yes - account creation lets you save rooms that you've created (we have people who have spent hours putting together different room combinations) but you're right about the high hurdle and we'll shortly be releasing a version that you can use all the way through without signing up.
First, as someone pointed out, you should not switch your quiz interface between the first question and the latter questions. I don't see that you gain anything by switching and it is a little confusing. I would stick with the first question layout, because it is simple.
Second, I'm not sure that you need the "Most recent results" feature. The investment your seeking from potential users is so small, I don't think I that you need to prove that you have traffic, and I don't really see this as morphing into a social app (if it does, I think you are straying too far away from what will make you money). Further, I think it detracts from the point, which I assume is to get people to take the quiz and click through to buy products. Removing it will make the interface cleaner.
Third, as someone has stated, I would make it clear how many images have been rated and remain. A simple "1 of 10" would do the trick.
Fourth, if you go with the second layout for the quiz interface, I would do away with or hide the "How to take the style quiz" text, like you do the "like or hate something."
Fifth, after the quiz, I would take people right to the "room" of stuff that they can click and buy. As it is, you are going to have a lot of people navigate away at the end of the quiz and they will never even see your money page.
Lastly, I noticed that you are using some magazine images. Although you will likely fly under the radar, that is copyright infringement. I see that you source it at least, and that may be enough to get them off your back.
I ran it past my gf (who watches a lot more home decoration shows than me), she didn't like the quiz results. She felt that they were all over the place and a bit contradictory.
I felt that the quiz was too long :p I was also a bit confused about how many more questions there were - I didn't really understand the potential/eliminated stuff.
I agree with run4yourlives, the objects in the room were really mish-mashed. Having it as a simple 2D representation of the furniture isn't very satisfying - the most jarring example being that the rug is just an upright rectangle...
I'm not part of the target audience, but I think you have something pretty interesting.
I stopped taking the quiz because I thought it didn't have an end :-) Perhaps I should have looked more at the user interface, but a progress bar or something would be helpful
I liked how I could immediately start using the StyleEngine. The navigation was great and I had no trouble using it. I thought the 'ruled out' could be a little more prominent so I could see my progress. Definitely a slick site though. Best of luck!
I thought the 'ruled out' could be a little more prominent so I could see my progress.
This is totally important. This is why almost all shopping carts these days use 1-2-3 style steps. The technical term (from User eXperience) is scent, and it's what gives the user a continued incentive to keep going.
I almost quit the StyleEngine until I saw that, but I almost didn't see it at all.
yes, we'll optimize for speed soon (but we hope to optimize at the right time). bedroom and dining room are next on the list. getting visitors is indeed the big challenge. SEO, viral/social, and SEM (in that order) are what we'll focus on. would love feedback in this area as well.
My wife points out that it would be interesting to do something for couples because she likes radically different stuff to me. So something that could marry (boom boom) our styles would be helpful.
we hear this from users - you can "force" style combinations now by choosing styles manually and then seeing the rooms that result, but we should probably make this function more obvious.
Nice implementation, good concept. My only suggestion you should not force people to take the quiz to get to the point of what is that the app does.
One thing surprising is not the fact that the team met on HN, it is the fact that only David is a hacker. I didn’t know that HN was also a meeting spot for interior designers. Really good to know : - )
I like the business - help people figure out what to buy, then make commissions on $1,000 furniture. Brilliant. And I like the approach a lot. So you're in the top quartile, for me, of Ask HN stuff here. Praise aside, let's get to the helpful specific crits:
You really need to Photoshop the pictures in your quiz to make them as standard and innocuous as possible. Telling people to ignore the floors, walls, etc. is just impossible. Ideally, you'd be able to stage your own photos.
Also, the interface needs to be 1) consistent and 2) less cluttered. I'd recommend really blowing it out with whitespace to figure out what you need and don't, then incrementally making it tighter. CrazyEgg might be super-helpful to you given that you have a very visual site.
As for "going viral", having quick page loads is necessary but not sufficient. You can make the page load quicker.
Now I know it wouldn't occur to most of the people on here but when I tried to take the quiz with IE7 the site hung as soon as I answered the first question. So 80% of your visitors will never know what it's all about.
Good point, but 80% is a slight exaggeration. Especially if you're talking about slightly techie affluent people in the market for this sort of site. They'll be using chrome, safari, opera, or most likely firefox.
We recently released a new version of the quiz, and looks like we had an IE7 bug which we'll fix right away. BTW - 55% of Sproost visitors have been FF, only 25% have been IE7/6.
using FF 3.0.5 here. I get stuck on the 2nd step of the quiz. The spinner spins forever. However the funny thing is it appears to work fine in IE 8.0.6
* Windows, floors, wall material, and other architectural features
* Color — it's easy to change color combinations
* Layout and arrangement — also easy to change
That's a monumental challenge for me. I vote basically based on what my first impression is, and these items inevitably have a play into that.
But I suppose if I were actually looking to redecorate, I would put more thought into my votes.
I wasn't sure what it was all about until I actually completed the quiz and started looking at "rooms". You may want to fix that somehow.
Also, I found some issues with the way the room objects were displayed (after you have a style)... seemed a little mish-mashed.
Looks like a good thing to present to Architecture digest or House and Home or one of those magazines... timing might not be the best with the recession though.
As far as growth is concerned, fashion seems like a great idea. As for actual value of the interior decorating, have you ever looked at hiring an interior decorator?
one of the founders previously started an interior architecture/design firm; subject matter expertise is key to the implementation. personal fashion is a possible expansion, but home furnishings is a $100B+ market in the US alone, so we'll focus there for a while...
