I know a lot of people here are hostile to the idea of astrology and that’s okay with me.
But my gf and I have been working on this app on and off since the beginning of the year, and I’m really proud of it. It calculates your natal chart and the generates a poem based on it.
I coded damn near 99% of this by hand, the only piece of software I’m using is the open source swiss ephemeris, and the clientside javascript was built only using knockoutjs and requirejs. The layout and animations entirely on own work. We also had an illustrator make some cool imagery that is put into your poem’s layout based on your natal chart.
Anyway we are entering “open beta” testing now, the site is live and more or less fully functional. I’d really appreciate any feedback whatsoever, even just basic design/user experience kinds of things.
My main design feedback is that the date/time/location entry is a big wall to a casual visitor. 95% of visitors are likely to drop off before seeing what the site actually does, thinking to themselves “how good can it be”.
I almost did. I was still too lazy to enter my actual information so I just entered random stuff quickly to click the button. As a practical suggestion inspired by this, maybe you could add a button “generate random for hypothetical person” (or random celebrities even from some data source, although that would be a lot more work). Then if they are enticed by the poem they might go back and enter their real data.
there is one of these. click the bottom left of the screen.
I mean the target audience isn’t gonna be reluctant to enter their birth dates, but it might be good to display the random button with text like “or try a random chart”?
I do wonder if I could just scrape wikipedia or something and generate a one time json object or something. that’s the approach I used for random locations — just grabbed a list of the 100 most populous cities in the world.
the rising and venus feel refreshingly inaccurate, it’s kind of nice to have something so concise and concrete to kick against. kind of missing the save-a-chart and complicated visual charts of the other sites but as a means for sharing your aspects quickly and clearly this owns
