At the moment it doesn't email people when a match has been made - my thinking behind that was the person who requests the help would most likely already email their new match to ask for help - if you guys think it would make more sense for the app to email to introduce, then I could look at including that too. Thanks again for all your comments! :D
But, my main areas of expertise (statistics, e.g. data analysis or mining, modeling or forecasting, designing and analyzing experiments, ...) don't mesh well with your categories. Have you thought about allowing users to search profiles, or some means of adding categories (sugestion box?)?
I noticed you need some help with the typography though, so let this be my first hackerbuddy contribution: http://f.cl.ly/items/0A3o083L2v1O402t1z1x/hacker-buddy-2.png
Sorry for png instead of CSS, I hacked it quickly in inspector, but should be easy to reproduce.
By the way, I stole the colour palette from Adobe Kuler. For hackers that struggle with design, it's amazing (ColourLovers.com, too)
Left-align vs justify might be worth retrying, justify won in my 5-second comparison. You're right about en dash; I left the copy entirely untouched because I didn't want to spend more than a few minutes on the whole thing.
While you're at it, the signup-button could use some love, too...
It would be great if you could expand the areas of expertise though. For example, I have significant expertise with cloud computing, EC2 deployment, scaling, MongoDB, but there's nowhere to mention this. I also have expertise deploying Rails in production, the different possible setups, etc. Just checking off "Rails" is a bit broad.
Thanks!
I'd like the hardcoded areas of expertise removed in favor of an autocomplete freeform box, much like Stack Overflow's tags box. For example, I'd like to put that I'm a Drupal expert and I'd like to look for node.js help, but neither of those are options.
I'm not sure a tagging system is the best option though. It's very flexible indeed but it's at the expense of the simplicity of checkboxes. Especially when many tags mean the same thing. eg: rails and rubyonrails.
Since "hacker" expertise is a limited scope, perhaps expanding from there is a better idea?
I'll contact Ad Muncher and alert them to the problem.
Also, StackOverflow has also been extremely helpful, especially given that I'm such a noob at this. For example, one of my questions was so basic about the ORM that after I found out the solution I felt like such an idiot. [1]
That being said...if you want a business and/or hacker buddy to bounce ideas off let me know. My contact info is in my user listing.
[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4907479/how-do-i-do-multi...
ETA: some sort of "undo" button (i.e. no longer needing help) would be nice :)
I just signed up to get a feel for the site for now.
I also recommend skill set options in product management, project management and community relations.
Great job on starting HackerBuddy. I was impressed with how quickly it matched me up with someone!
Ideas as they came to me:
1. Cool icons and good tooltips for areas of expertise!
2. I like my profile but you should allow vanity URLs like hackerbuddy.com/artvankilmer
3. Are you pulling pics from Gravatar? Nice bit of personalization.
4. Twitter and HN icons would be a natural addition :)
5. My Twitter and HN usernames are probably my HackerBuddy username. Could suggest that automatically instead of making me type it in.
6. Browse Users isn't prominent enough!
7. How I can give feedback isn't prominent enough!
8. Browse Users can't just be a dump of profile names. I need to be able to slice & dice by expertise, general availability (don't suggest folks that have already been paired with a bunch of other users), etc.
9. Some kind of reputation / recommendation / feedback system would really help. Why not pull in a user's HN karma or StackOverflow score to help seed things a bit? Even feedback on a user's profile of how helpful they were would help.
10. "CSS" is painfully missing, esp. since you have "Design", "HTML", and "JavaScript". CSS != Design (e.g. I think Photoshop, Illustrator, wireframes)
11. Logged out home page is a good start but you need more to hook folks. Try imagery of hackers helping hackers, appealing to folks obsessed with HN karma / SO scores / Twitter followers, and just nailing your value prop. "Free karma for helpful hackers" doesn't do it for me.
Keep up the good work!
Maybe a "suggest a category" feature would help here?
Really would like a faceted search function to filter and search users with specific skills, the "browse users" list is fairly useless as-is.
Also needs a "close account" function.
What is HackerBuddy? HackerBuddy is a weekend project built using Ruby on Rails. It was built as a way to learn Rails, there is a very large chance that this site will collapse under the weight of it's own awkward code. If it does - sorry - I plan to improve it as I get better at coding in Ruby, please bear with me.
All an all I love the idea, very simple design, easy to use. I will use it over the next few days and let you know again what I think.
Small problem: I clicked the "Get Startup Help" button, selected an area of expertise, and was then paired with someone. The random selection (instead of being able to browse available profiles) is not necessarily a problem, but now I can't cancel my request for help...
Also, it would be great if you sent out emails when you were paired with someone else -- a sort of automatic introduction. Do you send out an email to the person that was paired? Hopefully -- as I won't necessarily come back to the site to check if I have requests waiting for me.
Finally, perhaps the global list of users could be augmented by a bit of geographic info -- just to see if someone's close to you (might be nice to meet fellow hacker buddies)?
Might work well to have them on the index page _if_ you're signed in. Otherwise you get the copy on what the site is and how it works.
Just an idea :) Well done though!
I understand its not a completely "hacker" category, but there for a hacker that needs to complete a lot of those tasks for my startup -- I'd prefer to speak to a hacker than get advice from more business orientated people.
Sometimes, you just want to get to know someone else first before you give out an email address.
(shameless self promotion, I know, but I wish Dave the best of luck with his site)
