Critique my website?

bordes

Gawd
Joined
May 29, 2002
Messages
596
Hi [Hard],

I just finished pushing a live version of an idea i've been thinking about for awhile. It's a website where incumbents can actually rate, review, and give their bosses feedback. The idea kinda spawned from ratemyprofessor but for the professional realm.

I was curious about what your opinions are on the user flow that I managed to stitch together (I'm not a professional by any means).

The website is here:

http://www.thenakedboss.com/

Is the user flow intuitive to use? Did you have any trouble finding how to create a costume for your boss? Did you notice any bugs during the review entry process? Any feedback concerning the design, user flow, backend, is much appreciated! I think it's a cool idea and I'm eager to hear what others think.
 
1. Why are you not minimizing your templates?
2. Why do you have a lot of inline JS?
3. Please do not use a plain hashtag to mark a location! Congratulations you just messed up their back button.

- http://www.thenakedboss.com/#

VS

- http://www.thenakedboss.com/#aboutus

4. Add tips when you hover over each input so that a user will know what they're for (believe me users are dumb as fuck).
5. Please use pushState to change locations.
6. Please update your libraries.
7. Create your own global namespace for your boss application.
8. If you use concatenate a lot, try creating an array and then joining them later.
9. Why XHTML transitional? Why not HTML5?

UX suggestion:

1. Instead of giving the user 5 *optional* inputs, why not just give them ONE first? An area where it searches for both *company and *name.

It's a lot simplier and gives the feeling of 'oh this is all I have to do, nice'.

If they want to be more specific, they can click a toggle that will show them more options.

2. If everything is optional, don't even bother putting optional.

3. Have you tested this on a lot of browsers? IE? FF? Chrome? Opera? Safari?

4. Not mobile friendly.
5. Not mobile friendly.
6. Not mobile friendly.
7. Not mobile friendly.
8. Not mobile friendly.
 
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If I search for a name and no results are listed, how do I get back to the previous search fields? (One answer is to use the tiny little magnifying glass icon, but the workflow needs to have a more obvious option. I suggest putting a link above or below the "create new boss" field.)

Remove any non-implemented links/icons. (e.g. LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.) Or do some extra work to emphasize that you are aware they are non-working or disabled.
 
Just some additional things from technical perspective :

Use a CDN to host your static files.

For font weights (Lato), do you really need 300, 400, 700 and 900? That's quite a bit of additional weight.

You can load more than one font from Google Fonts using a single <link>.

Minification was mentioned, in addition, combine your assets (for production use).

Instead of using plain old Google Analytics tracking code, use Google Tag Manager. Much more useful.
 
Remind me never to post my website here for critique, lol.

For what it's worth, the site looks good, OP.
 
From a visitor's perspective...

There is no way to browse, only to search.

I found only one result for Los Angeles, "Philip Franchini". If this is an employer, it lists nothing about the type/size of business, etc. The web site listed goes to what appears to be someone's blog?

And what's with those "costumes" you're supposed to choose between? It seems rather juvenile.

You could use a logo.

Overall, I didn't see anything compelling to make me want to explore or use the site.
 
From a designer's perspective..

The orange text on the blue background of the "About" page creates a lot of visual noise. I'd recommend going with white or a very light blue.

The "About" page scrolls even though all the text fits in the browser window. Kind of awkward functionality.

As someone else mentioned, here I searched for "Los Angeles" and got this result. But there's no option to just return to the search, only "create a new boss". There should be a "new search" option.

I'd also make your hit areas a little larger for the small icons at the top. You have to move the cursor very close to the icons to get them to activate and I had to move my cursor to read the labels.

I also agree with P4rD0nM3 on the "optional" labels. Maybe make one search input that says "Company or Full Name" and then have an "advanced search" option?

Also, minor thing, but I don't know why there's an asterisk before the main paragraph.

Good luck with your site!
 
BLOODY HELL!

The site is dog slow on FF25 and hogs 100% CPU - if you enable JS which is needed because a simple HTML link was obviously not hip enough. At this point, I don't even care about the site's intent or anything else. Gone and never visited again.
 
I think the art is really good (Adobe Illustrator?)
The idea is pretty good too.
I also think the constructive feedback from the others is very good too.
It's helping me out as well.

Great thread.
 
