Maybe you look at a SIMPLER site like https://tom.preston-werner.com/ and mistakenly equate that with a "worse" landing page. Actually though this simple page has bullet proof styling, and slapping some stock images on it like you did on your page wouldn't make it better, it would make it way worse.
Rather than looking for an external factor like a "mythical uncanny valley" to explain your landing page's poor performance, look inwards at your individual styling and what could be improved.
Still, OP has lots of work to do on that landing page, but not only on the design (there are a gazillion templates for that) but on how does it convey the value of the service it's offering. Also almost all clicks take inmediately to a login page without much explanation.
They’re trying to take design principles that are common among professionally designed webpages and apply them. They are, unfortunately, doing so quite poorly, and it is leading to a worse result.
Edit: typo
Do you not see how their current page takes design cues from professional pages?
I think its much more likely the greater volume of criticism is due to the fact that as OP gets closer to a known aesthetic, the precision of the criticisms can grow because it becomes more obvious what the goal is, and how its been missed.
Whereas a totally unstyled HTML page can't really be criticized usefully, because there is no real goal presented, and so nothing to really contrast against. At best you can say "fix everything".
> Sections are not delineated clearly
> separation between heading and body
Personally, when I open that site, I have no idea what it's about at all (yeah, it's something related to house-hunting). Only when I scroll down an entire screen-height, I get some high level explanation.
All the things you noted are there, but I don't think fixing them would solve anything.
It looks way too wide and spaced out on a regular desktop monitor
Maybe at least give me a taste of something useful before I have to sign up?
I was much less bothered by the layout and colours.
But you still need a demo video at the very least
He had very little accent. He had obviously worked very hard to remove the accent (big job), but he still understood English as a secondary language, and sometimes had difficulty comprehending dialogue (especially in New York, where we talk quickly).
People didn’t cut him slack for the lack of comprehension, where I think they would have, if he had a stronger accent.
I also knew an Italian, who had a strong accent, but a better command of English than most native speakers. I think he deliberately played his accent up.
A great trick is to keep some of your accent, so people would know for sure you're a foreigner, but also surprise them with words that only the most literate people would know.
How to do it? Easier if your native language is Italian and you studied Latin at school. There's hundreds of words like that that naturally come to you as the ones you would use if you had to say the same thing in your native Italian language.
I'd say I have met a lot of native speakers that, while obviously native, have poor vocabulary skills (and also make some grammar mistakes - but not the ones the ESL students usually make)
It's not surprising to have people that have trouble with words like rotund, pulmonary, saturnine, among others. (Or the usual mistakes like "should of", "it's" when they mean "its", etc)
Incidentally, these (or at least the first) are the mistakes that only native speakers and very fluent people make.
My experience, everywhere in Tokyo from small restaurants to Disney, was that everyone was nervous to try to speak English with me, but willing to try. Even the waitress at one restaurant that clearly didn't speak much English.
When I tried to speak Japanese, they were delighted. My language partners have highly praised my accent, which I understand to mean that I'm not completely horrible. And I have a decent basic vocabulary and horrible grammar.
I have had some instances (both in Tokyo and with my language partners who were not in Tokyo) where they suddenly started talking way above my level, and I had to ask them to explain things, but I think that's just the weirdness of talking to a full grown adult that speaks like a child, and trying to manage that situation.
I've had the same happen (and then stop happening, to my delight) to me with English (non-native speaker with fairly strong Eastern European accent).
Thanks for that! I hadn't heard of Dogen before.
Not trying to be mean at all, but one should be careful with such assumptions, especially in a country like Japan that that abounds with social norms and codes that foreigners are almost guaranteed to get wrong.
