hey, I've seen your project around a few times and at Minecon. I love the idea and I think you have a lot of potential and while I absolutely love your interface I don't think you'll have much success with "normal" users when they use it. The reason your service is absolutely fantastic is because it addresses the biggest problem Minecraft servers have right now (it's not plug and play -- daunting to inexperienced users) but your interface, although pretty, feels... confusing. It feels like it's designed for people who understand Minecraft, which is not your core audience!
Hey Sam! Great to talk to you finally (we had an awesome time with @wedtm at Waza). We're primarily targeting existing Minecraft users at the moment because there is less teaching needed (and therefore less work). However we know that there's still a massive potential in reaching people who have never played (or even heard of) Minecraft before.
I'm really curious to hear specifically how you thought it was confusing. We've spent a lot of time trying to make the interface as simple as possible and would appreciate all the criticism we can get :) Fancy shooting an email to chris@minefold.com?
Yes, Miles mentioned he had spoken to you at the conference he attended, although Miles is no longer with the company and has no involvement with MCF or MCW any longer, just so you know.
The confusion I had came from the lack of hand holding. The individual pages (well most) make sense and are well designed and explained, but the process of using them feels disjointed. I'm not sure how much sense that makes, but I'm trying to imagine it from the point of view of someone who only understands a basic idea of how to play Minecraft.
For example, after signing up I click "create a world" and I'm presented with a well designed screen with lots of configuration options, but at no point does it explain what a world is. It's devoid of any information, it assumes I understand what you mean by world. Some sort of introduction on this page that says something like "A Minefold world is a minecraft world that you can invite your friends to, once created you add our server address to your multiplayer server list and add your friends to your access list and you're ready to play" would do wonders.
Next: the individual world management page. If I create a new world it shows "playing here" greyed out, what does this mean? After investigating the system I've worked out that you can only play on 1 world at a time and "playing on a world" is which world you've configured via the control panel to be accessed when you log in to pluto.minefold.com, not the world you're actually connected to, this isn't explained anywhere and I believe it will confuse users. If I click through the the "members" page there's no explanation here of what these people listed mean, I added my other account "samuel" and there was no explanation of how they can now join my world, or what the account needs to be (minecraft? minefold?). It makes sense they'd need a Minefold account when thinking about it and how the service works but users don't think, they expect the service to do that for them.
I could go on and on, although the interface is very pretty and simple which is what you aimed for, it is not straight forward, you need to hold your users hands and let them know exactly what to do and provide examples of exactly how to achieve the most popular use cases (creating a server for a friend and then getting a friend into the server is the main one).
edit: my comment seems a bit abrasive, apologies, tired, mean well :-D
Still, great work, good luck :-)