happen is they take the test again.

And I must say the test is fast, short and fun, perfect.

P.S.

Browsed around some more and came back to add to my comment.

If I'm going to be buying furniture over the internet I am going to need A LOT of technical information.

And A LOT of pictures, not just different angles of nicely made bed, but the assembly process as well.

P.P.S.

Bug?: http://www.bobbyberkhome.com/product/bedroom/19393/modloft-w...

[yangyang42]

I disagree on the signup.

I think the placement of the signup is quite nice. Why? because my test result accurate depicted my taste and I was curious to see more.

Needless to say, I signed up.

Didn't buy anything though... everything was way expensive.

[rtc]

yes - account creation lets you save rooms that you've created (we have people who have spent hours putting together different room combinations) but you're right about the high hurdle and we'll shortly be releasing a version that you can use all the way through without signing up.

[fallacy]

Great start!

I've got a few comments:

First, as someone pointed out, you should not switch your quiz interface between the first question and the latter questions. I don't see that you gain anything by switching and it is a little confusing. I would stick with the first question layout, because it is simple.

Second, I'm not sure that you need the "Most recent results" feature. The investment your seeking from potential users is so small, I don't think I that you need to prove that you have traffic, and I don't really see this as morphing into a social app (if it does, I think you are straying too far away from what will make you money). Further, I think it detracts from the point, which I assume is to get people to take the quiz and click through to buy products. Removing it will make the interface cleaner.

Third, as someone has stated, I would make it clear how many images have been rated and remain. A simple "1 of 10" would do the trick.

Fourth, if you go with the second layout for the quiz interface, I would do away with or hide the "How to take the style quiz" text, like you do the "like or hate something."

Fifth, after the quiz, I would take people right to the "room" of stuff that they can click and buy. As it is, you are going to have a lot of people navigate away at the end of the quiz and they will never even see your money page.

Lastly, I noticed that you are using some magazine images. Although you will likely fly under the radar, that is copyright infringement. I see that you source it at least, and that may be enough to get them off your back.

All in all, good start for sure.

[sciolizer]

Why do you think the first question layout is simple? I preferred the second question layout because it requires fewer mouse clicks.

[Jasber]

I thought it was confusing how the quiz controls changed after I answered the first question.

You should make that consistent.

Otherwise nice work.

[cjc]

Agreed. Specifically, moving the controls from the right hand side to the left hand side was jarring.

[rtc]

this is an artifact of our previous quiz interface; the comments here make sense and we'll change it to be less confusing.

[alex_c]

Good implementation!

I ran it past my gf (who watches a lot more home decoration shows than me), she didn't like the quiz results. She felt that they were all over the place and a bit contradictory.

I felt that the quiz was too long :p I was also a bit confused about how many more questions there were - I didn't really understand the potential/eliminated stuff.

I agree with run4yourlives, the objects in the room were really mish-mashed. Having it as a simple 2D representation of the furniture isn't very satisfying - the most jarring example being that the rug is just an upright rectangle...

I'm not part of the target audience, but I think you have something pretty interesting.

[ks]

I stopped taking the quiz because I thought it didn't have an end :-) Perhaps I should have looked more at the user interface, but a progress bar or something would be helpful

[jollyjerry]

I liked how I could immediately start using the StyleEngine. The navigation was great and I had no trouble using it. I thought the 'ruled out' could be a little more prominent so I could see my progress. Definitely a slick site though. Best of luck!

[sh1mmer]

I thought the 'ruled out' could be a little more prominent so I could see my progress.

This is totally important. This is why almost all shopping carts these days use 1-2-3 style steps. The technical term (from User eXperience) is scent, and it's what gives the user a continued incentive to keep going.

I almost quit the StyleEngine until I saw that, but I almost didn't see it at all.

[webwright]

Love it. I'm about to buy a fixer upper and this would be really valuable. Also, it's an excellent market for advertising (lucrative niche).

