UX Insider: Product Hunt Roundup - E.20 - Easy to Explore vs Easy to Get Lost

Hi, I'm Daniel from Duran, a product design studio for growth stage tech teams. Today we explore what's working, what's not, and what you can learn from the newest launches on Product Hunt. Let's start with Theun, one system for auth, payments, customer database, and analytics. Yeah, the website looks quite clean, easy to scan. Let's jump straight into the product. We have a 2-stop onboarding. At least this is how it looks so far. For the first step, we have a bunch of things to fill in. Not too many, but let's go through them. So I'm not sure what's automatic setup. It can get all the details from the website. It's a nice touch. Probably I would just like leave this open though, instead of like hiding it under a button or manually. And this is basically a switcher. But it's a bit weird because the whole thing below stays the same except this side. Okay, now I think I understand it. So basically it just replaces this first part. So it should break somewhere here because otherwise it doesn't really make sense. Okay, let's add the website. The logo, it's basically using the favicon and the display name. I just edited, but it was the page title. And I have to accept these. And to the next one, this is product details. Software as a service subscriptions. And you have to fill in the product details. Launch the dashboard. One more step. Product Hunt. And we are inside of the dashboard. What should I do next? So yeah, I have this bar on top to Activate my account. Not sure what this thing does. You have to fill in the business details or individual details. Okay. A bit the difference between the selected state and the non-selected state, like either in this state or if you remember what we had for how did you hear about us, that those tags or chips, there is not a big difference between what's selected and what's not selected. So it might be Worth just taking a look at that. And then I guess this is the main step, right? Ready to integrate. Get started. It's a nice touch that they have the sandbox. Let's go with the sandbox. Activate the sandbox. Okay. And then I guess we can play around with this. Though I still have to integrate something. So we won't integrate all the stuff. And I guess we have to like connect things together, right? Build with agents or manual setup. I will leave this out. But we can like play around a bit to see how the product works. So first of all, the sandbox mode, it's interesting. I thought that it's more like a demo than just like a simple sandbox. So probably it would make sense to like just show me a demo in the beginning and just like let me wander around and play around with the product a bit. Then given that it's yet another product that you have to connect things into it and the data, it's important. It could give a good overview of what the product actually can deliver. We had similar issues with products that we work on where you have to like connect different data points in order to extract the value of the product. And once people don't do that, they basically don't understand the product and they will just leave. Like we can see that everywhere they have this sandbox environment text. So it's easy to see that you are still in the sandbox mode and you can disable it from here, right? Let's disable it and it should go back up. And now it changed the theme as well. And now the theme is back. The next product is ProductBridge, AI-native customer support and feedback agent. Now that's interesting. The book a demo button fades a bit too much into the background. Same in the navigation. It's almost the same, same color, right? There is a small difference, but not too much. Quite a nice highlighting effect here for, for the features, right? Or actually capabilities, not the features. Going forward, how you capture feedback, support customers. Okay. They also have an MCP and help center, and there's a bunch of testimonials. I'm not sure. These are questions, right? Kind of like an FAQ. It's a bit weird that they have this X here and everything is open. Usually you have a chevron or something, and most of them are closed. Let's see. Start for free. Website URL added. Okay, you can customize like brand color and such. There's the logo that you can change, the brand name, and this is more about setting up the board. So let's go with feedback and enhancements, whatever is that. So you can select multiple ones, and they actually scan the web for feedback. That's nice. And everything is set up, and now we are in the product. So you can connect data sources if you want. Also, there are integrations. You can obviously skip or close. Let's, let's close this one for now. We have an onboarding checklist which we can hide. And it says install integrations, but I didn't install anything yet. There is also a feedback portal. Okay. Because of the colors, you cannot really see some of the details, though it was one of the suggested colors. But yeah, you can, like, definitely adjust those. Create another board. We have feedback and enhancements and customize the portal. What the customize portal means? Analytics, portal access, and the tabs and such. And I assume also brand settings. Yeah. SEO, SMTP. Okay. So we have all the posts in one place. You can open them. Nice touch with the side drawer because you stay in context and it's also easy to switch between things. You have a roadmap. What you can do with the roadmap, just add things to the roadmap. To go with new website, you can submit this one. Okay. Is the roadmap public as well or it's just the feedback that's public? There are surveys, obviously. There's a help center that you can put together. There