Hi web designers,

 

This is my first post on this forum.

 

I am currently working on developing a new conversational platform called chabble.com .

 

It is designed to let people share and discuss web-based content among a community without having to join yet another social network. It conveniently replaces group e-mails by adding chat-like features directly in the same window as the content. So instead of sending out a link and discussing via mail, you just send the link and the conversation together (conversations can be private or public and there are a lot of little funky features in the platform already).

 

Even if it started as a generic conversational tool,the main usage I am doing of it is to use it to show my work to customers and discuss progress with them in a simple & coherent way. I just sent them a"chabble" with a link of their prototype page and we use the conversation window to discuss... when a new version comes out or another page is ready, i just send a new chabble and so on...

 

Now, I am using this for myself but I am think it could be useful to the community and would love to get some professional feedback about it... (ie, should i spend some more effort into it, of should it just stay my toy?)

 

So if you want to try it,just go to chabble.com and register... let me know what you think...

 

Don't hesitate to come back to me with any feedback!!!

 

Talk to you soon

 

Federico

Hi Federico (btw, I assume you are Italian)

 

Function-wise I think the site is good. The idea is pretty good as well. A cool feature would be the option to highlight/tag areas of the site and comment them.

Overall I think you should definitely expose it to the public and see the reactions/interest. Public validation as you know is critical.

 

The tool however suffers from a bad user interface. The icons and typography is so small that really makes it hard for me to use it. I'm 21 years old, image an old 50+ years old client. The interface may also be more intuitive. So there's definitely a room for improvement in terms of UI/UX.

 

P.s. I was wondering who is behind the development? Is it just you?

Hi Kalo,

 

Yes you guessed right, I am Italian even if I have been living in Paris for over 15 years now...

 

Thank you for trying chabble out!

 

I agree with you about the font size and willl be trying to enlarge it a bit. The issue is that i tried to have everything fit in the left column that widths 360px... I guess I will need to rephrase things a bit to make them more compact and be able to use a larger font. Also I can try to enlarge the top menu buttons... (I agree with you, I am almost 40 and they start too be a bit small for me )

 

But to be honest, the main issue I have is the second one you mention : The site needs to be more intuitive... Currently there are a lot of options and features (conversations, bookmarks, links, contact management etc etc) and a lot of possible interactions (using the little orange gears)... Once you get into it they make sense,but for a first visit they might be a bit confusing (and scare people off). Definitely looking for ideas there!

 

For now I am hoping that most of the users will actually join the site because they have been invited to a conversation by someone they know and will take a second to try to figure it out by using that first conversation...

 

The good news for me was that you made it through the process of creating a conversation in few moments ! (which is a good first step!)

 

I am currently completely on my own on this project for now... Once I get the site working I will need to look for ambassadors to spread it out... One idea was to have the site live of advertising and give a % of the revenue to whoever creates conversations a given month... But this needs to be defined...

 

Thanks again for testing it!

The good news for me was that you made it through the process of creating a conversation in few moments ! (which is a good first step!)

 

Thanks again for testing it!

 

You are welcome. Bear in mind that I'm not the typical web user I'm a web designer and pretty much has spent my life creating websites .. for good or bad. But I can definitely see other people having problems with figuring how it works out, as it wasn't naturally easy for me as well.

 

Good luck again!

Hi Kalo,

 

Hope you are fine!

 

After our talk, I spent some time improving the global UI to make it a bit more usable... Also shifted the marketing massage to something a bit more meaningful. The new product line is ''Chabble is a URL shortener that adds a discussion board to the link."

 

here's an example http://chabble.com/~vKbyRpCVGD

 

Would be curious to have your feedback, let me know what you think!