Hi KajMagnus,

the website is a forum app provider. You can also use it as a commenting system on your blog. Your website didn't help me much to find it out. I was looking two weeks ago or to add a commenting system on my blog and remembered, that I liked the style of your forum.

I decided to go with a competitor, because I didn't wanted to hire a developer again to add this system (the open source one) to my website and offered more free features. The competitor (GraphComments) concentrated just on commenting and provided comments for free as long as you don't reach more than 1.000.000 visits per month. The 100 comments you were offering and the not so easy to understand embeed function did not help.

Back to talkyard.io. At first sight, I would like to understand right away what kind of website I visit. This wasn't clear to me. "Productive discussions for your community" isn't the same as "Add our forum app to your website". I've done the same mistake on my website btw, so it can happen to the smartest people. Actually it happens only to smart people :) .

On the menu. Your links confused me tbh. "Support forum", thought it was a donation page at first. "Who are you?", what? who am I?... better, Talkyard uses. "Plans", I thought I have to pay. "Open Source", I thought it is free. Now I have three links suggesting me 3 different things about one topic. Money. At least that's what I thought and from there came my confusion. The "About" page did its job perfectly fine.

I liked the two big colored buttons. They help understand your offering better than the above hero section does.

The Demo page is great, althought I would like the steps getting to it, be less. How it works page, could contain all the info and provide the buttons to start the demo (maybe, not sure if my thought is right).

The Plan page is great. This isn't designed like any other pricing page, but personally I liked it.

I saw there is a continuity on your site, to create a feeling of unobstrusiveness to the viewer. A clean look to say it better. You used white space to your advantage. in my own view, it is too much whitespace. Or maybe its enough, but has to be used in a way to achieve a better viewing experience.

On mobile I like the arrangement of the text and the pictures more than on the desktop version.
The about page on desktop has too width paragraphs. Maybe a bigger font and line height, could make it appeal better.

I absolutely love the red section "Start a forum for". Can this be placed at the top of your website? The "who you are" link could maybe be dismissed.

Hope you found my feedback helpful! Good luck!

I think this website is about embedding discussion forums on business websites.

At first, I didn't understand what the website was about but then I went to "Who are you?" and that explained it more.

The styling of the "hero image" needs some design love. Needs a better hierarchy of information, space in between lines of copy, and/or an image in the background, and/or less copy in that space.

I like the big buttons for View Demo Forum and Start a Forum.

It was hard to read the images when scrolling down. I would have higher-resolution images and better drawings.

On the Plans page, I would suggest putting those buttons inside the rectangles. They look weird hanging off the bottom of them.

The website is for quickly spinning up your own forum that becomes more of a knowledge base over time. Feels like a way for an organization to spin up their own version of stackoverflow.com

I really like how the "features" copy starts out. It starts off doing a good job of focusing on the benefit, not the feature: "Avoid repetition, save time", "Everyone gets help", etc. However, it starts to become more feature focus like "Pick the right ideas". Instead of "Pick the right ideas" that sounds like the work you have to do to add value to the forum, you could flip it and focus on the reading the best (highlighted) response first. I wouldn't use that exact wording, but that idea.

The features section gets a little repetitive. It would be great to see that broken up in a different way. Consider grouping similar concepts/features into their own sections and don't have every single feature be a "big graphic + headline/short sentence" layout.

Nice site

Look at the website for 10 - 20 seconds. What do you think it is about?

It's about creating Q&A forums, ala stack overflow with some voting possiblity.

What does the website make you want to do? Start doing that, and describe your experience.

Start such a forum, or take a look to a demo forum. I have two choices. Starting a forum if it's not what I wanted to do today seems long. I would rather see a demo first and know the conditions.

Is there anything that makes you feel frustrated or confused? Or that you like?

The page is a bit long, with a lot of details. I'm not going to read it all and finally I skip it all. I would rather see 3 reasons I should stop and consider using the service.

Use case maybe a bit too far and hidden. Compare with is good because it was a question I had but I'm not going to read so much. A matrix of features would be more attractive.

Any other thoughts or feedback?

