Looking for honest feedback on a tool for fast note-sharing: devs, educators, curious minds welcome 🙏
Some feedback on your website.
It’s bad. Sorry to be blunt.
I don’t even know where to begin.
Links are only identifyable by being underlined. But then you have underlined text on the front page which isn’t a link.
All links point to the author. subdomain, from where there is no way back!
Except for one link that opens my e-mail program without any hint that it’ll do that.
Oh, and another one that leads to https://quickpoint.me/quickpoint/animations/PAGE/1 . Fail.
Most of the links leave you guessing what happens when you click them – which in this day and age means, they’ll remain unclicked.
The color choice is … interesting.The entire site is actually illegal in very many countries outside of the US, cause it advertises a service but includes absolutely no info about what company or organisation I actually send my data to when I sign up. For the same reason, you are currently violating the GDPR cause you don’t blacklist visits from within the EU. Yes, that law applies even if you’re in the US.
And after clicking every link, I still have no idea what your software even is.
I’ll just leave this here:
https://vimwiki.github.io/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmEtH5FQs28I wouldn’t use your tool since it seems to be for note-taking, and the website is already overloaded with design and animations, so I’ve bounced off assuming your tool will likely be online and possibly using AI as well. I write notes in a text editor, which creates text files in the KB size range, which I can sync and edit anywhere.
Cheers! I don’t get why people would use vimwiki though?
Duly noted about the design and animation- if it’s for notes- keep it simpler and plainer?
What text editor do you use? And what are you using it for (like, what specific kind of text are you writing?)… Where do you usually sync? Sorry for all the questions… this is the best insight so far- I can defo use all this info.
I use vim cause it lets me stay on the home row with my fingers and it flies when you’re used to it.
So I use vim-wiki cause it lets me switch between coding, notes and my todo list without leaving vim, the terminal, it taking my fingers off the keyboard.Just a friendly hint: If you plan on making this a commercial product and earning money with it, be aware that the people here are a tiny niche, and probably not the type of people who will pay money for software as a service.
You need to enable JavaScript to run this app.
Well, likely not.
Fair enough! Quickpoint’s super JS-heavy right now, but I should definitely add a fallback or preview. Curious though, what would’ve made you stick around?
I would not, simply because it’s an online service. I avoid those whenever possible, and for such a simple piece of software I would expect it to run locally on my machine.
edit: by simple I don’t mean you did a poor job. I’m sure you put a lot of hard work into it, I just mean the concept of a word processor is simple.
is it like markdown for powerpoints? or LaTeX for powerpoints? seems neat, though I don’t create many presentations so I probably wouldn’t use it.
Really appreciate the honesty!- That’s a pretty good comparison (markdown for powerpoints? LaTeX for powerpoints). Can I ask: what kinds of stuff do you tend to write or share? (E.g. notes, docs, code snippets, outlines?) Just trying to learn where it might fit in or if it’s totally off-track for folks like you.
Do you want feedback on your website too? I have a big monitor. It’s too big, making use of the entire screen width and height, and seemingly scaling to fill proportionally instead of reasonably. I would like to be able to grasp the menu in one glance, not read word for word. I assume the content is a generated presentation. For me, that’s unfit for a landing webpage too. Too big.
Seems interesting. But I don’t have a use case, no need to make presentations regularly (and without existing templates). The signup is a hindrance, and having to learn a new syntax is too.
No docs regarding syntax or syntax overview/intro either, making it hard to assess. Link to “based on Tufle CSS” is broken. As well as hidden far down but not at the end.
I read the entire frontpage and I don’t know the answer to these questions:
- What problem is this product trying to solve?
- How does this product solve the problem?
- What makes this product better than the alternatives?
I would not use this product, because of marketing reasons. I believe (I don’t remember if it’s mentioned in the frontpage) that it is free, however, I haven’t tried using it because I don’t have an answer to those questions. I’m not a marketing person, but the front page is pretty important. Specially the start of it.
Also, I don’t know what it’s supposed to look like, but I believe that the front page is broken. I’m on Android using Firefox mobile on a 2400x1080 screen.
I hope that this helps.
Hey-this is super helpful, thanks a million for taking the time- really appreciate it.