BLOODY HELL!

The site is dog slow on FF25 and hogs 100% CPU - if you enable JS which is needed because a simple HTML link was obviously not hip enough. At this point, I don't even care about the site's intent or anything else. Gone and never visited again.

+1. I think this issue needs to be addressed first. I like the idea.
 
Are you looking more for design critique, UX or code?

Off the top of my head for code.
  • Inline Stylying will be a pain in the future
  • Remove inline JS

I dont know what the backend is and really, those are just improvments. When starting something like this speed of the essance when getting a product to market. Just re-iterate again

UX & Design. I'm no designer but my 2 cents.
I would say some of the orange gets hard to read in the gradients you might want to make solid color containers where you put your text in on your "about/read more" section. Otherwise i think it looks good. I only had a few minutes to really take a look but congrats on getting you site up, most people never even get to that point when they want to make something of their own.
 
The site is pretty badly broken; I can barely navigate it. For example:

  1. go to thenakedboss.com
  2. Click "click here to read more"
  3. Arrive at a new page with no new URL, so I can't directly book mark it.
  4. It's got light orange text on a blue background, which is almost completely unreadable.
  5. This page scrolls vertically, but doesn't need to.
  6. Press back. Doesn't go back.

Here's another:

  1. go to thenakedboss.com
  2. Don't enter anything (after all, all of the fields are marked "optional")
  3. click "Search"
  4. "We found results." But it's too much to ask that they're actually displayed, I guess.
  5. "Or, Create a new boss!" is displayed, even though results were found. "C" shouldn't be capitalized. The conjunction is still pretty anachronistic, even when "We found 0 results" is displayed.

The site claims to provide "a secure space", but doesn't do anything to substantiate that claim.
 
I think the name is bad "The naked boss" and there are sites that already do this.
 
Remind me never to post my website here for critique, lol.

For what it's worth, the site looks good, OP.

I agree... remind me never to submit my site here :p You did a very nice job on your site.... but you seem to do what I do, and got too caught up with designing things perfectly. People like you and I may appreciate the floating javascript clouds in the background (very nice touch), but most people probably didn't notice them, and it may make your site slower, or inaccessible to some people (people with js disabled, older browsers, older hardware, etc etc).

You can tell you've spent *hours* (days?) polishing this site to look good, but I think some of the code you've written works against you in terms of gaining an audience. However, I *personally* would visit a site like that repeatedly, just because it looks nice... but I don't think most people will. Most people just want fast content that looks decent... and javascript/jquery is slowing you down.

All in all, I'd say not to change anything besides the clouds... just for performance/accessibility.. but I guess other people have different opinions. Nice job.. you could do professional work, as the hardest part is coming up with creative elements like you did. Nice touch on the jumping buttons.. but again... is it really needed? Do that kind of stuff once you've already attracted visitors... focus on the ease of use/delivery of content at first.

Also... (sorry, but I have a pet-peeve about this) why did you use XHTML? Some people won't visit your site just because of you using that, because they don't agree with it.. and I'm half-not-kidding :eek:

Edit: By the way.. what did you use to create the graphics? They're professional-grade, in my opinion.
 
I also wanted to add that you can do most of the stuff (like the mouseover button animations) with CSS/HTML using animations.

You can see how it's just as easy to do it in CSS (and it'll be more universal/accessible by people), by looking at this W3 page: http://www.w3schools.com/css/css3_animations.asp

Take care...keep up the good work.
 
Indeed; if you don't want feedback, you're a fool to ask for it. I agree that most people get too focused on presentation details when they secondary to the whole point of the site: content.

Who in the world decides to not use a site because it uses XHTML? What is their rationale?
 
netsider is insane.

You obviously didn't try to use the site and find out how everything is broken and doesn't work. Original poster hasn't spent time fixing any of the easy to fix problems, he just packed up and left. Also, explain your rational for what you said about XHTML because it sounds ridiculous. What's bad about having conforming XML?
 
Just wondering, is this a proof of concept? If not, it may make more sense to prioritize marketing and getting feedback from users and the sort of pain points they have. None of us (presumably) are using your product, so us giving feedback may not be *as* useful. Still useful, but acquiring and getting feedback from users really trumps the kind of advice non-users may give at this early of a stage.
 
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