is moderation, changelog. Quite nicely shaped product. So basically it kind of replaces all your support-related activities and brings everything together, right? How do I access the portal now from here? Probably this button on top, but it's very easy to miss. So yeah, the roadmap, it's also public and you can see the changelog and the help center. Okay, that's nice. And most probably, like, once you start syncing things together, Do they actually— it's just a source or do they connect? Can connect things. Okay, that's fine. So this creates a public portal, right? Just go back a bit to the website. Yes, customer support and feedback agent. So they have this agent that you can set up, have the roadmap, feedback, support, chat, and everything in one place, right? Oh, it's nice that they actually merged the duplicates. Score the impact. Curious though how the impact scoring is just how people vote. Let's go to the roadmap. So there are, you can have comments, you see the activities, have tags, generate a changelog. People can upvote these. Okay. So let's see. Let's go to settings. Settings. There are a lot of settings though. But yeah, for these kind of products where you have to set up a bunch of things, you have to personalize it, you have to work on different areas of the portal and of the product. Makes sense. Nice. Nice. And if you are on the other side, so basically the portal itself, you can see the posts, you can share feedback, and you can select one of the 2 boards. Right. Either feedback, either enhancements. Go testing the feedback board. That shows up here. And if I go into the product, it also shows up here. And then you can select, yeah, where it belongs and the board. You can upvote and okay. There are also some areas that you have to upgrade obviously to use like surveys and help center and the support and insights. But you have quite some capabilities either way. Nice. Let's go to the next one. Next one is Ariso. Get better at leading with agentic and a bunch of stuff. They are changing quite fast. Okay, get your own Ari. Connecting with my Google account. There is a lot of stuff happening on the screen. Nice animation, but it gets a bit too much attention. Because they are like moving around and you also have this here and the text is also moving. So let's see. You can personalize it. That means you have to connect your Google Workspace and you can move the cards. What happens if I move it? Okay, can I go back? Yeah. So you can connect your work account. Then you can expand Ari's brain. That means Importing, importing things from Claude or ChatGPT, Obsidian, or Notion. You can also add your contacts. You can complete your profile. Obviously, there are a bunch of things here from passion, values, principles to personality. They also have this nice representation of all the areas. How can I go back now? I assume it should be somewhere like here. Okay. I'm not a big fan of this thing moving around quite so much. Okay, let's see. Complete your profile and then set your priorities. Okay, going back a bit. Choose how Ari talks to you. Add your other tools. Tell Ari what to always remember. And kind of that's it, right? So there are 7 steps for 7 days. What are these things? What's with this magnet here? Snap windows to the grid. Okay, let's go with researching UX patterns in AI, and that shows up here on the side. Okay, and what you can do from here? Let's go with agent workflows. It has this weird rounded something here on the side, looks somewhat like Claude. Okay, and if I go back to— how can I go back now? Today, let's go to today. Cannot. Go back. This is today. Okay. And my work. You have meetings. This looks quite different actually from the other areas. To-dos. Again, this also looks slightly different. Reminders, agents, and projects. Some areas look very different from like one from the other. And now something changed here as well. So if I want to go back, then this is— this just moves a lot in all of the places. How do I go back? Or where actually I am now? Go with the back button. Can I go back? I think I managed to get back, but I'm not sure where. So this is today. Okay. Where is the thingy that showed up? I can move this around, but then it pushes the whole thing. If I click on this, it's nothing. Okay. What should I do next? It's a bit confusing, I would say. You can also just make this into a window. So now I have 2 windows, but I don't have anything here. I'm not sure where the menu is. Admin settings. Okay. And if I want to go back from this, so this going back, it's very challenging, I would say. Yeah, I'm completely lost today. Okay, I found it, but I don't have that menu at the bottom anymore. And I don't have it here on the side either. And if I close these, then what will happen? I cannot close this. I can just— oh, that's weird. It says here to minimize, but it doesn't minimize it. It just puts it back on the page, which I assumed it's expand actually. Under My Space, there are basically settings like profile, priorities and routines, coaching. Coaching is a separate space from day-to-day chat. You have to set this up. I will go with skip integrations. And then this thing shows up here, preferences and collaboration cards. It would be great to just like clean this up a bit because there is a lot of context switching between things. So profile looks like this, priorities looks like this, which these 2, let's say they are, they are in a way very similar and also collaboration card. Preferences, Integrations, they have this sidebar here. But here you also have a bunch of other things that you don't see here on the top. And then Coaching, this looks like a completely different area. So I'm not sure why it's