From here it's more on the message and audience than usability

I'm a bit cold to open source being an advantage. I'm in the business, I know that every install comes with a cost of ownership, even if the source is free. It seems the app is made for people in IT but it's not clearly said. I imagine if I had to recommend this page to someone and they get to:

"Install on your server
You can install Talkyard on your own server; it's free and open source.

Instructions: https://github.com/debiki/talkyard-prod-one

You need an Ubuntu 18.04 server (e.g. a DigitalOcean 2GB VPS), on which you can install Docker. Talkyard is not a PHP script that you can upload to somewhere."

For me it's clear, simple but 99% of people I know can't understand that. Those who know could as well use discourse or whatever.

Since you mention digitalocean, I would have an image ready on the marketplace, click, done.

This said, it's a very nice work, elegant , interesting. I would do a landing page more target to the audience who is capable in fine to go all the way onto installation.

SUS2019

Hi,

I did like the clean interface look.

I was initially a little distracted by the rotating "community" words on the headline.

The wording was a bit weird - "People find help" - what people? My customers? This was unclear.

I also felt the features was too long and repetitive in format (left/right, then right left rows).

I would suggest another colour for the "Start a forum for" section - red seems too strong and disruptive a colour.

@KajMagnus nice talkyard you have here. Good to see you from the SUS2019 forum :)

This site is a messaging platform in the same vein as stackoverflow. The website makes me want to look for what it is in particular that it does that I need, which should be covered by some of the numerous features. What confuses me is that some of the things it describes are redundant, QA and custom forum, embedded forum, messaging...in a way it tries to be everything to everybody.

There are too many features on the front page, perhaps a more focussed proposition would help better. After all, it's likely that it doesn't do all those things perfectly already.

Simplify!

I really like the name TalkYard. Yet the rest of the terminology on the website is less strong. It is currently using technical terms that assume a certain level of background for the viewer, yet it is obvious that is not the intention. Suggest eliminating the "features from" statement, and replacing the word Forum with yard or something branded. Or you would need to use the word Forum in your product name like FastForum which would be accurate but again, TalkYard is pretty awesome

KajMagnus,

1.) The website is like a chat forum, but for large groups of people. It's a lot like slack or reddit, but for a community or large organization. Plus, there's Q&A.

2.) The website makes me want to start a group chat for a recreational sports league that I'm in. I like the single sign on/ o auth with google. I actually created a chat with relative ease. The barrier to use is low and I like that.

3.) I dont feel frustrated by anything - I actually really liked your "Compare With" page. However, under each competitor, I would visually separate the pro's and con's out into two columns. I think the purchase page was a little confusing. First you force the user to identify who they are. They might be the sole proprietor of a business -- so an individual, but a business account. Which option would they choose? It's also in the wrong currency for me (we use $ in the US.) I love that you give discounts to developing countries. But, it's also confusing when you use the terms "Open Source" that makes me think everything is free. On top of that, the language around the site may be too technical for the general consumer.

4.) Other thoughts - good concept, here. I'm so used to Slack, but I see what you're going for. I think it could be helpful, and I will actually try to use the chat group that I created!

I have recently wanted to add forum functionality to my web application so this site is very relevant to me.

One of my first questions is how are users created? And can I create / register users from an API?
Having looked around I cannot find any reference to an API? Is there one?

I then looked at the pricing comparison table, that makes sense to me and reasonable usage quota's etc.

I then tried to find out which tech stack has been used to see if it would fit with my own, as far as I can tell it uses ReactJS on the client and several other frameworks on the server side.

The compare to page is a good idea but could do with some graphics to spice it up a bit, break up the text.
Or maybe some comparison tables?

Overall, good job.

Hi,
I like that you added a "Compare with" link but I took me over 30 seconds to notice the link ... I would try to make it more visible.
I suggest making the top menu sticky to show on scrolling (links like Compare with would be visible on scroll this way) but with a more pleasant colour background ... not black.
After I clicked on the link I was expecting to see a clear easy/fast to read comparison table... not just a long text.

I would be more careful about the messaging on pricing.
At the bottom it says Free but actually on the pricing it says Free Trial.
Free for me is different vs. Free Trial.

