Nothing complicated... Just posting on relevant subreddits, HN, Designer News, etc.
I think the more important (and far more difficult) part is writing an article that's interesting enough that it doesn't need a lot of work or trickery to get visits.
Then you should not hire them again! The quality is very poor. There are many grammatical mistakes and the style is quite clunky. It makes your company seem a lot less professional.
That doesn't quite read correctly. "Build your database with an online spreadsheet" or "Create your database as easily as a spreadsheet" or "Build with the power of a database and the ease of a spreadsheet"
Ps. Love the idea for the project, I have been looking out for something like this for a while.
Got it. We've put the simple demo and tutorial as a automatically installed application in your account when you registered.
Looks like we need more clear explanation even before the registration. We tried to focus on the benefits of Ragic to encourage registration, but it looks like it's not clear enough "why" our product can bring this benefit.
From a user's standpoint, I think you're focusing too much on trying to get me to register. I won't even get to the demo if it requires me to register.
I get it from your perspective, you want to get their info so you can follow up, etc. It's just risky since a lot of people won't get to the "Aha" moment and will just end up leaving.
Yes, we've worked on A LOT of items from the last submission.
The biggest problem was that it's not really easy for people to get started on how to build applications with Ragic. People don't like to read documents, so we added an "Interactive Tutorial".
The interactive tutorial takes new users step by step to build a simple application on Ragic, pretty much like how you do it on a flash game or online game. If you click through the tutorial, you will have built a simple Ragic application. We really hope that this can help our users get the hang of it.
Trying to answer here for him: I ran into troubles with the third field added - the demo didn't react anymore, I couldn't type in the field name. Also I agree that it should be a bit less restrictive. For example it only accepts the step when I actually type in "Customer". I'd prefer arrows and a fixed help box instead of the overlays - as it is at one time had to look around where it wants me to go next.
A few more things:
- It was hard for me to get into design mode again after having tried the form view. I'd make that more prominent. Right now I think it's only in the context menu for the entities, not for the whole db however.
- I see forms, but do you have (dynamic) list views as well? How do I format / generate them?
- Try to get rid of all the "leave this page" browser warnings.
- paragraph text fields behave very odd in Chrome (graphical issues after resizing, I think it also cut some pasted text). I also think rich text capability might be critical there, but I can understand that you wanted to avoid that beast at first.
In general I like the approach - I think it's a very valid business idea to try to give benefits to all those businesses with Excel 'workflow applications'. The ability to do multiuser editing might be a big enough benefit alone to get some customers - maybe you could accentuate more on that. IMO however the UX from the developer end needs a lot of streamlining.
1. What browser/OS version are you using? I would like to reproduce this issue.
2. It's in the context menu you mentioned, and in the upper right corner of the form. We should find some way to make it more prominent.
3. The dynamic list views are generated automatically. When you finish designing a form, just click "<< Back Listing" and it will take you to the listing page.
4. We added the "leave this page" warning because a lot of users have mentioned that they accidentally click on the exit button.
5. There's some special feature that we added to the copy and paste function that might confuse new users. I think we need to disable it by default. The feature is mean to match the field names from the source with the field names in the Ragic form, and put values from the source to their corresponding fields.
Really appreciate the feedback, please let me know if there's any other advices. I can be contacted at jeff at ragic dot com
1) OSX 10.8.x, latest Chrome (omw right now, can't check)
4) How about a save-by-default stance? is versioning and rollback hard to implement on your stack? (those two characteristics should be used together IMO) Alternatively I'd just implement a message that asks whether to save, forget changes or cancel.
We had a sandbox account log in at the registration page, but after some testing we found that it made a lot of people who would have signed up just go to the sandbox instead.
You could generate a unique key for each visitor as a sandbox user and then give the prompt to convert to a full account once the user has started interacting with the site. Be sure to make it non-intrusive though.
Ragic, a Database/Excel hybrid. I just posted Show HN above.
It's a product where you can build online databases just like creating a Web Excel spreadsheet.
There's free trial that you can try out first with online tutorial. The lite license is $5/user/month
If the user already have data on an Excel, we provide an import wizard so that they can import their Excel and create a database with it.
If the user does not have existing data from Excel, they can first define the data fields on Ragic using the design mode. They can actually create cells as fields just like they would on a spreadsheet, but a lot of users find it hard to catch on so we added the drag and drop model just recently. So both ways should work okay.
And actually we do support OpenID log in, and the ability to click on an URL in e-mail to grant access to some DB entries. I guess we have to work on making these features more obvious to users.
