This is intended to be constructive criticism, though you may find it harsh.
A quick look at the front page (particularly the stuff focused at the very top) does not suggest anything so much as a competitor to Gmail. Scroll down and the feature list does little to change this impression. For $20/user/mo?
All right, you don't have the resources to compete with Google... I understand... but how does that change my decision as a potential customer?
Maybe it would help to emphasize a little more on what the distinctive advantage is here. Is the point just to get out from under Google et al. with a similar product? If so, maybe find some way to invoke the problem you see with Google et al. I don't know what you MEAN by "innovation from the inside out" or why it matters to me enough to pay $20/user/mo (for the preview; it looks like you plan to increase the price later...)
Phrases like "shit work" and "dick around" and "sticky fingers" on the questions page might be phrased more professionally, and several pages could use punctuation work (you seem to omit periods a lot)...
I am a little concerned about a "custom mail engine I'm writing from scratch". Are there not any established tools to build on in the Ruby world? Why do I want an email service which does not support IMAP or Android? Is this primarily geared at Apple devices or what (if so, that could be signaled more clearly...)
>> This is intended to be constructive criticism, though you may find it harsh.
Any criticism is good right about now
It's very much a competitor to GMail, in that it's essentially GMail with some filtering and IMAP magic on top
To start with, my problem that I am attempting to solve is notifications for things I'm not interested in in the middle of the day, which I have attempted to solve with notifications + funnel
The distinctive advantage is the ability to modify when email is sent to you, plus the ability to filter different types of email (transactional, newsletter, human beings)
You're right on the unprofessional copy, I'm sorry, and the punctuation mistakes are simply a flaw in my English (It is my first language, there is no excuse)
I spent 3 months on the backend making sure it receives email perfectly, and securely, and I could not find a mail server written in Ruby which I could modify and add features like Funnel to
It supports IMAP, IMAP is the primary method which devices will retrieve email with (ActiveSync is patented by Microsoft, who would like licensing fees)
It will also support Android, as in, the native mail app on Android, I am just prioritising iOS first because it avoids competition with native GMail, which as one person, is nigh on impossible
Yes, it's primarily geared towards iOS devices for now, because I don't think I can compete with the GMail + Android paring yet
Thank you very much for the criticism, I'll do some changes now
> I spent 3 months on the backend making sure it receives email perfectly, and securely, and I could not find a mail server written in Ruby which I could modify and add features like Funnel to
The Sup mail client[1] went through a phase trying to handle IMAP directly, but the consensus was that it was simply too awful. It did yield some colorful code[2], but the fallout was that most people relied on offlineimap[3] to get their mail successfully.
$20 per month, per user seems a little high when compared to Gmail which is either free (personal) or $5/month (business). The fact that Google is able to charge for email is partially due to the fact that they offered it for free for so long and got so many people to like the experience that it created a lot of demand in the workplace for it - I think you really need a way to let people experience your application for free if you want any shot at enticing people to pay $20/month for it.
There may be some subset of people willing to pay $20/month for ultra-configurable filtering, but I'm not really sure how big that market is, and I doubt it will help you break into larger organizations.
I intend this as constructive criticism, so I hope you understand that and take it as such: please hire a designer. Email is an app one stares at all day, it has to look good. Not fancy, but restful and pleasing to the eye with function dictating form.
You should be able to fix the readability of this without hiring a designer. Not that you shouldn't hire a designer, but you shouldn't wait to fix it before you hire one either. Since email is all about text, if it looks unreadable that's going to be a big turn-off. Read at least the next paragraph of my post!
To start, I would reduce the font sizes on your header-type items somewhat. It's clear that you're using large fonts and bold to emphasize key information (which is the right idea), but a heuristic I've found is that if you're using bold, your font doesn't need to be as big, or if you're using a large size, you may not need to be bold. When you do both, it's like an assault on the eyes, which you don't need here. Doing this alone would make your app like 75% better (note: I made that number up entirely and don't know very much about your app.)
Next, you could tone down the reds (I would change the hard red #F00 color to the softer pink-ish color, and then reduce the pinkish color further), and exchange the black on white for something else. For your icons, you could experiment with grays (I like to start with #333 and then go up or down), so they're less overwhelming.
Finally, add some labels for your icons. Remember how you made your fonts smaller before? Well that applies to these labels. They should be contrasty so you can read them, but otherwise it's fine if they're subtle.
A couple of minor points about your website: the proper name of your competitor is Gmail, not GMail. You should add more spacing between your icons and the text (it feels crowded currently.) Also, your circle arrow jobs are getting cut off at the bottom.
Finally part ii: don't forget to steal from others. Obviously I don't mean blatantly stealing a design, but just check out what other sites do. To do this effectively, you have to pick a particular thing and examine it closely. So for example, if you want to figure out how to do headers, go to other sites and see what they do to give emphasis to things without being overwhelming.
The font is Segoe UI, I did that screenshot before I bought Proxima Nova, so the font will become Proxima Nova (I may Instapaper this and give you a bazillion settings for it)
As for the icons, they are a very tricky subject, I intended to create symbols for major features such as Funnel and Triage and have common icons for everything else, but it seems I've failed there
Typekit gets you Proxima Nova as part of their package among others fonts. It's not bad, but for something like email, it may be helpful to use the standard stack of fonts.
My app sends emails (not a competitor). The interface uses proxima nova, but the email rendering is generally in an iframe with default sans-serif or serif font-faces.
If you use sans-serif as the first font-face that will default to Helvetica on Macs and Arial on Windows.
I generally don't like toolbars with lots of icons that don't have labels. Google's web properties have been moving in this direction and I find myself having to click buttons to figure out what they do.
