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This is awesome. Although the Android app has some rough edges it gives off a very personal and connecting vibe. I think the shades of blue and green you chose
by superice 10y ago
This is awesome. Although the Android app has some rough edges it gives off a very personal and connecting vibe. I think the shades of blue and green you chose feel too cold for what the platform is supposed to be, the app feels very cold initially... but then this amazing thing happened: I started to listen to the Ocean. The Ocean to me feels like something from the movie "Her" (2013): these are other peoples stories and lives I'm listening to, and that is both really odd and really cool. It feels very personal, and I think this might be exactly what many people are missing nowadays: just taking 5 minutes out of your day to empathize with others, and since it's audio only you could do that while in the car, or while working, or while cleaning your house. I haven't yet tried this with family or close friends, and I think it might feel too personal at that point. Then again, I'm not that socially capable, so that might be just me. Perhaps it takes some getting used to.
As I said before though, there are some rough edges. The written text in the app feels... unprofessional, which might not be a bad thing necessarily. I think you tried to find a light tone to connect with users, but you haven't yet succeeded in striking that light hearted balance between connecting with your users and talking with the confidence of a business. The colors look somewhat cold for what feels like a very warm app. And on the tech-side there could be some improvements, like detecting 'empty' waves: apparently people happen to accidently send out a wave without any meaningful sound whatsoever into the world, and I imagine detecting that is something that could be done automatically. By the way, sound quality is okay, but make sure you don't neglect it. This idea will only work if you forget that you're listening through a device, if it's anything like a phone call I think that might be to robotic.
Something I just thought of: how do you plan to tackle the language barrier? Is the Ocean going to consist of English-only spoken text, or are you going to tag waves with a language and filter based on what the user is using?
- dl_terp 10y agoThanks so much for the feedback. I'm asking the developers about automatically removing blank waves. That seems like a big win. Otherwise we might have to have it as an option under "report" and rely on the community (at least initially) to mark a blank wave as blank. As for the language barrier. Yes, we're going to be english only to begin with, then I think we'll make versions for other languages. I'm trying to think of the best way to simply message this right now. Let me know if you have any great ideas.