I think their lander is a good example for developers who need some help designing their landers.
Just focus on two key things.
1. Understand the purpose of your page and try to do the least possible. Ex: explain what the product does or create hype, ease of sign up or show benefits of product etc.
2. Reduce the noise on the page so you can accomplish it well. Do this by either increasing contrast for the interface elements or reducing the number of elements.
Too often people get caught up in making it pretty. So their priorities end up looking like:
1. Lets make it pretty
2. Tell them everything about our product
And so for a lot of developers doing design they fail at the first step and ultimately end up with a poorly designed page that is crammed with info.
Take some pointers from these guys and when in doubt "show less".
Call me silly for running NoScript in this day and age of Javascript on every page but it's not often that I get a moment of "WTF" when visiting a site.
This one gave me just that. Took me a scroll down the page, then up again, then halfway towards pressing backspace... Then I remembered! Whitelist NoScript temporarily!
Normally this comes pretty naturally to me because I can easily spot that a site is depending on Javascript or not.
I'll be honest with you, I wasn't really thinking about the NoScript case when writing the post.
I'm not sure if NoScript has a way of telling you that you might be missing something on the page. Kinda like how Click2Flash tells me if it is a sIFR. That would seem useful for minimal landers like these ones.
Their website is beautiful; simple, elegant and tells me enough about what they do for me to want to install their plugin. I wish more companies could present their products so concisely.
I would like to know more about the folks who will be reading my mail. An about page with some real background to let folks know who is behind the company seems mandatory to me. Also, this is a service I would want to pay for, free scares me when it comes to giving someone access to my e-mail.
- Security. They appear to be receiving my email address and those I interact with. I wonder how long they store that. I wonder how securely they encrypt that in their database, or if they don't encrypt that at all. Do they submit to annual security audits with that valuable information? Is any of that information subject to USA government security audit laws like Sarbanes-Oxley?
- Do a whois on them and you get a DomainsByProxy thing. That doesn't give one a warm fuzzy feeling, security-wise.
- The Notes area at the bottom -- does that mean that someone can write something malicious about me and everyone who receives an email from me, who has Rapportive installed, can see that message? Or, is that just a personal, private notes area just for me and no one else? If it's a public thing, then wow -- I have a serious problem with that.
"Notes" is a great idea, but storing them anywhere but locally raises the probability that they could leak, which would be disastrous for your users and possibly fatal for your startup. Good luck with the product though, neat stuff.
This was actually a website we prepared for investors; we weren't intending a public beta today! But the press found it, and so here we are. That's why you can't see a privacy policy.
In the absence of a written policy, we'll "treat users right" which roughly means we'll "treat users how we ourselves would want to be treated".
That's not particularly computable, so: the bodies of user's emails never leave the browser. We find email addresses in the browser, and send those back to our server to lookup. The emails themselves never touch our server.
Perhaps you are already planning this, but I feel that an app of this nature needs to go beyond the usual fine print privacy policy and give a front and center explanation of what it's doing. You could portray this as a feature description rather than a warning, as long as it's crystal clear.
That said, nifty idea. I'd like to see more website extensions like this, if there was a better security model.
Yes, we're planning to be very transparent about what we do. At the moment it's really just a matter of staying on top of all of the unexpected press!
Our users' trust is absolutely crucial to what we're doing, so you can expect detailed information on exactly what we do with your private data; and we may also make some things opt-in/opt-out. We have no intention of hiding anything.
This is fantastic - works well so far and is overall beautiful. If I were you guys though, I'd be a little worried that google is going to kill it because it replaces the ads in gmail, which are the revenue producers. Is there a plan in place for what happens when google starts to get annoyed about that?
It seems to me that the guy who controls the plugin would win a technical engagement. Legally they're safe too, I would imagine. If it becomes popular I guess Google is just going to have to buy them!
My first guess was that this required a Google Apps subscription because of that. If I'm wrong, yeah, that could be a problem, but if you later change the product to require a Gmail subscription, then you turn things around by becoming a value-add to Google's premium service, which I'd imagine they'd be quite happy about.
So it basically covers up Google's ads in Gmail? No thanks. I get a great product for free from Google and I want them to benefit by selling ads that I see.
