I released my first update this morning! Thank you hubski for your advice last month. I'm still working on several other ideas I received. If you have any new ideas or comments, please let me know and I'll add your username to the about page!
I'm going to give you some feedback on design rather than app / messaging / etc. 1. Line Height! Woo! Line height is the space in between the lines of text. In css, you use
Here's your site now: Here's it with 150% line height (I used * { line-height: 150%; }) 2. I know you love your huge uppercase first letter but frankly it doesn't work for an app like this. You end up with wicked white space (and not in a good way.) My advice is to drop it, use that white space in other places (like a decent padding on your interior boxes). 3. Typography. Typography is hard. It really is. I truly suck at it. So I steal from other places. Here's some of my favorite sites that show me how to do type good: http://www.typ.io/ http://hellohappy.org/beautiful-web-type/ http://fontsinuse.com/ If you have any inclination to improve your design / type skills (which you totally don't have to if you want to focus on dev), I recommend Chrome Extensions Font Ninja and WhatFont. These allow you to click any element on a page and see font, size, color, line height, etc. Then be aware of every site you are on and how they use type. Now, a bit about the app premise. I understand the idea and I think it's novel (at best). What I think you need to find a way to show why you want to submit content to be featured AND why a user would want to visit the app to see the content. My first thought is...man what happens if the winning post is like "poop". Then I don't get anything new for 24 hours? Some things to think about might be spontaneity, serendipity, ease of use, non-addicting (hey..you don't have to scroll forever like you do on facebook), etc. Also, your stats for social media may be correct but I'll argue that only your users of your apps will hear what I have to say. It's not "everyone" - especially since at least 50% of my friends are on iOS.
That number can be anything - pixels, percentage, ems, etc. However, the key to making line heights awesome EVERYWHERE is simply use 120-150%. The more line height the better, IMO.
line-height: num;
My God, this is by far the highest quality feedback I have received yet (and I've been consulting a LOT of communities online). Thank you so much for taking the time to lay this out. It will take me some time to consider and process it all but I do take it seriously. As promised I add the usernames of people who provide helpful input to the app's about page (its all I can offer at the moment) and you definitely earned that. If you prefer not to have it there, just let me know and I'll remove it. Thanks again for this amazing critique and information. Also, yes, I really like having the large first letter. What if I was able to make it lay inline instead of on top of the line? I.e. the large letter sits at the beginning of the first two lines. Just thinking off the top of my head. I'd love to find an elegant way to keep the large first letter.
That's fine - more than enough. I'm happy to help in any way I can. I knew you loved that letter. :) That would work better. The Hubski Illuminated style (I think it's broken now) used this technique. This is the only bit of code I can find from the original CSS file. I'm not entirely sure why or how it works but it did...I think...It appears that floating the first letter allows it to be floated as any other element. I spent a lot of time trying to make it work.As promised I add the usernames of people who provide helpful input to the app's about page
Also, I really like having the large first letter. What if I was able to make it lay inline instead of on top of the line? I.e. the large letter sits at the beginning of the first two lines. Just thinking off the top of my head. I'd love to find an elegant way to keep the large first letter.
.pubtext p {
margin: 8px 0;
font-size: 15px;
}
I would recommend going through some of the news sites that use this technique and see how they do it, combo of fonts, etc. Don't waste your New Yorker article views on this tho - their first letters suck! .pubtext:first-letter {
font-family: 'goudy_initialenregular', serif;
font-size: 75px;
float: left;
padding-right: 3px;
}
Just wanted to echo this because IMO its the biggest problem with your app right now, at least design-wise. It makes it look like the first letters of past winners are meant to spell something out, acrostic-style.I know you love your huge uppercase first letter but frankly it doesn't work for an app like this.
|Each day one winner is chosen and their message is broadcast to everyone. The fact that this statement is false both hurts and helps your idea. First, and most obviously, "everyone" is in fact "the other users of the app", not actually everyone. Even with record setting numbers of users, that's going to be a small fraction of everyone. Getting my message out to the users of your app is quite a bit less exciting than getting a message in front of everyone. On the other hand, the fact is that I don't care what most people have to say. If you really did pick a random person from the entire planet each day, I would probably stop reading in very short order because the overwhelming majority of daily messages would be utterly uninteresting to me. If users of your app were consistently more insightful than average, you might be able to keep me interested. Unfortunately, that's rather counter to your premise.
Mechanics question: how is the winning submission chosen? If it's random, that's problematic because you could end up with stupid stuff, diminishing the appeal of reading the daily post, which in turn diminishes the appeal of submitting (smaller audience). But if it's controlled by some kind of moderator, that's also problematic because they control what "everyone" sees, which leaves ample room for a biased content stream. But that gives me an idea: I'll edit it in sometime soon. E: Never mind, I forgot it
The winner is chosen at random by an automated script so there will be stupid posts. I don't know if there is any good way around it unforunately. Moderating the posts seems to go against the core ideal of the app. I think "stupid" can be subjective and leaving the app truly random allows us to hear people we never would have heard, even if they don't have something profound to say. I think there can be some value in that.
Categories!!! When this app gets huge, you're gonna have a lot of people thinking.. oh boy, what are the odds of my message winning, that'd be great! Well, what happens when you've got 1m+ users all of a sudden is just like the actual lottery, which most intelligent people won't play because it's a scam and you'll statistically never win. So why bother posting, even if I don't have to pay for it, it's a waste of my time and I will likely have no connection to the post or the poster who wins. But what if you could break it down, a dozen winners a day (still, out of a countless # of users!) in Music, Art, Fashion, Politics or Relationships, Sex, Confessions, Crush shout-outs, College etc. Not only will you be able to tailor your userbase by targeting exactly who you want with the categories you provide, you will increase user relatability to your app because they may find a category that matters to them. and they'll stay, and they'll post, and they'll challenge their friends to see if they'll win, and what song they'll post in the Music category– who does the winner shout out in their post?? Moreover, you've got a reason to get people checking back on the app throughout the day, to see who won in each category, instead of just looking it up in the morning and sayin "ah, ok, got it" and never opening it again. And you don't have to devalue the gratification of a winning post by having multiple winners a day in just one cesspool of who-knows-what. Not a perfect system but I think it'd be a great feature. Hope this gets big!
Categories is a suggestion I have gotten from several users. It is a great idea and I will definitely work in implementing it soon. One idea you raised that I hadn't considered is staggering the different wins throughout the day to keep people coming back to the app. That's brilliant. I could keep the notification for the grand lottery and have optional notifications for the categories, so that people don't get notification fatigue. Thanks for this input! I'll add your name to the About page as a thank you! Just let me know if you don't want it there and I'll remove it.