Seems also very valuable for remodeling-- not just furniture. The most commonly remodeled rooms are kitchens and bathrooms.

The site is agonizingly slow. You are serving up 200k+ images scaled down in HTML. Seriously? Make it as fast as hot or not and you have a winner.

I'd also break it down by room. Kitchen, Living Room, Bedroom, etc.

Of course, as with many sites-- there's no build in marketing. How are you going to get visitors?

[rtc]

yes, we'll optimize for speed soon (but we hope to optimize at the right time). bedroom and dining room are next on the list. getting visitors is indeed the big challenge. SEO, viral/social, and SEM (in that order) are what we'll focus on. would love feedback in this area as well.

[sh1mmer]

My wife points out that it would be interesting to do something for couples because she likes radically different stuff to me. So something that could marry (boom boom) our styles would be helpful.

[rtc]

we hear this from users - you can "force" style combinations now by choosing styles manually and then seeing the rooms that result, but we should probably make this function more obvious.

[sh1mmer]

I was thinking more about letting two people do it and then try to identify the overlap rather than the product of the two preferences.

[okeumeni]

Nice implementation, good concept. My only suggestion you should not force people to take the quiz to get to the point of what is that the app does.

One thing surprising is not the fact that the team met on HN, it is the fact that only David is a hacker. I didn’t know that HN was also a meeting spot for interior designers. Really good to know : - )

[davidjeffries]

The application is just as much (actually, probably more) about the interior design than the engineering :)

[sachinag]

I like the business - help people figure out what to buy, then make commissions on $1,000 furniture. Brilliant. And I like the approach a lot. So you're in the top quartile, for me, of Ask HN stuff here. Praise aside, let's get to the helpful specific crits:

You really need to Photoshop the pictures in your quiz to make them as standard and innocuous as possible. Telling people to ignore the floors, walls, etc. is just impossible. Ideally, you'd be able to stage your own photos.

Also, the interface needs to be 1) consistent and 2) less cluttered. I'd recommend really blowing it out with whitespace to figure out what you need and don't, then incrementally making it tighter. CrazyEgg might be super-helpful to you given that you have a very visual site.

As for "going viral", having quick page loads is necessary but not sufficient. You can make the page load quicker.

[rmason]

Now I know it wouldn't occur to most of the people on here but when I tried to take the quiz with IE7 the site hung as soon as I answered the first question. So 80% of your visitors will never know what it's all about.

[axod]

Good point, but 80% is a slight exaggeration. Especially if you're talking about slightly techie affluent people in the market for this sort of site. They'll be using chrome, safari, opera, or most likely firefox.

[ivankirigin]

  "So 80% of your visitors"
  

Early adopters != browser share, right? But obviously you're right and this is an issue.

[rtc]

We recently released a new version of the quiz, and looks like we had an IE7 bug which we'll fix right away. BTW - 55% of Sproost visitors have been FF, only 25% have been IE7/6.

[ins0mniac]

using FF 3.0.5 here. I get stuck on the 2nd step of the quiz. The spinner spins forever. However the funny thing is it appears to work fine in IE 8.0.6

[amobilebiz]

Same problem here. Works in Firefox, but not IE7. After you answer the first question on the quiz I get a javascript error on the next page.

[walesmd]

Yep - I also had to refresh once to grab the stylesheet.

[sam_in_nyc]

Don't pay too much attention to:

    * Windows, floors, wall material, and other architectural features
    * Color — it's easy to change color combinations
    * Layout and arrangement — also easy to change

That's a monumental challenge for me. I vote basically based on what my first impression is, and these items inevitably have a play into that.

But I suppose if I were actually looking to redecorate, I would put more thought into my votes.

[run4yourlives]

Not Bad.

I wasn't sure what it was all about until I actually completed the quiz and started looking at "rooms". You may want to fix that somehow.

Also, I found some issues with the way the room objects were displayed (after you have a style)... seemed a little mish-mashed.