Frankly, that's a bizarre rationale. Either the ads are useful to you or they're not. If they're useful, you'll want to see them irrelevant of how they benefit Google. If they're not useful, it's like saying you're glad public transport is crap because it's cheap.
Yes. I know personally I have never clicked on an ad in gmail. They're always for totally bizarre things.
For example, the last Fandango email I got served up a bunch of ads for roofing companies. See Alice in Wonderland and get my crawl space sealed! I guess...
Anyhow, Google wouldn't lose one red cent if I covered those ads up since they make money on a CPC (vs. CPM) basis.
How do I uninstall it on Chrome and OS X? I can't find a way to do it. My main pet peeve right now is that once Rapportive loads, I can no longer unlabel an e-mail by clicking a little 'x' next to the label. (Yeah, it's relatively minor, but breaking host functionality isn't nice :D)
Sorry to hear about that bug -- we will look into it. For now, you can disable Rapportive by choosing Window -> Extensions from the menu, and clicking the 'disable' link on Rapportive.
We are actually fully compatible with Safari already; we just haven't yet got round to releasing a little Mac OS app that always runs our JS on mail.google.com.
The downside is that you have to manually start it in your Gmail tab. The upside is that most peoples' Gmail tabs are very long lived and, hey, it works in Safari :)
just sent this email to the rapportive team (I'm guessing rahulvohra will be the first/only to respond since he's "on top" of this HN thread):
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When "mail.google.com" loads (the "inbox view") the emails from people in my crm/social networks should be "glowing" or "jumping out at me". I LOVE your guys' product as is, but won't you really be maximizing efficacy by splitting the inbox into two "virtual" inboxes: one being messages to me from outside my crm/social network and two being those messages from people already in my crm/social network.
If you add this feature, not only will you meet your desired target demo use case but open yourself to the use case for average consumers who would like to only see gmail emails from facebook friends (and ignore the rest, aka SPAM). In this case I'd recommend your web app living a "dual-brand" life and branch development (if i had to guess this would double your odds of being acquired by Google, Google know's email's on it's last leg so if your app can bridge the old to the new (Google Wave) for both consumers and business users than whats a few hundred million to nab them up? lol)
Good luck! Thanks for rapportive!
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Do you guys agree? (that the "inbox view" would be the "killer feature" of this app)
Very cool -- I'd just be worried about the companies switching APIs on you. If you're prepared for that then more power to you. Or maybe you're just scraping the sites themselves and blobbing them over to the side? I guess my technical understanding of how it works is a little fuzzy.
Part of making an API publicly consumable is an informal commitment to maintain it. Most major API changes are announced far in advance, and legacy versions are maintained to give developers the chance to switch. A company whose core value depends on consuming that API will likely be informed about future changes; I'd think it's the least of their worries.
We search on-demand currently. A search will start the first time you open an email from an address we don't know about. Searches can take about a day right now.
WOAH:\ Hope you guys can trim that down soon. At the minimum, you might want to state an approximate time on the right. I kept going back at the screen for 10-15m hoping it'd be done.
The most seamless way to get Rapportive working on Google Apps is to make your Google Apps email a Google Account and give it the same password. You can do that here: https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount
installed it and played with it few minutes.
2 questions:
1. why can't I delete notes?
2. are you calling the ability of adding notes to a contact CRM?
Notes in themselves are only barely CRM, but we plan to allow you to share them with your team. And that's about as much as Highrise allows you to do! (Ok, there are also tasks, deals, cases etc. but who actually uses those?)
that's exactly right. it's social because there's a link to twitter. and it's a CRM because you can leave a note. awesome, at least they know how to get PR.
Just focus on two key things.
1. Understand the purpose of your page and try to do the least possible. Ex: explain what the product does or create hype, ease of sign up or show benefits of product etc. 2. Reduce the noise on the page so you can accomplish it well. Do this by either increasing contrast for the interface elements or reducing the number of elements.
Too often people get caught up in making it pretty. So their priorities end up looking like:
1. Lets make it pretty 2. Tell them everything about our product
And so for a lot of developers doing design they fail at the first step and ultimately end up with a poorly designed page that is crammed with info.
Take some pointers from these guys and when in doubt "show less".