Max -
You are good at some UI, but not yet at UX.
I am very happy you rec’d your funding, but unless you fix the clunky barriers to intuitive use of your product, you will fail to adopt the very large portion of the market that is willing to pay for your service but needs the Google-ease-of-use UX.
I have 35 yrs exp in design - machine, product, graphic, sound, process, etc - and I am struggling with the basics here, unable to clearly or intuitively see the next move for the user.
Option switches are far, far away for their corresponding input fields - try to add a link to google writer for the first time - it’s virtually impossible. Pull a user focus group, and watch them try to do this.
The ubiquitous ‘Select Input’ field appears to be friendly to user input, apparently inviting a click that should lead to a Google Drive file selection interface, but guess what? It just spins and spins and spins. I can’t imagine how many support tickets you get about this issue alone.
I began this am thinking I would make a quick flow that read from a google doc (nope, not avail), pass to Ask AI and then output to a google doc (apparently broken).
This should be easy, for even a fourth grader.
And here I am, a user of Solidworks, Rhino, all Adobe suite, Cinema4d, 3DS Max, etc, just stuck, unable to complete the most basic of flows.
Lol!
Google Drive File Writer Failed!
A File URL must be input, or uncheck ‘Use Link?’ to pass in a File.
And ‘File To Write > Select Input’ does… nothing. Nothing.
And when I finally get it working. guess what?
Complete hallucinations.
I took my successful and fully functional web console prompt and input document from Claude 3.7, and copied it directly into Gumloop, Ask AI, Sonnet 3.7 - same prompt, same doc. What I got was a return was from another planet.
"Thank you for joining me for a walk. So we’re going to take a walk today. I’m out and about in Sausalito. I’m walking across the Golden Gate Bridge, which is something I’ve never actually done before. "
Wow… Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.
There are a lot of other issues. Note that I have only been using this for perhaps 4 sessions, and I find the interface to be hard. Color contrast for input fields is non-existent (see Edward Tufte for proper instruction here); vertically scrolling through the input fields is challenging and clunky; the reddish flow arrows look like error indicators; there is no flow direction indicated until user clicks on a node, and even then they must explicitly click on the non-text input part of the node; zoom scrolling is not consistent, forcing user to make wide mouse movements to get out of the dead zone, not sure why this is designed this way; disconnected test nodes completely stop flow execution, apparently all nodes must be connected, for some reason, and we have to delete our test node with all existing configurations; error messaging is non-existent, even in popups, unless user accidentally stumbles upon Ask Gummie; there is no way to examine output unless user clicks 3 deep into an “entire screen hogging popup” that is very very clunky and hides most of the data the user is seeking (for some reason); occasionally an orphan node will have the trash can when you click on it, and occasionally it will not, forcing user to hit delete key; Gummie hallucinates on the regular, and user has to go to gpt or claude to get the correct answer (this is really a burn for an AI automation platform, lol!).
Anyway - this is just in my first four sessions. Why am I paying $100 a month for this product?
I might make a Youtube video about this, showing folks how many errors I can get on a simple 3 node flow.
Lol!
