Looking for feedback on our new start-up
greybox.co
greybox.co
Rating: Meh. I'll play around for a bit but probably won't stick around.
The good:
- Homepage Design: Great. Reminds me of a Pinterest for content (not just pretty pictures)
- UX: Great signup, almost madlibs-style
- You don't make me confirm my email before actually signing in
- you don't make me have to join before browsing/adding value
The fail:
- Value proposition? The about page is fluff
- Why the landing pages for each article? Are you trying to instapaper-style redress the content in a more readable form? Then why just a part of the article? Are you rewriting the content via NLP or seomthing? You never tell me that.
- Community: Why the social network aspects? Do I need a social network to consume my news?
- New articles. How do I add new articles? What if I want to bring in an article I found elsewhere? I'm sure you can do it, but the UX doesn't make this intuitive.
- After signup: Great. I have no friends except the founders. No content. Don't see that there is anyone else using the service. I'm supposed to be munching content. But after logging in I don't see any. Take me to content consumption or the community!
- Design Fail: The user control box in the top left is hanging over my article using Google Chrome.
All in all... What's the benefit to this versus one of a million other ways to consume content? The value isn't shown implicitly or explicitly. Not better designed than Flipboard. Not more configurable than Pulse. Not more content breadth than Reddit. Not more "grab and read at my convenience on any device" than Instapaper. So what do I use greybox for? Is it just another pretty face? All the product descriptions are fluffy and nondescript, which is a turnoff. The design is great. From the about page is seems like you guys use this specific CMS and wanted to show that you could make a news aggregator with it. Cheerio! But why would I use this every day?
Is this a serious "let's build a business" launch? Or is it a "look what I made, it shows what I can do with this CMS, but we don't intend to really drop everything and pursue this full time and think we'll actually build a business."