here. And then under My Work, you have Meetings, come on, To-dos, Reminders. So basically, Meetings and Reminders are kind of similar but not the same. Then you have Agents and Projects. And these 2 also change slightly if you look at the right side, but also here. So things move around quite a lot. And Journal looks different than what we had here, but it's similar with the other parts of the same category. And then we have the Brain. We have Contacts, Notes, and Trackers, which some look in a way, others look different, and then the brain is like completely different. But it's an interesting visualization for sure. And if you go back to my chats, then you have your chats here. But now I'm not sure how can I go back to what I had before where I had this menu here, and I cannot find the menu anymore. Let's try to refresh this whole thing. No, still no menu. What's this? You have a grid as well, and I'm not sure what this thing does. Auto arrange. And this one, it's like a share. Share the dashboard, documentation, notifications, and please close this one, and other settings. So this is the same as this. It's an interesting product. I definitely didn't play around enough to understand what can be done here, but the navigation, it's a bit too complex. It's easy to get lost in things, and some areas are different than other areas, and basically patterns, they don't work the same way across the product. So some kind of, I know, reorganization of the navigation would be super beneficial, I would say, in this product. In some places, you have, like, very long lists of things, and some areas appear 2 or 3 times. What if we go to— let's go to meetings. So they also have a meeting note-taker. Okay, and what's this one? Sample meeting notes. Okay, so this is the meeting note. You can also see the transcript, I assume, if it's there. It's not here at the moment. Some settings here on top and tags. These are quite small, so easy to miss them or make them at least challenging to click. And a bunch of things here. You have insights on the meetings. We don't have enough meetings, obviously. And coaching, I assume it's also on the meeting level or on the meetings. So you can also upload recordings. You can enable sync. But even here, the buttons look different. Yeah. So on the capability side, it looks like you can do a bunch of stuff, but actually getting those things to work for you might be a bit challenging, I would say, with all the things that are happening here. I'm not quite sure on all of these boxes and windows that you can move around. What's the last step? Oh, we don't have that. Let's go to choose a style. Okay, if we go to this, it actually— I don't think this should be that part, or styles is that part. Okay, this is something different. So here you can actually input text and then they extract how you would talk, how you would write. Communication profile, maybe this is the one. I assume that's the one. Communication style based on Desk types. Okay, let's leave it default. And if we go back, is that checked? No. But should I just switch it to something different, or do I have to like save? Now it's done. That one step is done. You can obviously add integrations. They have a very long list of integrations indeed. And what are the other steps? Okay, and the last one. So if we go And that's it. Cool. Yeah, so as I mentioned, the product looks interesting and capable of a lot of things, but setting it up and like just navigating and going around things, it can be a bit challenging. It's somewhat easy to get lost. And I'm not sure I'm very sold on this whiteboard style, but it's also a personal preference. So like even here when Like, I just minimized a window and the other one that's here. So minimizing this window, it shows up here. So that's one pattern, but minimizing this window, it actually shows up in the main area. The same thing as if I click on expand, which makes sense because it expands it. But now how I can make it back? I cannot. I cannot minimize it anymore, I guess. Or yeah, I'm not sure if I can. If we go back to today, nothing happens. Looks a bit challenging to use in some places, I would say. How can I go back now? Okay, there's another settings panel which is admin settings. Even getting out of this area, it's a bit challenging because I have— this doesn't do anything. This doesn't do anything. So it would be nice to have like a home button or something that just like leads you back to where you started. So I can do it from here, but it takes a while to figure this out. It could be just like a simple home button somewhere. Also, you have this home here, which is a bit confusing because this is also a home icon here. And this doesn't seem to do anything. I mean, if you switch between these, then Yeah, it brings you back to general settings. And also this bar doesn't update. If I change something here, it doesn't do anything. And now something disappeared, the yellow bar. This should also update when I change something here in the navigation. It should update the dropdown, and then it should be at least in sync. Let's go back to today, and now everything gets back in this windows mode, so I can move them around. Can I Start another chat. Me, my chats. There is this new chat with a dropdown as well, off the record. Okay, go back here. It's just one chat window. Maybe something like a plus or something here would also help. You know, it's just like do something new from here or start something new from here. Because I thought that you can somehow show all of your chats or something. But it looks like it's one chat here. I'm not even sure how you pick which one. Okay, let's see. Pin, that means on top. What? Nothing changed here. Yeah, daily