Overall, Japanese people really are culturally and linguistically fairly isolated on their little island chain -- and they hate it. One of the upshots of this is that fluent or even conversational English speakers are quite rare in Japan; and another is that anything and anyone from "overseas" is a potential source of fascination and wonder. (A little scary, too.) So when it comes particularly to the young (< 50 y.o. give or take), as a foreign tourist you will find yourself surrounded by people mildly to extremely intrigued in making a cross-cultural connection -- seeking a "borderless feeling" -- but they have no idea how. With a bit of conversational Japanese, you can establish lines of communication with the Japanese you meet and kick off that connection process, for which they will be quite grateful.
At the very least, learn how to ask for an English speaker if one is available. I did this once in a frozen yogurt shop, and was introduced to the manager, a 22-year-old who wanted to tell me all about her time as an exchange student in California (as well as how to buy yogurt in the shop).
Of course, this was Osaka. So maybe they were just super-accommodating to me so they would get my business. (By comparison to Tokyo, Osaka is hustle town -- matters of decorum and cultural appropriateness can be put aside if it means more business.)
LOL this is my experience in Taiwan. I find my Mandarin is miraculously much better at the night markets than it is when asking directions.
Honestly I love being a poor mandarin speaker in Taiwan. I am pretty sure a good chunk of the population has better english than my mando, but if I start with madarin they will respond in kind 90% of the time. My theory is that they're happy for me to struggle with a language than to do the same themselves - fine by me, great opportunity to practice!
Relatedly, and famously, Shigeru Miyamoto takes interview questions in English and understands it fairly well, but responds via interpreter simply because the idea of people hearing him struggle with English embarrasses him.
I assumed this was because my German sucked.
Someone finally explained to me that my beginner German was fine, but most people relished the opportunity to practice their English.
I learned to just keep going in broken German, my conversation partner in broken English. For the most part, it worked.
I think he was either used to speaking English with non-Germans or just liked having the opportunity to speak English.
I just kept replying in German and he eventually switched to speaking German to me.
I've had more of this kind of experience (Me speaking intermediate Spanish, with my conversation partner speaking intermediate English) in places outside of my home area where people are more likely to speak Spanish than English on a regular basis: a range of Latin American countries that I've visited, and especially when I visited the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico.
The absolute worst is places where most people speak English well but some don’t at all. Puerto Rico for example. I’d start off in Spanish and get answered back in perfect English a dozen times in a row, then finally give up and just speak English to somebody. Every single time, that would be the person who didn’t understand it. And every time I’d be so flustered at having to switch back on the fly that my own Spanish would disappear.
In rural, undeveloped bits of Central America, though, I’d go weeks at a time without speaking English at all. It certainly boosts your confidence.
Same here in Sweden: I look South European, so if I speak Swedish I'm just a 'foreigner', if I speak English I'm a tourist who should be impressed by how welcoming and friendly the locals are.
Italian here with a decent grasp of the English language.
1) some sounds are harder to learn how to pronunciate, especially for American English, and especially 'R' based ones
2) with time I've grown fond of my accent and wear it as a distinctive badge. Most of my English speaking, European colleagues do the same. Everyone has their own and it makes part of our personality.
I like that. My acquaintance used to have to peel the girls off him.
I have a very strange accent, that has been stepped on, by many years of traveling.
As a child, I had a British accent, then, I lived in Maryland, and got a slightly "Southern" accent. I have lived in New York for the last thirty years, so that has also affected my accent.
Plus, I have a scratchy, high-pitched voice, anyway (vocal cord damage, as a kid).
In the real South, Marylanders are considered damn Yankees.
In New York, we're considered damn rednecks.
I assumed redneck was an insult but it seems not always from what I've heard. I guess it is here. But what does it mean?
These may seem odd questions but I truly don't know. TIA
Between the "North" and the "South" on the Eastern seaboard there is a central area that is in some ways renounced by both "regions". There's some remainder of the Civil War/Mason Dixon line there, but it doesn't follow that delineation today.
