-
Does anybody have book recommendations for this?
-
I don’t know of a marketing book specifically written for designers. That said, there are plenty of fine marketing books that are accessible for anyone.
Seth Godin’s books are great and fun to read: https://www.amazon.ca/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_ebooks_1?ie=UTF8&text=Seth+Godin&search-alias=digital-text&field-author=Seth+Godin&sort=relevancerank
Meanwhile, Marty Neumeier is a design guy who covers a lot of big-picture topics (strategy, brands, etc.): https://www.amazon.ca/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_ebooks_1?ie=UTF8&text=Marty+Neumeier&search-alias=digital-text&field-author=Marty+Neumeier&sort=relevancerank
And, in my opinion, everyone can benefit from reading: https://www.amazon.com/Positioning-Battle-Your-Al-Ries/dp/0071373586
There is, of course, lots more. These provide a place to start, though.
-
-
Step 1, don’t waste 1/3 of my screen on a useless bar: http://i.imgur.com/4f41VPf.png
-
-
I’ve attended a few conferences, at which they offered “speed dating”-like sessions, in which a handful of UX folks would give quick feedback on sites. Most times, the attendees seemed to find this useful—even though the sessions were short.
So, we’re trying the same thing on Officehours. I spent the past few days reaching out to folks with varied experience, asking if they’d take part. We managed to get a pretty wide range of people involved, who I feel bring some unique viewpoints.
The sessions are free. There’s no trick or ulterior motive with any of this. It’s just a few people who don’t mind lending a hand. If you have a chance to take a session, please do. And let me know how it works out for you. I’m interested to see if this format has legs.
-
This content seems more fit for Hacker News than lobste.rs.
-
-
Well, this is advice about how to effectively build momentum for your startup; I have never seen discussion of how to run a startup on lobste.rs. Career advice is certainly relevant here, but yes, this is one of the few cases where I’ll agree that HN is the clearly better destination, since startups are HN’s entire reason for existing.
A good way to figure out if something is relevant here in general is to look at what tags you’re trying to put on it, and whether they really fit. If there isn’t anything that does, it probably hasn’t been sufficiently interesting. I suppose “practices” does include this stuff, so that wouldn’t have helped in this case.
When in doubt, write a few sentences in the description field about why you found the link interesting or important, and why you think this audience would - at the very least, I think people will at least be nice enough not to downvote in that case. :)
-
-
-
-
I tried to group content, so readers could make sense of all the options. I also documented some of the ones that are gone/inactive, just to save interested folks some time.
I know the list is incomplete. At this moment I just don’t have the energy to add more of them. Perhaps I’ll feel differently in a few days.
-
The world needs a good open source IRC web-based client. Maybe that’s Chapp. Maybe it’s not. Think about it, won’t you?
-
-
-
like IRCv3? http://ircv3.net/
-
-
-
-
BTW: A little video we created to help explain how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfbav261Lqg
-
-
Thanks—it’s nice to hear that!
I storyboarded it, and then built the assets in Illustrator. (I tried to keep transitions really simple, as I don’t have any direct experience with animation.)
Once those were ready, I animated them in Flash, which seemed like the best tool for the job. I hadn’t used it in ~15 years, so it took a little while to get used to. That said, it was easier than I remember it being.
I then used a decent microphone to do the voice over and Audition to boost it a bit. (I think the audio could be better.)
The sound effects all came from iStock, which saved some time.
All in all, I’m happy it turned out OK. That said, I’m sure it could be a lot better if a pro would have put it together.
-
-
-
Out of curiosity, is there a plan for what the business model will be? So far it seems everything is free on both sides, if I’m not missing something.
-
We’ll start with job postings as we think this is a good environment for them. Once we have categories in place, recruiters will be able to tailor ads to appropriate audiences, which I think they’ll like. Additionally, they’ll be able to link their Officehours profiles to the posts. So, if someone wants to learn more about the position, or the recruiter wants to have a brief informational interview, they can use Officehours to do so.
Job posts don’t sound particularly exciting, but at ~@$200/each (which seems like a pretty common rate), we don’t need to sell many to stay afloat.
After that, we’ll start to offer value added services for those who want them. We see these as most useful to institutions (e.g. colleges and universities) that would like to group all of their people together, and offer prospective/current students support online. We haven’t worked everything out with this, but the folks I’ve spoken with in these places seem to think such features could be helpful.
Honestly, though, we’re not too concerned about revenue, yet. We’re just two guys, so our costs are pretty low. Plus, we did a bunch of things over the past year to buy some time (i.e. got rid of our office, started working from our homes, did a lot of client work, and saved money). So, we can run for a stretch before cash becomes a problem.
This is important to us, because something like Officehours isn’t that viable as a business until we can achieve a certain volume of traffic/activity. And that can’t happen until the experience is very good for all users. So, for the next while we’re just going to work on fixing bugs, improving the user experience, and adding new features—with hopes that we get the mix right.
-
-
Iceweasel 38.2 on Debian - Main page UI - continuously scrolls & jumps around the page ever second so I can’t read the text.
The text I did read convinced me to have a look & give it a go though :) (If I can get the browser to behave… :)
-
-
It would be nice to have a filter on this page: https://officehours.io/advisors
-
We didn’t rush on this feature, because we wanted to get user feedback quickly. (Plus, there was little need for it, when we only had a dozen advisors.) Now that we have a few more people using the service, the need for categories is much more pressing.
So, it’s in the works—and should be complete within the next 2 – 3 weeks.
-
-
there is a ‘profile’ button at the bottom, when not logged in, that then when clicked results in an error.
-
-
The snap-scroll feels very strange. Maybe only snap if one of the bottom buttons is clicked?
-
-
Couple other notes:
- Clicking “Profile” while logged in gives an error “User does not exist”. While true, mildly nonsensical.
- Of the twelve links in the bottom left corner, an appreciable amount don’t do anything unless you’re logged in, and are a little hostile to just clicking about. Especially since that nav bar disappears on login and error screens, breaking the flow of clicking around.
- Advisor list seems pretty homogeneous; focus is only an startup support? Seems like the service is reasonably generic, but it doesn’t come off in your current advisor list. I can imagine this as useful for bakers, makeup artists, writers and more.
-
Thanks for the notes. A few responses:
The “User does not exist” message is a bug. Not sure why that’s happening, but we’ll fix it.
The links in the footer are tricky. Certain areas just aren’t relevant until you’re signed-in. We could probably replace certain pages with temporary pages. E.g. the Calendar page could show an example of a calendar and say, “this will have your events in it, once you start offering/booking sessions.” or something of the sort.
The advisor list is still in its MVP state. (There was little need to make this more fully-featured until we had a few users.) Now that we do, we’re in the process of adding categories. These will help visitors sort through advisors more easily. They’ll also be able to filter by time, karma, et cetera.
-
-
-
The “Play Video” button seems to be broken in Firefox 42.0 on Linux Mint 17.1. I am seeing the error message “TypeError: player.seekTo is not a function” when I click it.
-
It’s a good question, but I think #lobsters already exists for what Chapp is offering in this case. ;)
Ahh—yes. I see that now. Didn’t know that existed.
You’re right. #lobsters probably does offer any of the utility/fun that Chapp would. I suppose the only things missing would be video/images, etc. That said, those might not really be that important.
Cheers!
In this context no, however I didn’t realize chapp.is has private rooms… I might start using it with guys at work. :)
Nice!