Product Exercise Day 6 of 20: Makerlog 2.0
This is Day 6 of my 20-day Product Challenge.
What is the product about?
Makerlog is a community of makers and a social productivity tool for logging tasks that allows makers to stay productive and ship faster. It works like a task management tool, where makers can have a visual overview of what they are working on as well as other makers in the community. You can explore and view what other makers are also doing.
On the website, you add a new task, and if it is completed before 12am in your timezone you get a streak for that day. The streak is similar to Github’s contribution streak.
Makerlog 2.0 is a newer version of an already launched Makerlog with a better redesign and newer features like maker score, streak graph, more integrations, etc. You can also connect Makerlog to Trello, Todoist, slack, and many more of your favourite applications.
Potential customers: Makers, Developers, Entrepreneurs, Product managers, Designers, basically anyone who wants to do anything productive.
How did the creator(s) think about this idea?
After trying to use Work In Progress (wip.chat), which is a community of makers helping each other stay accountable while shipping products together, Sergio Mattei Díaz realized it was expensive for him as a student. He decided to create his own similar product which would be free, allowing people like himself to stay productive while making great products.
This product was built purely from scratch, feature by feature to help more makers reach their goals.
What did they get right?
Makerlog utilizes the principle of consistency, the psychology to keep you productive by making you complete tasks daily. The task completion streaks keep you accountable and committed to logging your progress. The streaks like Github streaks motivates you to get something useful done everyday, this way makers can ship more and ship faster.
After seeing the similarity in the community audience, Makerlog decided to collaborate with Maker’s Kitchen. This has helped both communities grow as both services are charging towards similar missions. Maker’s kitchen is a slack community of makers also helping each other.
Makerlog is API centric and easy to integrate with your own applications, which has made the service developer-friendly.
Competition
- Wip.chat
- Make Hub
- ProductHunt Makers
- #Launch
- Startup Scene
- Indie Hackers
- MakerClub
- Task management apps: Trello, Todoist, Wunderlist, Any.do, Microsoft To-Do, Google Tasks,
Why do people like the product?
Built by one developer, the website has a very professional look. The design is very appealing to makers, and the user experience is quite intuitive and straightforward, for example, adding a new task is simple and to the point.
I especially like the use of legible texts.
Most users are already finding a lot of help and support from the community of makers using this product. Makerlog has grown a supportive and friendly community which in turn keeps people on the site as they feel welcome and cared for.
Because it is API centric, developers find it useful, and you can directly use its API or Webhooks to log tasks. Or you can even use clack integration to add new tasks.
Possible Improvements
The website is responsive and adjusts well on mobile browsers. However, there is a little delay between a physical tap and the firing of click event on the mobile browser. The website needs to be more responsive in terms of button clicks on mobile browsers.
Still on mobile, when I click to view an image, it zooms in and shows only a portion of the image without the ability to zoom out. Resizing the image popup on mobile or making it responsive will be very helpful.
Makers’ logs on the log page should be a no longer than a fixed height, can be shorter but not longer. This prevents very long logs from taking majority of the screen. I suggest adding a view more button, which expands longer logs for those who want to view more.
Lastly, the action buttons on a task card are blocking the whole task. This is good design on the desktop because of cursor hovering, but I found it annoying on mobile as I kept deleting my task. There is no hover on mobile, so when I click, it either invoke the edit action or delete the task. I suggest making it non-blocking on mobile resolutions (see image below).
Thanks for reading, Feel free to check out my Makerlog profile. I will be posting another Product Exercise tomorrow as part of my daily product challenge for 20 days.
