Goalfinger

January 6, 2013 3:14 PM

Goalfinger
Goalfinger is a simple website that aims to help you decide what to do with your life.

Role: programmer, designer

posted by bwerdmuller (9 comments total)

It looks neat! I bet, though, that you'd get a lot more participation if you showed in a concrete way what the site actually is/does, without having to create a username. The About page is a bit vague. Most people (myself included) aren't going to go through a sign-up process for mystery meat.
posted by threeants at 2:39 PM on January 7, 2013 [3 favorites]

I lost interest after the request for my email.
posted by Bun Surnt at 4:18 PM on January 7, 2013 [3 favorites]

I lost interest after the request for my email.

Same here.
posted by curious nu at 4:57 PM on January 7, 2013 [1 favorite]

This looks fun. I agree with the others that asking for email upfront is a little off-putting. I also clicked through to your blog and read the post about it. I think the issue is (at least for me) that people don't want to sign up for anything without knowing what they're getting as opposed to what type of sign-in it is (e.g. email vs. Persona). It might be easier to get sign-ups if you let people go through the process of creating the goals, and then, if they like it and want to save, they can go ahead and sign up. Or at the very least, maybe include the screenshots from the app on the about page.

I could be mistaken, but it looks like you're going for a full-sized, no-repeating background image. But over here (Mac Chrome) it's not full-sized and it's repeating vertically. If you set the CSS for html (and maybe body) to width: 100% and height: 100% it should be good.

Congratulations!
posted by wintrymix at 1:16 PM on January 8, 2013 [1 favorite]

Requiring 30 goals seems a bit tedious. Also, head-to-head ranking doesn't always make sense when goals are complimentary (e.g. spend less vs. save more), vaguely defined (e.g. earn respect vs. work harder), or pose demands on a different resource (e.g. time/activity goal vs money goal).

I feel like having separate lists for different goal categories or contexts (money, time, work, etc) would be more meaningful, since the point of a ranking is to prioritize resources.
posted by jlh at 2:46 PM on January 8, 2013

Ahh, it looks like Twitter!
posted by limeonaire at 5:41 PM on January 9, 2013

So... why does it want my email. Is it going to email things to me?
posted by koucha at 6:30 AM on January 10, 2013

To just browse around I'm not going to bother giving out emails or creating accounts. Your front page looks pretty.
posted by Folk at 11:47 AM on January 10, 2013

Yeah...Wanting my email up-front is kind of a game-killer for me. The project sounds like it has great potential, but I'm not giving-up an email address (even the ones I have expressly for spam) without a test-drive first.
posted by Thorzdad at 10:26 AM on January 13, 2013