Hacker News Reader

Comment by crowcroft | Hacker News Reader

Some immediate feedback – if you want to ask people to spend their time in your app for feedback, make it easy for them and ask specific questions.

I'm curious enough to click the link and have a look. I'll even leave a comment (as evidenced by this note), but I'm not curious enough to read through a wall of text, and make some vague 3-7 day time commitment.

If you want people to be engaged and spend time learning this tool and providing feedback, reach out to friends. Strangers online are unlikely to care enough to get past the first sentence of that landing page.

View on HN

Thanks for the feedback, I really appreciate it! Not sure if you've heard of Pieter Levels, but I watch some of his seminars, and he often talks about how with friends or family, you can end up hyping each other up. I guess that’s why I wanted to get opinions from strangers this time—I've had past experiences where people close to me (and myself) got too excited about an idea, only for it to fail. I figured getting feedback from people who don’t know me might be more straightforward.

I totally get the long paragraph thing—it’s been pointed out to me by one of my family members that it’s a bit much, and I understand not everyone wants to read through all of it. I just thought it’d be better to provide more info than less, but yeah, looking back, I should probably trim it down a bit. Thanks again for the comment!

Good luck finding testers.

I understand the concern with getting feedback from friends and family, you definitely want to avoid getting into a bubble. One thing you can try – don't ask for feedback, ask for complaints.

If you ask for negative feedback you're more likely to get useful information from them. Even better if you can be specific about what you're after. Questions might be something like: 'During the first five minutes when you were setting up events, what did you find confusing?'

Thanks for the advice, I really appreciate it! I totally see your point about asking for complaints instead of just feedback—people are often more honest when they can point out what's not working. I’ll definitely try asking more specific questions as you suggested. I guess next time I do something like this, I'll know what I could have done better.

Thanks again for your feedback, and for giving it a try—that’s all I can really ask for. Happy New Year!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com