I agree. I was commenting on rms' thought that fashion was potentially a more viable market. I would completely agree that home decor will net you more, and probably more easily.
I did the quiz but stopped short at entering my details. Then I came back and read all the comments here and decided I did want to create an account after all.
Kudos for using cookies and keeping my quiz results; I would've been very irritated if I had to do it again just because I didn't sign up at the same time. :)
This is clever, and I think it gets a pretty good read on me, but my real style (as judged by actual purchases) is cheap and/or used--so I'm probably not a target consumer here.
In the room display (which is odd, but the problem is hard), my apache area rug showed up somewhat smaller than my great plains porcelain table lamp, and a throw pillow dwarfed a sofa. Giving some better sense of scale is the only definite improvement I can think of. That and don't let pictures almost completely overlap, as some candle holders do on a leaf bowl the second time I loaded the page.
ETA: Clicking to buy a "Deep River Rectangle Cocktail" table went through the affiliate program link and to the retailer, but it dropped me on the front page.
Wow, I really like this site. Some of the graphics leave a little to be desired (the logo and the greater than sign on the "see your results" page). But, I really liked the flow and interaction. It did take me a second though to figure out what was going on when I started the quiz, because the buttons jumped from the right of the image to the left and were replaced with a bunch of text on the right. I thought I had been taken away from the quiz and was a bit confused.
Very sweet though. I'm going to pass it on definitely.
I too wasn't sure what it was all about, but (and most sites should take a hint here) you made it very easy to figure it out. I clicked the button and off it went.
I'm curios as to why you went with two different styles though. When I start I have radio buttons and a submit on the right of the picture, then you go to the voting blocks on the left of the picture.
Why the change?
It would maybe be better to go with the more familiar (Hot or Not) style of selections below the picture.
I like it a lot. Will show it to my gf as well. The style of the website is very nice and clean. I love the sproost logo! I have a few criticisms though.
The quiz is very long and it seemed to my european eyes that there's an overhang of traditional styles and little differentiation among contemporary options. Modern seems to imply asian.
I didn't like most of the rooms, but after making my choices the system summerised my style pretty well. Very well actually.
The "design your room" page suffers from some layout quirks (Firefox 3). One of the items in my room got stuck when I switched to selecting more items from the sofas category. That rug just kept hovering on top of the sofas and only went away once I used the budget slider. I wasn't able to repeat it later though.
I love the budget slider but sometimes it didn't stick. It kept snapping back to the greatest price range.
My room looks a little jumbled because the pics aren't aligned at all. I understand that I'm supposed to arrange the items as I see fit, but that doesn't make much sense to me since I can't possibly make the whole thing look anything like a real room. The sizes and perspectives are just too different. I suggest you pre-align the items next to each other. People can still move the items around if they want to.
I appreciate that it's very difficult to actually let people design a room that looks like a room. It would work a little better if I could zoom individual items so I could at least put that lamp next to the sofa and make them look proportionally sized. To take this further you could figure out the sizes of the pieces from the vendors' sites and automatically zoom them accordingly. I know, I know that's a massive amount of work and maybe it wouldn't help enough to make a real difference.
I'm not sure why the "saved rooms" and the "design your room" pages are separate pages. I would prefer a drop-down to select other saved rooms right on the "design your room" page. The cost rundown could be placed on the "buy your furniture" tab or dynamically displayed by clicking somewhere next to the total. In my opinion, there are too many pages and menu/tab levels.
The "to be added" section isn't very useful I think, but if it's there it should at least let me remove stuff from it.
The signup process is OK. No confirmation emails, no nothing, just an email address. But I would still let people see the room designer before making them sign up.
I usually don't fancy those quizzes (e.g. for music and movie tastes), but yours was actually interesting. Very good pictures, fun to look at, but they took too long to load to keep me involved til the end.
Scaling of fonts / liquid layout could be improved, looks a bit funny on FF/Ubuntu. Layout could use more white space for clarity.
Very nice. Excellent design. The quiz was fun and easy to complete.
I would like to see a list of specific styles and their representative pictures though. That way, I can see the names of other styles that I might like or dislike.
In the style engine I would move the options (love it, like it, etc.) over to the right of the picture, or underneath it. And make it look more like clickable buttons.
The placement and design makes it look like a menu.
Just wanted to post a quick message - very cool! I don't have time to go into details, but the site is very slick, and strangely enough, something I would use.
Well done! I'll try to add some more details later.
great job guys. I like the minimalist and clean design approach. I took the quiz and got my wife to do it too as we have just redecorated, and the answers were quite accurate about our style inclinations. Good to see a quality start. I think the tough part now is to integrate this with multiple channels that could create the revenue. I would suggest to start by approaching fashion/interior designers as they would find immediate value to provide their clients with the use of this tool. Good luck.
I recommend you use the Polyvore model. Let people pick items from different categories and create their own furnishing style. You are definitely in the right space.
But I did stop at entering my email address.
Sites like HN have spoiled me with their fast and easy signup. I'd make giving one's email optional.
Remember signup is one of the biggest hurdles any website has. The easier you make it the more people will do it.
Especially if someone is just playing around and has not created dozens of rooms, the worst that could happen is they take the test again.
And I must say the test is fast, short and fun, perfect.
P.S.
Browsed around some more and came back to add to my comment.
If I'm going to be buying furniture over the internet I am going to need A LOT of technical information.
And A LOT of pictures, not just different angles of nicely made bed, but the assembly process as well.
P.P.S.
Bug?: http://www.bobbyberkhome.com/product/bedroom/19393/modloft-w...