>Just off the top of my head you know what I would like to see as an email interface: Reddit.
Each headline being the suvject being an email with all the comments being the replies. Different users can reply in a threaded way to all the recipients of the message etc.
Obviously it would need in-line attachements and in-line pictures.
It would be interesting to allow a vote system on messages. Rather than file them, you down or up vote them. But in your box, you have more than one vote so you can apply more or less weight to info. Along with tags and groups and many other things that I can think of...
That would be cool.
---
I think you're on to something if you can incorporate the reddit model moreso in your app...
Though I think you need a designer pretty badly, and the costing model is too high.
Where are you located? I'd love to beta this and provide feedback? Would you be interested in this... I am a product manager, IT background and other things... I alos have an amazing Designer I could hook you up with...
>>Derpyhooves, a custom mail engine I'm writing from scratch in Ruby.
I know that programmers like to come up with fun names for their projects, but I think naming the core of your business after an MLP character is a bit over the top.
I would also suggest you have instrumentation set up for your app so that you can see how users are using it. I've used mixpanel.com before, it's free to start with. That way you can capture key user interactions that you're interested in (eg, are people using the "foo" button?). You can also use it to catch exceptions, especially where you think there might be issues like with your ssl cert.
Good luck, I admire your initiative to "ship" your project and it looks like you are getting good feedback on HN thus far.
More constructive criticism: your benefits seem to really be features. To convert your features to benefits, you need to talk about likely possible use cases. For example, one "benefit" that you list is "Custom notifications", but that doesn't really tell me anything - it doesn't connect to me at all. Instead if you had said "Get invoice notifications when you get to work", that would resonate with me more. You'd obviously have to tailor your benefits to your target customers.
No, the proper response to this is to fork out more money for a certificate that is more widely supported! It's email, it should be secure / trustworthy?
This might be an issue with - "purchased certificate must be combined with a root CA certificate for it to be trusted by browsers", see https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/ssl-certificate i think it is an nginx thing? And definitly do NOT disable ssl
Disabling SSL is even worse - there is no way I'm going to trust someone with something as important as my email if they don't offer SSL or can't get it right.
Please don't mistake this for flame, but instead its intended to be constructive:
As a UI/UX guy, I would say:
1) The homepage sucks. Really. The red color is so bright that it would attract all the user's attention and would make them ignore the important features you have advertised below
Red is used to implement anything important (like call-to-action buttons) and it looks like you are over-using red. Its a very bad sign, especially when the UI is one of the selling points, and especially when you are charging a premium ($20).
2) >A complete replacement for GMail
a) Is going to attract a lot of negative attention,
b) is not ethical
Why? Because it is not a complete replacement for Gmail and never will be.
Why not? Because of various reasons - UI, Features (Some features in Gmail labs aren't available with yours) and finally Price.
3)$20 a month for email is overkill. And there's absolutely no reason why as an end user I should use yours over Gmail, because its free. From what I see, some of the features you claim to provide, which you claim to make your app superior to Gmail fail to impress me. For example, the event scheduling. I'm sure I can do something close with Google's calendar app?
4)If you are targeting Gmail users, then, for what platform? PC? Mac?? Android?? iPhone??? Be clear, right now its hard to digest if this is just a weekend hack or a serious app, because the pitch of your app. isn't clear enough, atleast not on the homepage. (Being brutally honest)
5) There was another guy who tried the same thing - I believe its called Mailapp. It would be good for you, if you could learn from his mistakes, you can find his post here on HN and how much criticism he received despite his UI being significantly better than yours, by many folds. Read what people expect, from the comments here on HN on the mail app, I believe it would help you a lot.
There is a fundamental problem with such apps. Embracing Apple-sque minimal User-Interface design is a good idea only when you know what you're doing and how things should look. There is a reason why important elements like the compose button in Gmail are in red. There is a reason why links are in blue. First try to understand these reasons behind the psychology of colors before you get minimal. Making something/Marketing something minimal doesn't make you smart or superior, infact you will be offending many users because of your poor understanding of UX. Look at the home page, look at the red color for the unread messages. In one sentence - Its highly un-professional, especially considering the fact that you charge me $20 for this.
See, we live in a time where for $50 a year we get an account on a cool photo-sharing site like 500px. Please consider reducing the price if you want to get in more users. For $20 a month, one can run their own VPS (Linode) and run their own E-Mail server..(but not sure why anyone would do that thought, but just saying)
Please do not get offended, I sincerely want you to improve your app. All the best, my friend, wishing you good luck!!
A quick look at the front page (particularly the stuff focused at the very top) does not suggest anything so much as a competitor to Gmail. Scroll down and the feature list does little to change this impression. For $20/user/mo? All right, you don't have the resources to compete with Google... I understand... but how does that change my decision as a potential customer?
Maybe it would help to emphasize a little more on what the distinctive advantage is here. Is the point just to get out from under Google et al. with a similar product? If so, maybe find some way to invoke the problem you see with Google et al. I don't know what you MEAN by "innovation from the inside out" or why it matters to me enough to pay $20/user/mo (for the preview; it looks like you plan to increase the price later...)
Phrases like "shit work" and "dick around" and "sticky fingers" on the questions page might be phrased more professionally, and several pages could use punctuation work (you seem to omit periods a lot)...
I am a little concerned about a "custom mail engine I'm writing from scratch". Are there not any established tools to build on in the Ruby world? Why do I want an email service which does not support IMAP or Android? Is this primarily geared at Apple devices or what (if so, that could be signaled more clearly...)
Good luck