For example, in New York someone who grew up in rural Maryland would likely be viewed culturally as a "Southerner". But so would someone from Western Pennsylvania. So would someone from West Virginia, despite West Virginia and Pennsylvania being part of the Union. People in the Deep South would view residents of these areas as "Yankees".
In both cases what is meant is that "Your cultural experience is different enough from ours that you're not 'us', you're 'them'." where 'them' is Southern or Northern, wherever you're not. The thing is, there's a big chunk of the mid-Atlantic seaboard that is unique, not traditionally Southern or Northern.
"Redneck" is usually pejorative for a working class, white, Southerner. When rednecks say "redneck" it usually isn't an insult, but when others use the word it usually is. Calling somewhere a "Redneck bar" is fine, but calling someone in that bar a "redneck" is usually not.
"Yankee" is just a term for Northerner. I'm sure you could say it as an insult, and I'm sure some people think "yankee" is an insult, but if someone calls me a yankee I'd happily agree with them.
Here in NZ, "redneck" seems to be morphing away from the "hick" or working class definitions to more of a "racist bigot" connotation that could be applied more widely.
It is usually not used a positive way.
Much the same, "redneck" is not meant in a positive way up north.
As with many insults, the group the insult is hurled at can own it, and take it up as a term of almost endearment.
"Yankee" is/was a derogatory term for Northerners, most typically used by Southerners during the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. If you want to get technical, it applies most strongly to New Englanders, but when used by a Southerner, it's a pretty broad brush. Nowadays, you'd be hard pressed to actually find someone using the term "yankee" in any sort of serious or angry way. It's much more common to hear it in a tongue-in-cheek way, which is how the parent commenter was using it.
"Damn Yankee" is something of a stereotypical phrase you might hear from that time period, especially Reconstruction, when there were still a lot of hard feelings about the war, as well as about Northerners who moved south to participate in Reconstruction, often known as "carpetbaggers" and who were thought of as profiteering from the situation.
But nowadays it's more of a cultural joke, or meme. Like for example, if someone were to recommend me a barbecue restaurant in, like, Vermont or something, I might say "I don't know if I trust a damn Yankee to make good barbecue!" (To be fair, I would have very low expectations all the same. Barbecue just isn't the same outside the South.)
As for "redneck": it's still something of a disparaging term, and connotes poverty, poor education, and general backwardness. It's sorta like the word "hillbilly" or "country bumpkin", except with a more distinctly Southern vibe. However, it's been partially reclaimed and is often used by country folks to refer to themselves.
However, it's not exactly a term used only by Northerners- it wouldn't be at all surprising to hear (for instance) a Southern doctor or lawyer grumbling about "a bunch of stupid rednecks" causing trouble.
Man, I wish I could multi-upvote...
I would never correct this in a different context, but the word you're looking for is simply "pronounce".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1mqg4C0awA
>Green Eggs and Ham narrated by the Reverand Jesse Jackson
>What was great about this skit was that absolutely nobody in that studio even knew Jesse Jackson was there outside of Kevin Nealon who anchored Weekend Update and Lorne Michaels. It was a great surprise to everyone and completely unscripted. Jesse just absolutely nailed that reading.
I know a little bit of Polish but I speak it with a perfect BBC Polish accent. Worked a long time at it. I noticed that on buses or in restaurants if I told people I didn’t understand Polish they completely ignored me and didn’t simplify their language. I think because I can speak my few words like a native they just filtered out what I was saying.
The same was not true in Paris. I am not convinced I have a great French accent, however.
Not necessarily. I'm Irish, and English is my first language. Landing in Atlanta airport a few years ago I asked some airport staff for directions to the bus, and they looked at me blankly. It was only when I said "bus" in a fake American accent that they understood
I suppose OP meant "weird non-native English".
Native accents, in my experience, are a different matter. Certain non-American accents (Irish, Scottish come to mind) are just very hard to understand for untrained American ears that have never been exposed to them before.