journal to save. And if I go back, went back here, but nothing changed here either. Okay, that's interesting product, but yeah, I would definitely work a bit on the navigation and how things are connected because it's very, very easy to get lost in The whole product just going around. Okay, let's try out elva.ai. Sign up free. It's quite a pretty sign-up page. Interesting layout for, for the sign-up area. Usually you have these 2 in the same level, not like smaller, visibly smaller actually. We have a tutorial. Let's just try out the tutorial. Nice animations as well. Like one step, start the tutorial. Okay. It's nice that they added this visual representation of actually what's happening. And these actually correspond for different areas of the product. So if I go next, next, this goes to the MCP server. The next one goes to API contacts. And then you also have a demo collection. Okay, this is the demo collection. I assume this is more like to play around with the product a bit, right? You have an overview, you have the API editor, you have the documentation. Let's go back to the dashboard. This is the demo collection, and this opens here down below. It is a bit weird how it opens, but I don't think it's a big problem. It's easy to navigate around that. But now I'm still in the demo. Okay, you can create a new one from here, from scratch, from a sample API, or Generate an API with AI. Yeah, probably we'll stop here, but just a couple of thoughts. Super nice representation of what the product actually does on the tour, and then how they actually connected those to the sidebar navigation was nice and helpful. And also having this demo, it's a nice touch for the product. So you can wander around and explore a bit. without you actually have to commit to create something. The next product is Cream. Let's see how this goes. Quite an interesting layout, I would say. Nice, playful, colorful landing page. Get started. Continue here. Adding the store name, what you are selling, adding some stuff here. They don't display the number of steps, but I assume there are not too many. This one, like 3, these 3. Yeah. 3 steps. And once you are in the product, there are some other things that you have to do. Tell us about your business, verify your identity or business identity, and create your product. But this playful design language that they had on the homepage, it translates here as well. So that's quite nice. Have these nice colors and the buttons that stand out a bit. Also the cards. How you operate. Okay, you have to fill in all these details. I won't go through all of them, and without them I cannot actually do too much, but I guess it's good enough to just like wander around a bit. And once you move around and, and you are not on the home page anymore, they have this highlight to know what you should do next. They also have a test mode. Let's try the test mode. Does this mean that they create What's the difference between test mode? So it's not quite like a demo, just the fact that you can play around with your own data, or I thought that it's more like a demo, honestly, or I hope that it's more like a demo. You can create a product. You can— let's go with a subscription. And then you can see this filling in. We have a new product created. You can create bundles. And inside of the bundles, you can add the product. I have to— okay. And I would need 2 products. I have just one, so we cannot create a bundle, obviously. But this, this is how it looks on the checkout. Looks very similar to Stripe. And you can switch to live. Let's add one more product, another subscription. How do you change the price? It's here. Honestly, I was expecting it somewhere on the side, somewhere here for some reason, not down below. But this is, yeah, this is a summary basically of what's happening. But when I saw the price here, I thought that I can just like edit. Maybe it would work like having an edit and then just like scrolling you here. There are a bunch of options as well. And other than that, let's see what other things we have. Discounts, obviously licenses nicely packed together and settings. And this is the portal, I assume, right? Quite a nice product, actually. I really like the theme here with these shadows and the buttons. It's not something that you see in all of the products. Most of them are quite flat. And also just navigating and going around, it was easy. And though I didn't set up the whole store and such, what I could see on a glance, it looks quite nice and easy to use. this page of creating a product. Super easy to scan, to go through. The only thing that it was, at least for me, a bit confusing is the pricing. But once you start scrolling around, you easily find it. Other than that, not much to say without the data, obviously, and properly testing it out. That's it for today. As you can see, there are some products that are playful and easy to use and nice to navigate through and just discover what they can deliver. But in some cases, navigating between different sections of the product and then finding your way around them and then getting back to where you actually started might be challenging. And in those cases, it's very important to help and guide the users through the whole flow so they can actually find what they are looking for. And most importantly, they find it easily, not just like wandering around and trying to guess. What should be the next step? Look out for how you can fix these and eventually ask a couple of people to try out the product and just look over their shoulders and you will find some very important and useful information about how people are actually using the products in their real life. Thank you and see you next time.