Looks like a good thing to present to Architecture digest or House and Home or one of those magazines... timing might not be the best with the recession though.

Good luck to you!

[rms]

I like it. To me it seems more obvious to do this for clothes rather than interior decorating. Are you planning on applying this to fashion?

[apgwoz]

As far as growth is concerned, fashion seems like a great idea. As for actual value of the interior decorating, have you ever looked at hiring an interior decorator?

[rtc]

one of the founders previously started an interior architecture/design firm; subject matter expertise is key to the implementation. personal fashion is a possible expansion, but home furnishings is a $100B+ market in the US alone, so we'll focus there for a while...

[apgwoz]

I agree. I was commenting on rms' thought that fashion was potentially a more viable market. I would completely agree that home decor will net you more, and probably more easily.

[joshsharp]

I did the quiz but stopped short at entering my details. Then I came back and read all the comments here and decided I did want to create an account after all.

Kudos for using cookies and keeping my quiz results; I would've been very irritated if I had to do it again just because I didn't sign up at the same time. :)

[joshsharp]

Also, once I save a room, it would be nice to have the option to share it - I'd like to be able to email a link or something.

[midnightmonster]

This is clever, and I think it gets a pretty good read on me, but my real style (as judged by actual purchases) is cheap and/or used--so I'm probably not a target consumer here.

In the room display (which is odd, but the problem is hard), my apache area rug showed up somewhat smaller than my great plains porcelain table lamp, and a throw pillow dwarfed a sofa. Giving some better sense of scale is the only definite improvement I can think of. That and don't let pictures almost completely overlap, as some candle holders do on a leaf bowl the second time I loaded the page.

ETA: Clicking to buy a "Deep River Rectangle Cocktail" table went through the affiliate program link and to the retailer, but it dropped me on the front page.

[NoBSWebDesign]

Wow, I really like this site. Some of the graphics leave a little to be desired (the logo and the greater than sign on the "see your results" page). But, I really liked the flow and interaction. It did take me a second though to figure out what was going on when I started the quiz, because the buttons jumped from the right of the image to the left and were replaced with a bunch of text on the right. I thought I had been taken away from the quiz and was a bit confused.

Very sweet though. I'm going to pass it on definitely.

[pedalpete]

I too wasn't sure what it was all about, but (and most sites should take a hint here) you made it very easy to figure it out. I clicked the button and off it went.

I'm curios as to why you went with two different styles though. When I start I have radio buttons and a submit on the right of the picture, then you go to the voting blocks on the left of the picture. Why the change? It would maybe be better to go with the more familiar (Hot or Not) style of selections below the picture.

[paraschopra]

Actually, I liked all the rooms. Put in some of the messy ones as well. It is hard not to like a perfect room like the ones you have in the pictures.

[fauigerzigerk]

I like it a lot. Will show it to my gf as well. The style of the website is very nice and clean. I love the sproost logo! I have a few criticisms though.

The quiz is very long and it seemed to my european eyes that there's an overhang of traditional styles and little differentiation among contemporary options. Modern seems to imply asian.

I didn't like most of the rooms, but after making my choices the system summerised my style pretty well. Very well actually.

The "design your room" page suffers from some layout quirks (Firefox 3). One of the items in my room got stuck when I switched to selecting more items from the sofas category. That rug just kept hovering on top of the sofas and only went away once I used the budget slider. I wasn't able to repeat it later though.

I love the budget slider but sometimes it didn't stick. It kept snapping back to the greatest price range.

My room looks a little jumbled because the pics aren't aligned at all. I understand that I'm supposed to arrange the items as I see fit, but that doesn't make much sense to me since I can't possibly make the whole thing look anything like a real room. The sizes and perspectives are just too different. I suggest you pre-align the items next to each other. People can still move the items around if they want to.