It looks like something you would use to create a discussion for a group of people. It makes me want to create a forum. It was a bit confusing if it was somewhere I would have to add the other people into the discussion or if everyone can see my question online and put their own input. I will continue as a blogger. It doesn't let you translate the money exchange so it is confusing if you are Canadian or from the USA how much it is truly going to cost you. IT doesn't tell you what happens when your free trial is up, and someone else tries to contribute to your discussion. I like have it gives multiple options depending on if you are a company, or a student and that it lets you choose between blogger, company and student/teacher.

I like it, I got the message fairly quickly -- it's a site which will allow me to create a forum in which people can discuss, share ideas, work etc.

The questions/thoughts popping into my head in those first 20-30 seconds were...:

• it's quite techie... I've no idea what StackOverflow, Discourse, Slack, Reddit, Disqus... are
• the in the example is "how to work from home, VPN broken" which reinforced the techie feel (lots of people have no idea what a VPN is)
• if your target audience isn't techies, maybe adjust the tone...
• my next thoughts were " ok how much is is?" and clicked Plans... had to click again for costs... Should 'Plans' be called 'Pricing' to be more up-front?
• 'Compare with' is very useful and a good sales pitch, it's exactly the comparisons (I'm assuming they're the main competition) that people want to know, and so you save them time

In conclusion, it has all the info I'd want and answers my questions pretty quickly. It inspires confidence and looks professional. My only suggestion would be around what 'tone' you want to strike, the brand feel... It's on the side of 'utilitarian' ie. more 'pc' than 'mac'. Here's an example of a maybe similar service category, but the site has a little more flair and could offer some inspiration: https://www.signupto.com/

Great job, good luck with it!

Looks like an all in one solution for managing internal comms, customer comms and forum based communities.
As a SaaS founder I would look at using this first for an internal community, and perhaps as an alternative to Zendesk / Intercom.

Logo is cool. Maybe too much text.
CTA wasn't as strong as I would have thought. View demo could just be an example image with a 'click to view'

I think the website is about creating a forum for someone, however I'm unsure as to why I would (or really, WHO would) want to create a forum.

I was also confused as to where it would end up or be located once the forum is made, however this might become evident to me if I actually went through and made one.

I really like the name Talkyard for it and that almost makes it more clear as to the purpose of it. The only time I have really seen forums are on reddit.

The site makes me want to either click on "watch the demo" button or "make a forum" and I think if one was more emphasized it would be clearer as to which should be clicked on. I spent a few seconds looking at both and didn't know which would be better to click on so then I moved on to the rest of the page instead of randomly selecting one. I think if one was emphasized more with contrast in brightness and size it would encourage quicker action.

It also might be helpful to say right upfront why this site is useful or unique from the other sites that are listed. When I read "with the main features from
StackOverflow, Discourse, Slack, Reddit, Disqus." it makes me think, "then why do I need this site?" So I'm not sure what added value this site has that the others don't. (again I'm not that well versed with using forums to begin with so I wouldn't know just from looking at it)

Once I went to About, it was much more clear what the website does. If I was actually looking at this site I probably wouldn't have made it all the way to About before leaving the website. It may be helpful to have somewhere on the first page a noticeable call to action to "Learn about everything you can do with Talkyard" or something like that, that would guide me to the about page. I am someone who really likes to know what something does or is about before I start clicking on things (I usually read most of a manual before I start using products haha).

In terms of aesthetic: the bright blue and bright pink colors are giving me a very doctor's office/pharmacy vibe. Im not sure why that is, and it doesn't mean its negative, just thought it may be useful to add that.

I hope this was useful!

Nice page. The plans page didn't look good on mobile. The columns were too thin.

I liked the option to see the live demo and try it. Not sure why it looks the same as this usability testing page, do they use that service? Anyway, looks nice. The only thing I would change is the pink colors, but not a major issue.

I think the website looks professional. I didn't really know what the product or service was. Seemed a bit unclear to me. The word forum is pretty broad so i wasnt sure. Only once i click on demo did i understand. I didn't like the two options beautiful & informal etc I feel like it could have just said 'formal' or 'informal' with maybe an image of what they looked like, so i could understand what it was and what they looked like. I clicked on the mouse or cat in the top right corner first as i didnt know what it was or what it did. I was intrigued by it. Overall, I think sites design is good maybe just needs a bit more clear direct copy/description of what its all about.

