These holidays I have been working on publishing a feature update to my bicycle marketplace app Sprocket on Product Hunt. As an ex-Lyft Growth Designer I was surprised to learn firsthand how confusing the design of producthunt.com design is— so I wanted to take the time to make some recommendations that will undoubtedly streamline the process for other makers, while its all fresh in my head.
“Launch an update” vs “Launch a product”
I present exhibit A, which inspired this whole article:
As I can tell the UX structure for this mess is as follows:
And then when I was trying to figure this out with Product Hunt customer support over email I got further confused by the marketing lingo because a ‘NEW’ product launch is called a “Lauch” but then a product update is also called a “Launch” and not an update ( like everywhere on the internet ) The results were predictable and hilarious as follows:
P: Your launch is not approved as you’ve launched something less than 6 months before
Me: I have not launched anything yet. I have only posted Sprocket in 2014.
P: Can you share the launch URL
Me: What do you mean? I have not launched anything yet.
P: You’ve lauched before within 6mo. We can delete your lauch so you can re-launch something else.
Me: I’ve claimed my app but I havent launched anything before. I have only “Posted” my app. See screenshot…….
P: This is a Product Hub https://www.producthunt.com/products/sprocket Since your last post (also known as Product Launch or Product Post) was linked to the main Hub (Sprocklet), the Hub has already been created. Feel free to create a new post here https://www.producthunt.com/posts/new
Me: ???????
Needless to say I am still very confused as a professional app designer on whats happening with the random word salad. As far as I was able to ascertain — customer support rolled back a launch I never created allowing me to move forward with a launch which I havent tried to make yet and which is separate from the launch I already created but which was a post? #coooooool
The obvious solution would be to add an update button in the menu under the “new product launch” option.
Additionally it might be time to invest more into the design side of things overall 👩🎨 as there are many other things that could use some polish besides this
I can only add 10 images per article on Medium so I will have to break up this thread into multiple articles