You’re absolutely right- Those three questions should be answered in the front page. Do you have any examples of tools that do that well? (feel free to screenshot or link)
Right now, I’ve intentionally kept things a little broad, because I’m still trying to learn from users like you-especially around what you think QuickPoint might be good for. But I totally see how that ends up being a bit confusing-especially if you’re not sure what you’re even looking at. I’ll tighten up the messaging!
Really helpful note on the mobile view-I’ll check Firefox Android on that resolution. Appreciate the heads up!
Is there a type of tool you do use often (for writing, sharing, collaborating, etc)?
- Office 365
- Google docs
- Libre office
- Confluence
All of those answer the questions. Sure, libre office for example relies on everyone knowing what MS office is, but it still does a good job of explaining.
Again, I don’t know exactly what your product does, but my guess is that confluence is the one that’s more similar.
Don’t need to look at your competitors though. Go to any product with a multi-million marketing budget and you’ll see how they answer the basic questions in a similar manner.
Edit:
Of course if you look at what their product page looked like before the AI bullshit ate the brains out of the tech CEOs, you would find better examples.
from the overview i can’t really tell what it is, although it sounds like onenote, which i’ve never really gotten along with. also yeah, the online requirement thing means it’s not suitable for secure work.
Hey- Thanks for the feedback. You’re right about the lack of overview or clear purpose- I’m aiming for more of a “just type and share instantly” kind of thing. At the end of the day, I guess what I want to know is- what could this be used for, you know? I might have one idea, but I could be wrong.
Curious- and it may sound basic but I don’t wanna assume- is offline use important for you mostly because of security or something else (travelling/using hotel wifi, etc).
I work with governmental organisations and heavy industry. spotty internet, data privacy, changing laws, cleanroom areas, IT audits, travel to places with less savoury governments, telemetry that shouldn’t be stored but is due to some flag someone forgot, takeover of the server, ulterior motives, you name it. needing a network connection means it has to be assumed compromised, and short of letting my IT dept host its own version, you can’t convince me otherwise. I need to be able to 1) sync data only when on a verified safe network, and 2) trust the server that data goes to and from.
when it comes to what something could be used for… are you doing market research, or basic research? building a tool usually means you have a need for that tool. If you’re trying to market something, do a proper test with a control group. just going “i made a thing, i don’t know what it’s good for” isn’t going to pull in crowds, especially if there is a barrier such as account creation to actually use the thing.
Edit:
also, your page is missing basic accessibility features. all the links are <button>s, not <a>s, so they’re not properly picked up.
Wow! This is great stuff! Really appreciate you taking the time to lay this out.
I get your point: in high-stakes, security-conscious environments like yours, needing a persistent internet connection is a non-starter. Your two conditions (sync only on verified safe networks + trusted server endpoints) are a clear, actionable framework I hadn’t articulated so well before-thank you.
Cheers for calling out the muddiness around purpose. I started this as a tool to scratch a personal itch, but I’ve been deliberately open-ended in trying to understand where others see value. Still, the lack of clarity does become friction-especially when account creation is required up front. I’ll be rethinking that flow and messaging.
Also noted (and agreed) on the accessibility issue. I’ll fix the <button> vs <a> problem-thank you for catching that.
what would a deployable/self-managed version for an environments like yours look like?
i’m glad you’re taking it as intended, i was worried about my tone…
a version that could be used in a restricted setting would
- be offline-first (or online-optional, even)
- install and work with minimal privileges (no curl|sudo bash)
- have few to zero external dependencies that need vetting (to get past IT)
- send and store very minimal amounts of data off-device (especially important for PII like user accounts)
- use only audited and proven crypto and auth (because nobody should be rolling their own there)
- allow bring-your-own-database setups for the server (because some places run the same DB software for everything)
- play well with other tools on a posix system, e.g. make sure data files are structured text rather than binary (for future-proofing)
- if running in a browser-based environment, preferably work without scripts enabled (to eliminate XSS risks)
- if running in a native environment, be open and reproducible (so builds can be verified)
- keep to itself; e.g. make sure to keep stuff in its own namespace and not spread files around (for the server this is usually accomplished by containerization but not everyone allows running stuff like docker)