I'm always thinking "why do you think I said that to you now?", because if someone said to me "sorry, my English is really bad" I'd respond with something like "Oh OK, I'll slow down then, or is there another language we share?".
I was brought up in England, and there it can be very rude to ask for what you want directly (usually depending on class, as most things do in English culture). So it feels very wrong to just come right out with it ;) but I'm learning.
Me speaking English gets the cold shoulder too. We’ve tried this out in different situations where we don’t make it known we’re together just so we can compare and contrast the treatment.
[1] trying to buy a medium size bottle of water with “nie duze, nie male woda nie gazowana po prosze”
I'm curious what you mean by that.
TBH I've seen non-slavic person speaking Polish only once, so I don't even have an idea what I'd do in that situation.
Same happened to me in Spanish. I can pronounce Spanish pretty well so when I was a beginner and said something to somebody in Costa Rica they responded with full speed Spanish. So I had to learn to mispronounce more.
The impression I think is that the more polished a product or MVP looks, the more "finished" it is and therefore the more open it'll be to criticism (there's literally more of the product to criticise). This could be a good thing, since it gives you much more insight into what needs to be improved for the final product
Which all kinda makes sense, with the intuitive reasoning being: If you had time and money to sink into a pixel-perfect design, you're already one step beyond product-market fit, so creating a too good impression might not work in your favor.
I've found the tricky stage to be when you're getting closer to high-fidelity but you're not quite there yet and need client feedback to progress. Caveating everything the client should "ignore for now" can be exhausting and sometimes doesn't work (e.g. they'll nitpick the things you don't need feedback on yet), but polishing everything to high-fidelity levels before you can show it is incredibly time consuming. Are there any interesting tricks at this stage?
I also use the phrase "uncanny valley" for this in-between stage of design where there's a risk the client is going to harshly judge parts of the design that aren't ready for feedback yet. Is there another phrase for this?
I'll usually try to gauge at the start of a project how receptive the client is to brainstorming over rough work because it's much more efficient this way.
But the important thing is to take an evidence-based approach.
A good idea is to keep it low fidelity for as long as possible until the UX is worked out and tested. Then high-fi it along the brand guidelines.
Then test test test, again.
The best way of getting a good result for your client is to take an evidence-based approach where the initial product is set up as an experimental baseline and further improvements are tested against that baseline, be that through automated A-B testing or focus groups of representative users.
Focus on getting something small to market as soon as possible and adding/improving features in an evidence-based way.
If the client has feedback you don’t like, test it anyway and charge them. They might be right.
Focus group testing should take place before presenting to clients. Use paper prototypes with paper cutouts or using an app such as POP.
Don’t guess! Test!
As a rule when doing UX you want three possible designs (one of which should be a bit “out there”) and you should test each design with representative users. You learn a lot more from in person research than from A/B testing. A/B testing should always be used to verify changes or features. But you need to focus group at the design stage.
As an aside, what do you do when clients are resistant to doing user testing?
Position yourself as an “evidence based” supplier.
But for current clients, loss aversion is always the best way to get people to change their behaviour. What I mean by that is you have to quantify the value of lost customers. Sometimes that means doing some user testing anyway (perhaps on some other area of their product) and showing how many people are getting frustrated and/or giving up. User testing doesn’t have to be expensive, just find 3 representative people (even if one is your SO or the boss’s PA) and sit with them while they use the product. If you can tell a client this is costing you x million a year, and fixing it only costs x thousand then you’re pretty much there.
But like I said you’ve got to lead with evidence based approaches to get the clients you want.
I definitely agree with this, from what I’ve found both giving and reviving feedback.
Some pages show very clearly that the focus was not on designing a good looking appealing page, either minimal on purpose, or just a bit dated (like hackernews, or old reddit). Not bad, it's familiar, functional, fine.
Other pages are designed to do other things; for example evoke desire, excitement and/or delight (like Apple, Stripe).