I appreciate that it's very difficult to actually let people design a room that looks like a room. It would work a little better if I could zoom individual items so I could at least put that lamp next to the sofa and make them look proportionally sized. To take this further you could figure out the sizes of the pieces from the vendors' sites and automatically zoom them accordingly. I know, I know that's a massive amount of work and maybe it wouldn't help enough to make a real difference.

I'm not sure why the "saved rooms" and the "design your room" pages are separate pages. I would prefer a drop-down to select other saved rooms right on the "design your room" page. The cost rundown could be placed on the "buy your furniture" tab or dynamically displayed by clicking somewhere next to the total. In my opinion, there are too many pages and menu/tab levels.

The "to be added" section isn't very useful I think, but if it's there it should at least let me remove stuff from it.

The signup process is OK. No confirmation emails, no nothing, just an email address. But I would still let people see the room designer before making them sign up.

[hussong]

I usually don't fancy those quizzes (e.g. for music and movie tastes), but yours was actually interesting. Very good pictures, fun to look at, but they took too long to load to keep me involved til the end.

Scaling of fonts / liquid layout could be improved, looks a bit funny on FF/Ubuntu. Layout could use more white space for clarity.

I still like the idea. Good start, keep it up!

[paul7986]

Yes nice that you allow use of the site right away which then takes you further into the site.

I kept answering like, hate and what not for like 20 rooms, but then got tired.

I thought it would stop, analyze the rooms I liked and give me a personality or the app would design my perfect room with perfect furnishings.

good job and good luck!

[mikexstudios]

Very nice. Excellent design. The quiz was fun and easy to complete.

I would like to see a list of specific styles and their representative pictures though. That way, I can see the names of other styles that I might like or dislike.

Like biohacker42, I stopped at the signup.

[wensing]

Well done. I learned something about myself and I can't wait to share this with others.

[cmos]

I really like it. But I have no interest in your topic of furniture.

I also got tired of looking at pictures.. perhaps a little more reward after going through 5 or 10 images?

Can you take your engine + make it work with different categories?

[mixmax]

In the style engine I would move the options (love it, like it, etc.) over to the right of the picture, or underneath it. And make it look more like clickable buttons.

The placement and design makes it look like a menu.

[sgrove]

Just wanted to post a quick message - very cool! I don't have time to go into details, but the site is very slick, and strangely enough, something I would use.

Well done! I'll try to add some more details later.

[mhashim]

great job guys. I like the minimalist and clean design approach. I took the quiz and got my wife to do it too as we have just redecorated, and the answers were quite accurate about our style inclinations. Good to see a quality start. I think the tough part now is to integrate this with multiple channels that could create the revenue. I would suggest to start by approaching fashion/interior designers as they would find immediate value to provide their clients with the use of this tool. Good luck.

[rokhayakebe]

I recommend you use the Polyvore model. Let people pick items from different categories and create their own furnishing style. You are definitely in the right space.

[sidsavara]

I liked it - fun! Tweeted it

Is there a way to tell my friends my results? Not via email, I want a direct link to tweet/IM etc

[rtc]

we're working on just that - sharing/comparing/combining your style profile results with others. stay tuned...

[0x44]

I went to signup, but your application would not permit it. The '+' character is valid in an email address.

[tptacek]

Every one of these rooms is so much more expensive than my living room that I'm finding it hard to judge.

[rtc]

we have a "budget slider" feature for each product category (e.g. show only sofas below $XX). do you think a budget slider for a room makes sense?

[tptacek]

Sure. It's not a huge deal, it's just that my immediate reaction was always to the room first, and the furniture second.

[rscott]

I really liked it. Maybe at the end provide some links to stores specializing in certain styles?

[gsmaverick]

I definitely bookmarked this site. This is the best webapp I have seen on HN in months!

[daveambrose]

Why did you choose a lightbox for sign-up/login?

[andrewljohnson]

Pretty great, it was spot on with me.

[DJN]

Lovely site.. well done