Love the concept and I'm hopeful that it gets the traction deserved.
A couple of UI comments from a brain that spends all day on conversion / UI:
a) HN at 1280x1024 gives you nearly 30 items without scrolling vs. ~10 on Inbound which feels like a UI problem.
b) The header is unnecessarily large, the "Hot Articles" title is redundant to the point of the site. In conversion testing I've never seen a larger header improve sticky/conversion and less is always more.
c) On hover you activate the color change of the story table but I still have to navigate to the actual link for the click through which is non-intuitive.
d) Categorizing is an interesting idea but I think that appeal of HN and many specific community sites (or subreddits for that matter) is that sub-categorizations aren't necessary. EG the community picks the content that's interesting to the community, and category sorting is a "power user" desire, but just confuses the 95%.
Big fan of the work you guys do elsewhere, hope this sticks!
Thanks for the feedback. You make some really good points.
a) You're right. Though we're not going to get to the same density as HN (we've deliberately chosen to show more information per article), we should be able to get more items in there.
b) You're right. It's too large.
c) Right again. We should allow clicking through the article on any area that triggers the hover.
d) This was a deliberate choice. We debated it, and categories won out. Though the right thing to do is to test it (and see what down-side impact the categories are having -- and whether that's worth the additional categorization).
For now, we're working on getting the site back up. The issue is not traffic (directly), but some strange wonkiness with the twitter oauth process.
You should also take a look at the site using IE8 (one of the largest browser segments for general traffic). The articles area is grey-ed out (you can hardly see it).
I also think you guys should re-think the categorization (I'm finding it incredibly distracting). If you remove the category name and give the link title more width (so that it's not truncated in many cases) - the title can speak for itself regarding the nature of the link.
Another +1 for removing categories. I find myself subconsciously ignoring headlines based on the category even though when I force myself to read it, it's actually something I'm interested in. Super dumb! But for me seems to be my human nature.
For what it's worth.
But love what I see and my social marketer has been forwarded the link and we'll keep checking it out.
A couple of UI comments from a brain that spends all day on conversion / UI:
a) HN at 1280x1024 gives you nearly 30 items without scrolling vs. ~10 on Inbound which feels like a UI problem.
b) The header is unnecessarily large, the "Hot Articles" title is redundant to the point of the site. In conversion testing I've never seen a larger header improve sticky/conversion and less is always more.
c) On hover you activate the color change of the story table but I still have to navigate to the actual link for the click through which is non-intuitive.
d) Categorizing is an interesting idea but I think that appeal of HN and many specific community sites (or subreddits for that matter) is that sub-categorizations aren't necessary. EG the community picks the content that's interesting to the community, and category sorting is a "power user" desire, but just confuses the 95%.
Big fan of the work you guys do elsewhere, hope this sticks!