Then there are pages that want to be Apple, but don't quite succeed. A lot of websites that use Bootstrap or material design are like that. It's superficial design, they have some of the styles, but it's very clear there is a lack of design, lack of storytelling, lack of substance. It's a bit cringy to look at, it evokes negative feelings.
That doesn't mean all is lost, even experienced designers often go through that phase in the design process, they just are unlikely to release it haha. Keep asking yourself questions; What do I want it to do? Why isn't it doing it right now? Why does it look off? Look at examples that do achieve what you want, what exactly is it that is different? Etc etc. And then iterate, iterate, iterate.
Design often looks simple/obvious, but it takes a lot of practice, perseverance and struggle to get good at it.
If the design appears obviously incomplete or unfinished, much critical judgement is withheld since it's assumed that whatever criticism they have will be addressed by the final design. Depending on your goal, this can be helpful or even counterproductive (maybe the finished design won't be how they assume it will be). Or others will instead focus on high-level feedback like addressing the overall theme and direction instead of the minutiae of the design.
If the design appears highly polished, then any issue, however minor, is assumed to be "finalized" and thus the criticism pours out.
If you make it appear completed, then people will assume it is in fact completed. If you're still working on it, make it look clearly unfinished.
However, no matter how much you stress it is a prototype or make it look as such, someone will still criticize the the fact it's all in black and white and all the text says "Lorem ipsum".
I believe we're conditioned to understand various fidelities of information based on the principles of design. These fundamental principles—things like contrast, balance, proportion, hierarchy, motion, and variety—help us determine how to interpret what we experience.
For example: a webpage that has clear hierarchy of information, is visually balanced, uses motion to attract attention and convey concepts, is much more likely to be interpreted as a final product. Whereas a page that is a bit disorganized may be understood as in early development.
The problem is most landing pages are one page, so the creator invests considerable time in making them look and work well, leading to the perception of a complete project.
Then when the time comes to build a fully functional website/product, there's a lot more to invest in and so less time is spent.
Paradox of shipping an MVP product or business, I guess.
I've seen it first hand numerous times. Even if a client/audience feels the need to offer feedback/criticism ('cause they always do) the level of polish even affects how they frame the feedback/criticism.
[0]: and data charting tools, presumably more
Can I ask - why do you think you are building a "better" landing page? If you are getting judged more harshly, doesnt that mean your pages are not actually "better"? Maybe as you are building more pages, your subjective opinion of your own designs has changed....
I've seen it a few times on MVPs launched here. Some new YC company and their flashy homepage, but when I browse the homepage I have no idea what the company actually does. The pages are clean, but the actual idea is vague...
To me, "better" means more effective i.e. higher conversion rate, wider reach, etc.
It's common design these days to have landing pages that are a giant photo with huge text where you have to scroll for for a mile to be rewarded with nothing but platitudes and hyperbole, one sentence at a time. The simpler page which actually explains the product functionality and the pricing in clear language on one page would be better from the user's perspective.
https://t-artmagazine.com/what-is-corporate-memphis-and-why-...
> Illustrations in the style, with its aggressively friendly expressions, portray a world that is uncannily utopian.
Showing me corporate Memphis and hiding the product is a major red flag.
Believe me, the site was worse a few weeks ago - or at least a lot more basic. The feedback I got from the few people I showed that site to was quite positive though. As I made what I thought were improvements though I started getting more and more negative feedback hence the observation in my original post.
True, some of what I thought were improvements probably made the site worse. The lesson I've learnt is still valid though - I should have paid someone early on in the product development stage to take care of the UI.
I will pay someone this week to do that and hopefully launch properly sometime in June. I bet when I actually do a "Show HN" with a decent looking landing page it will not garner as much interest as this has - people love picking out mistakes!
Still, a big thank you to everyone who has provided feedback. I've fixed the obvious errors. Will tackle the others when I get the chance.
A bad landing page filters out people who are just moderately interested. They'll just close the tab and move on. That's going to skew the feedback you'll get.
