Dear people trying to sell me stuff:
Please put something on your website that I can read. I do not want to watch a video, and that's all you have, so now I will never learn about your product.
Please put something on your website that I can read. I do not want to watch a video, and that's all you have, so now I will never learn about your product.
Please don't put a ream of text on your landing page that I have to read in order to learn about your product. I'm a visual person, and the web has not been a text-only medium for quite some time now. Something like a video, relevant pictures, and big bold text will do just fine thanks.
I'm not trying to play devil's advocate here. This is actually what I prefer, and I think they did a good job.
I understand what you're saying--nobody wants to land on a stuffy wall of text. But in this case, there's nothing to find but the window dressing. I'm fine clicking on a "find out more" link that takes me to more detail. But that's missing here entirely.
Then if you end up with the living-with-nest page you get a slideshow, video link, clear links to more info, a step by step slick UI describing it, etc.
I'm pretty impressed with the balance of information and usability. If I had to nitpick one thing it would be that the "Meet the Nest Learning Thermostat" link could be a little more obvious (being next to a button hides the fact that it's a link).
It turns out that Nest doesn't have it smack dab on the landing page, but you just need to make the logical (to me) choice of clicking on the "Meet the Nest Learning Thermostat" link and the information is there. Scroll down at your leisure and skim through the text and the illustrations. It's not even one of those annoying PowerPoint-like presentations; you just need to scroll down.
I liked it, a lot.