Day 75 (Feedback Friday): Relephant

feedback friday

Finally trying out my housemates’ product, Relephant!

Notes and reflections

  • Onboarding

    • There’s a ton of content on the welcome page and it feels a bit overwhelming

      • Simplifying that page to just the steps required for setup and moving the other parts (searching, sharing, adding screenshots, etc.) to a separate help destination might make it less intimidating

  • Main page

    • When viewing all the screenshots, showing the timestamp and text seems unnecessary and feels cluttered

    • Every time I switch tabs and come back to Relephant, the images refresh which is pretty distracting

    • Showing the collection sharing UI is confusing when it’s not something I can act on

      • Makes more sense to show this after user performs a search

  • Viewing a screenshot

    • Link icon is unconventional and placement makes it seem like I’m copying the timestamp

    • The timestamp doesn’t feel like it should be the most important information of the screenshot

    • Wasn’t clear at first what all that text was. Having a label like “Image text” would help.

    • Tags

      • Many tags seem irrelevant
      • Feature request: Be able to add and remove my own tags
      • Feature request: Being able to click a tag and see all other screenshots with that tag

  • Random feature requests

    • Being able to see the URL I was on when taking a screenshot would be helpful

Overall product thoughts

As I see it, Relephant faces two challenges:

  1. It requires users to change their behavior
  2. There are so many potential use cases that users might not know how to use it

Behavior change

There aren’t that many use cases for screenshots as they exist today, and people certainly don’t see them as a way to extend their memory because the tooling doesn’t exist. Relephant has the potential to change all that, but it requires people to develop the habit of taking screenshots, if they don’t already. An existing example of another product category with the same challenge is bookmarking (e.g. Pinboard) where users need to develop the habit of bookmarking sites before they find the service valuable. But when they do develop that habit and reap the benefits, they become extremely loyal users.

Endless use cases

The major roadblock to creating that behavior change is that users might not know why they should. The ability to intelligently process and organize screenshots has a ton of potential use cases, but none of them are obvious. Imagine all the reasons why people save images today, and it could be done faster and better with screenshots. For example, someone who’s looking for inspiration for their room decor could take screenshots from different blogs that they visit and put it into a collection — Relephant could also automatically remember the page it came from for future reference and surface similar images from the Web. A photography enthusiast could do the same with all the photos they love — Relephant could automatically organize those images by image content, color, etc.

I think the solution for both of these challenges would be to identify one killer use case and nail it. Giving people a clear case for taking screenshots would be much more effective at helping them build the habit than having them figure it out on their own. Right now, I still don’t know what I should be using Relephant for even after having gone through the onboarding. It seems powerful, but I’m not sure for what.

One starting point is the use case on Relephant’s landing page: extending your memory. This resonates with me because I’m often not able to recall where I read something or exactly what I read, and this is something Relephant can entirely solve for me with its existing feature set.

Imagine that Relephant creates a browser extension like Full Page Screen Capture that automatically takes a screenshot of the entire page with a single click.

Now every time I read an article, a tweet, or basically any text content that I want to remember, I can click that to have Relephant save the information.

At any point in the future, I can type in the few words I remember or the topic name and get back that article in addition to all other related content I’d saved.

The moment I benefit from this by being able to remember some random tweet I read the previous week, etc. I’d start taking way more screenshots because I’d be sold on the power of having Relephant remember things for me.

This is a pretty niche use case, but I think that’s totally fine. I can see the people who care about organizing their personal knowledge becoming ardent fans of this (see #roamcult). And from there, Relephant can expand into other use cases until people learn to rely on Relephant as their trusty external brain.

THE POSSIBILITIES ARE ENDLESS