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Ask HN: Should users be made to fill a form before downloading?

2 pointsby anujsethabout 14 years ago
Hi,<p>I have a dilemma related to the free download version of the my startup's software (www.graphitecharts.com/download). We are a silverlight based charting library with an aim to support WPF and Windows Phone 7 in the near future. I know most people here hate plug-ins but our aim is to focus on intranet and extranet applications and sites, and eventually support sharepoint and possibly excel.<p>We launched on 22nd march 2011, that's the date I officially announced it on twitter and posted it to the visual studio gallery. We haven't had any sales yet, but we do get around 5-10 unique visitors a day from the visual studio gallery and google. 2 out of every 5 people who visit the site do download the free version. We have had around 50 downloads so far. The problem is I have no way to contact these people. I do not force them to fill any forms and but there is an optional comment form below. This setup stems from the fact that I personally get annoyed when I have to fill a form to try something out. I also hoped people who are genuinely interested will email us back on their own.<p>Problem is its not working. No one has filled the form and no has emailed us back. Its still early days but charting is hard (the first version has taken 1 year to build) and I would love feedback from users before I start working on the next version. So do you think I should force users to fill a form ? I will explicitly state there that we might contact you to ask for suggestions etc. in the future.<p>Any thoughts on this would be really helpful.<p>ps: I know the site needs a lot of work, so be gentle, but any feedback is welcome.<p>thanks, Anuj.

2 comments

flashingledsabout 14 years ago
Good work on skipping the forms; if you make me fill out a form before allowing me to download something I'm going to be mashing the keyboard with my palm.<p>Emailing people to solicit feedback seems a little bit weird. Just put a note somewhere (where it will be seen) reiterating that this is version one and you would really like any kind of feedback.<p>If that's not working, figure out some specific aspect you want feedback on and put the question out to a forum. For example I've seen some amazing UI design feedback come from cold-call requests on HN.
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Chocobeanabout 14 years ago
What kind of form....just email?<p>I would personally be very hesitant to fill out a form for free software (trial? full?), and be completely turned off by the prospect of having sales people contact me about it later.<p>Sometimes having nothing to say is a good thing.
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