If you don't get (much) feedback at all you're in a much worse spot. Then you don't know if your MVP sucks, or it doesn't but your landing page sucks, or maybe both are fine but you're just not getting the right traffic. It's way harder to figure out what to do when nobody seems to care at all about what you've built.
If you think it's visually stunning without being informative or just pure information without attention-grabbing visuals, then you'll fall on either side of the hill.
Then there are other factors including your target audience, copy-test, sentiment, color combinations etc.
I've build many landing pages in my life time and I am not sure if I still get it. If you are optimizing for HN-audience, I would say it also requires a different strategy (e.g. demo first without signing up?)
Everything should be in support of telling the main narrative, while also keeping attention. It's a balance as you say; a dry story isn't very interesting, irrelevant attention grabbing isn't very interesting either (or very briefly to be followed by disappointment and confusion).
What's challenging with landing pages is that for a lot of products the story of the product just isn't that exciting, you can add bells and whistles but that isn't going to make your story any more interesting. Finding a good narrative is imo half the battle.
edit: I noticed that at the very bottom there's a link to a demo but the demo doesn't load.
The images are fine and there's not much more to the design on mobile. But at the top I'm told "you previously created a home hunt" which I definitely didn't which links to a form with prefilled demo passwords which is unusual, the main call to action is below the fold, and I'm not sure how important the link to donate to the project via OpenCollective is, but I bet the average first time user is confused by it. The other effect I can imagine is if the first cohort of viewers was the sort of people that browse interesting FOSS projects (who will have used a lot of software with worse landing pages!) and the cohort looking at the current design are homebuyers in general...
- Add more whitespace. Sections are too close to each other
- Reduce font size. The body text is way too large and competes with headers
- Add padding. It would help to have some whitespace on the left and right of your page.
Some of the internal elements also seem too squat and compressed, especially the "what makes our websites special" part
To me it has something to do with the typeface choices, and/or the text layout. My eye drifts to the text in the upper left quadrant.
Lack of actual photos is maybe another thing but for me personally there's more to it than that.
If you present pixel perfect designs for feedback, feedback is less specific because users think the product is finished. However, when it’s a pencil sketch, users become critical and critique everything because they don’t think anything is set in stone. I try to present LoFi everything until final sign off.
Find a product that has a design you want to emulate and just copy it. Copy the colors, font styles, font sizes, element spacing, drop shadows...everything. For the illustrations or other content that is copy protected, just buy something that looks similar from shutterstock or some other website. I've followed this model repeatedly.
Design is important because a polished website can make you look like you are a larger, well established company. But it's not worth your time as a founder to master design.
That being said, the design on propertysquares.com looks amateurish and makes me feel like you are small.
The colour scheme is a bit jarring.. Some odd spacing choices and no real direction of what the service does.
I'm pretty awful on my own with UI and UX, I rely heavily on others but when I'm in a pinch, I'll try find some inspiration on Behance or such. After years and years of outsourcing and studying other peoples work, I think I can notice what works and whats interesting new and what just seems off..
Its definitely a marathon and not a race so don't take this negatively. Don't be afraid to rely on other people for it!
When a non-designer makes an update, there is always something off, whether it's the font, color-scheme, or sizing that's quite apparent. I'm not a designer myself but I think I can tell when a website had a lot of effort put into the initial design but not so much on maintenance and content updates - something always seems a bit off.
If you design looks hand drawn you will get creative feedback. But if your design looks polished you will get binary (harsh) feedback.
You can see that design tools like balsamic have different renderings, exactly because of that.
The issue with your landing page is that it comes off as “designery” while at the same time not showing the polish that an actual designer would produce.
I can see that you’re trying, but it is clear that you don’t quite grasp what the intent of the design elements is supposed to be.
Making the landing page better is easy pretend work.
Making the product better is hard real work.
Good luck.