I like the overall experience. Design is well made, colors look nice and colour scheme is proper. I have noo issues with reading content, pictures are good quality. Infographics looks nice and everything is easy to read. In-text : Place it at https://talkyard.your-organization.com - font could be better, it doesn't fit into the overall picture. The first page is overloaded with info, I myself prefer the minimalistic style.

Look at the website for 10 - 20 seconds. What do you think it is about?
It's about exchanging information between colleagues (during the quarantine?)

What does the website make you want to do? Start doing that, and describe your experience.
First, I viewed the demo forum. Next, I chose the beautiful and Informal and look at it for a couple of seconds. Then, I went back with the browser button and chose Insightful and Formal and read a couple of titles. Finally, I went back to the home page and realized that without thinking I always chose the pink button over the blue one.
Oh, I just realized by looking at the animation on the front page that it's not only about co-workers.

Is there anything that makes you feel frustrated or confused? Or that you like?
I like the icons on the front page, but the following pages seem too loaded with text.

Any other thoughts or feedback?
I like the overall feeling of the site, it's clean and the use of colour is clever.
There are a few things you could consider design-wise:

• Avoid opening a new window for the user when it clicks a link (target= "_blank"). It's a bad web practice.
• Try to cap the paragraphs horizontally after 70 characters. Generally, it's hard to read over that. Check line length in this article https://betterwebtype.com/articles/2019/06/16/5-keys-to-accessible-web-typography/.
• Is there a reason why the visual weight of the two big buttons is similar? You may want to highlight one of the two options (the best one according to your goals) and reduce the visual height of the other one.
• For better SEO and inform your user, you may want to identify better your pages. For instance, instead of just "Use Cases" in your title bar, you could say "Taklyard | Use cases". A good tool to help you with this kind of stuff: https://website.grader.com/

Given Website is the blogging website. some LInks open in a new window. whereas the Github link open in the same window, actually needs to open in the new window. Data on "https://www.talkyard.io/compared-with" and "https://www.talkyard.io/about/" links need to justified in alignment, it looks unorganized. colour combination is decent but with respect to today's scenario, it can be better specifically page of plans needs improvement.
Talking about the usefulness of the website, it's quite useful.

Look at the website for 10 - 20 seconds. What do you think it is about?

It turns out that this website offers a service to add a discussion to the website.
It's also kind to app users.

What does the website make you want to do? Start doing that, and describe your experience.

I want to deploy a community.
There are replies and activities in other forums, but I felt it was good to be able to see the participating users easily.

Is there anything that makes you feel frustrated or confused? Or that you like?

I love it!
There's a good discussion going on.

Any other thoughts or feedback?

There were a number of test topics that weren't solid sentences.
If this is actually implemented, there will be no interest in the forum.
When you write a topic, I think it's better to introduce a system where you can't write a topic without a solid sentence.

I think this website is a company selling an application I can use to create a forum and start a community online.
I chose to have a demo. I found the 3 options a little confusing and spent some time clicking back and forth between the different options.
I was a little confused at first I thought I had returned to the usability testing exchange. It took me a moment to realise that it was just using the same software.
I felt there could be more direction on that demo page to assist me in making my choice and did feel a bit frustrated at the lack of information.
If not for the fact I was taking part in testing, I may have dropped out at this stage if I was 'shopping'.
I have been using and running forums for ~18 years at this point (though I believe they are becoming increasingly niche in general). I think that helped me to understand whaat was going on at first glance.
I've worked for a number of large businesses and non-profits where the task of shopping for this software may fall to someone without the prior knowledge I have and in those instances I feel the user would really struggle to engage.
I think the key here to the user's understanding is how they come across this page. Less of an issue if they've googled something like "I need a forum" but if it's an ad, I think the ad copy would need to set the right expectation and provide some context for the page before they get there.

