KnowledgeBid - YC applicant - looking for feedback

Re:KnowledgeBid - YC applicant - looking for feedback by Alex3917 on Wednesday October 10, 2007 @05:52PM (#66024)

I'm actually going to go against everyone else and suggest making it messier. I think with a site like this you actually benefit from having some ridiculous graphics, a la the million dollar homepage. Right now the site is difficult to read, but that's only because there is too much text too close together. The problem with super clean is that it gives the site an empty feel. Throw in a few gifs to give the site a little personality and it makes it feel like there's something going on. You can always clean it up later, like what Amazon and eBay have done recently and MySpace will probably do in the future. Some might argue that eBay should have been cleanly designed from the very beginning, but personally I think the initial garish layout probably helped it to gain traction.

The only trick is you still need a way to convey what the site is about, make it easy to navigate, and display whatever information the user needs to see on any given page.

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Re:KnowledgeBid - YC applicant - looking for feedback by DaniFong on Wednesday October 10, 2007 @06:06PM (#66032)

Eww.

Don't do that.

If you want, make some other, throwaway messy version, host it on a different domain, and prove to yourself that messy is bad.

BBS's had personality. Hacker News has personality. And they're clean. Trying to make a website seem like it has personality by deliberately making it messy is an example of the worst kind of superficiality -- superficiality that lies about it's origin and intent.

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Re:KnowledgeBid - YC applicant - looking for feedback by Alex3917 on Wednesday October 10, 2007 @06:18PM (#66036)

Authors start with a blank page, so if there's something there then it's probably there for a reason. It doesn't really make sense to claim that the ecommerce sites of the past were messy "by accident" but that doing the same now would be superficial. The design of Hacker News is great, but I don't think there's one Ultimate Best Design that should be applied to every single app.

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Re:KnowledgeBid - YC applicant - looking for feedback by jkush on Wednesday October 10, 2007 @09:02PM (#66101)

No, but you also need to have a very clear design which transmits a mental model of how your site operates. I'd be skeptical of a site that was messy and over cluttered especially if I was going to be using it to trade knowledge!

I think a clinical, empty look wouldn't do, but adding more mess is the wrong direction.

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Re:KnowledgeBid - YC applicant - looking for feedback by Alex3917 on Wednesday October 10, 2007 @09:33PM (#66108)

If clutter made it harder to form a mental model then everyone in Vegas would be lost.

edit: But the reason everyone isn't lost is because Vegas is basically one straight road with flashing lights on the sides. Which is more or less what I'm proposing.

Also, I see your point about the knowledge seeking demographic. Not sure whether I agree or not. For every Jimbo Wales looking to hire a philosophy postdoc, there could be a hundred MySpacers looking to hire someone to clean out their bongs. Or maybe not, who knows.

Also, on a different topic, there should be a way to embed ads for experts onto my blog or homepage.

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Re:KnowledgeBid - YC applicant - looking for feedback by rwebb on Thursday October 11, 2007 @09:07AM (#66232)

Thanks - this is on our to-do list as well. You could use SpringWidgets now but we'll probably make a Digg type widget down the road and let bloggers embed referral codes in it.

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Re:KnowledgeBid - YC applicant - looking for feedback by rwebb on Wednesday October 10, 2007 @06:02PM (#66030)

thanks? my sarcasm meter is broken. i have no idea if you are serious.

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Re:KnowledgeBid - YC applicant - looking for feedback by Alex3917 on Wednesday October 10, 2007 @06:09PM (#66033)

I'm completely serious. Unless I'm being completely fooled by randomness, I don't think it's a coincidence that so many of the top ecommerce sites have started out messy and have gradually become more clean AFTER gaining a following. eBay, Amazon, alibaba, yahoo!, epinions, squidoo, etc.

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Re:KnowledgeBid - YC applicant - looking for feedback by jsmcgd on Wednesday October 10, 2007 @08:29PM (#66087)

Perhaps the trend reflects the fact that they finally worked out which one is actually better.

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Re:KnowledgeBid - YC applicant - looking for feedback by Alex3917 on Wednesday October 10, 2007 @09:22PM (#66105)

If the user knows what a site does and what they're trying to do, then it makes sense to have a really clean design that gets them where they're going in the fewest clicks. But back in 1997 most of eBay's prospective users didn't know what eBay was, what they were doing there, or what eBay could do for them.

Hypothesis: The less the users know what the site does and what they want to do, in other words the less clear the goal, the less important it is to minimize the number of clicks to reach that goal. And the more experience users have with a site, the more important it is to streamline the process.

I think premature optimization applies to not just code but also design. For example, joining the Wikipedia community is probably much more difficult now even though the meta pages are much more ordered and clean than a few years ago. Whereas when the community pages were a hodgepodge of random crap it was a lot easier to just jump into the community and start contributing.

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