The website allows teachers of coding to create forums to exchange information with the students

It was very difficult for me to understand what "using the main features from StackOverflow and Slack:
Start a Talkyard forum at https://talkyard.your-company.com" means. I was unable to imagine what this service does with this kind of description. As a potential user I would have appreciated more clear communication and perhaps some pictures of the service. Also bellow the fold the focus is on what kind of users could use this platform - again this isnt really helpful for me as I still dont understand exactly how this service works or what precisely it does. Only when i scroll further down I see something that resembles feature list. Though the focus and communication could be again improved - especially my impression was like this description was for somebody who already somewhat knows the service rather than for someone who has never heard of this product before.

I did like the clean interface look. Template was good

I was initially a little distracted by the rotating "community" words on the headline.

The wording was a bit weird - "People find help" - what people? My customers? This was unclear.

I also felt the features was too long and repetitive in format (left/right, then right left rows). If you made them less long then it would clear understanding

I would suggest another colour for the "Start a forum for" section - red seems too strong and Hurts my sensitive eyes

Seems like a knowledge base similar to Notion App.

Hi, Guys, I love the name Talkyard. I think the homepage needs a simple illustration or stock-photo or two of people collaborating together remotely. The heading is good. Although, I want it to say "everyone" rather than the rotation of words, i.e. Community, Co-workers, etc. These words are good in the blue icon box. There's a lot of scroll in the features section. Once again, I am not a fan of the illustrations in this area but I like the rollover effect of the points and forum images. The website does a great job demoing what Talkyard does and looks like. I thought the Talkyard test forum could use another category or two for search. If there is a long run-on forum, I'd like the ability to search by month/year/date and also to search via keyword and user like you can in gmail to find old emails. Have you thought about calling each forum a yard? The name sounds informal, it makes me think 4th of July outside BBQ. Great job!

i really love how this forum creator site describes itself well in the about section.

I would rate this site 10 out of 10

Hi! Starting by the name, I think It's pretty cool

What do you think it is about?
While I looked at it, i didn't know what it was, after I read a bit I realised that it is a forum provider.

What does the website make you want to do? Start doing that, and describe your experience.
Due to the nice colors I wanted to see more content about it, because in the first view i didn't see too much

Is there anything that makes you feel frustrated or confused? Or that you like?
it's kind of frustating cause it doesn't have many visuals and you can get a bit confused, however I like the colors, they're very bright an happy,

From what I understand, this website allows you to create a forum for any requirements. I like the different icons given for different chats. But I had to select a chat to get the link to it's answers. If you can give a link to the answers below each chat in the first list itself, it would save user's time.

I think the copywriting could definitely be improved to be more specific. "Talk and share knowledge" definitely piqued my interest, but I wasn't quite sure what pain point you're solving, if I'm in your target audience, what your solution is all about, etc.

So my first thought when I was reading through it was that of confusion unfortunately.

It's also very cluttered with a lot of text. If you mention that you have features similar to all of the those other platforms, I think that can be discussed somewhere lower on the page in order to keep things clean and easy to read.

Once I scroll down, I see that you dive right into what the platform is used for and the features. This is great, but I'd like to see you discuss the benefits and not just the features. How does this help improve my life and why would I choose this vs. what's already out there? Remember to refer back to the pain points that your platform solves. It might be obvious to you, but for someone like me who just stumbled on your website for the first time, I need to be told in a very clear way what those benefits are. :)

I do like the colors and the overall design though. It's clean, easy to read, and looks trustworthy.

1.) It seems like it's a forum site, but I can't tell the features or why I would want to use it based on the home page.

2.) I click demo because I want to understand what the product actually is. I need to choose between styles of demo forums, but I'm not actually sure what the difference is here. Images indicating the styles here would would be helpful. I choose "Beautiful and Informal"

3.) As far as I can tell from the demo forum this is a basic forum product — I still don't understand what differentiates this product from what is already out there, and I don't understand why I would want to use it. I return to the homepage and scroll down. This is the first time I've realized that you can scroll down on this page. I see "Use cases" which doesn't help me understand much, but then I see "A Knowledge Base" and find this information helpful. I'm beginning to understand this product but not well enough. I get frustrated and click away.

I like the name, the color scheme, the navigation, and the pricing table. I think you could use design systems like you have on the pricing table to organize the information on the "compare with", "use cases", and "about pages.

I hope this is helpful!