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About Userlook

userlook.com

289 pointsUniosguru69 comments

Move your mouse and don't forget to hover on cheese

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This is great, though accidentally noticed it can be taken out of context: http://cl.ly/2M1b273Q0A2Q2e2z1N2t :)

LOL I love this so much that i think my team's about me page is going to be just this. No animation at all.

The original is actually this one http://www.technologywithpassion.com/about-us/team/

When others copy you it must be a good thing.

this

That one can also be controlled with the keyboard - move your fingers around the arrow keys and watch the heads dance!

Yeah i was just about to say that, Lateral (Tech with Passion) had that really cool about us page for a very long time.

I love this one, just watch the guys for a bit to see it: http://secretpenguin.com/about/

I was going to mention this one, too. Caught me off guard the first time I saw it.

What's supposed to be happening? Stared for a minute (in Safari) and nothing happened to the pictures.

Flash needed.

How'd I end up in hogwarts again? /reddit

For some reason, I find that one mildly creepy.

I have to wonder, with about pages like this, do some people not take them seriously? I'm a young guy (22) and I find it interesting. To me, it shows that they are a company that can have some fun. Which is a good thing, in my opinion. But I know there are a lot of experienced entrepreneurs on here, ones that probably are more business oriented. What are your guys' opinions on this?

(I hope this comment doesn't sound like a backhanded compliment or anything. I'm really just curious).

I'm no proven entrepreneur but being in that space, personally i think its a good move by this company. In marketing, provided it's done in a manner that suits your business, you should do everything you can to create conversation, i.e something worth remarking on.

Seth Godin talks more about this in Purple Cow but the above is the general gist of it

I'm probably about as conservative as it gets here and, for me, something like this can go two ways. Their creativity is a plus if they are the team I'm hiring to do our website. However, it seems frivolous and unprofessional if it was the team I would considering to replace our CRM.

Depends on the goal of this. If the goal is to get publicity through sites like HN then I would suggest its a success.

If the goal is to inform users about the business, then I would say its a fail. I personally spent about 1 minute moving my mouse around the page and couldn't be more uninterested in what it was about.

I'm in the "somewhat more experienced entrepreneur" category and I think it's a positive. Demonstrates creativity and that they don't take themselves too seriously.

When I look at websites for developers/designers, the question I ask myself is: What kind of people will this company be able to attract? Will they get the really good ones? Creative things like this increase their chances (people like to work for a fun company).

I agree. This page is great at encouraging me to spend a minute moving my mouse round and round in circles on the page, but doesn't encourage anything further. A few paragraphs (or bullets) of actual information about what you do ("We want to make the world better together with other people!" is as generic and meaningless as they come) might encourage me to click through to the rest of your site.

Pretty sure they made this page specifically to get to HN front page. Userlook was posted to HN a month ago, then 3 weeks ago, then 3 days ago... The previous attempts were more straightforward but not very successful.

See http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=userlook

good for them.

Agreed. So long as they're not outright spamming, the only way to get to the front page is by producing something valuable that gets voted up.

Copying someone else's about page idea is valuable?

Agreed. Iteration shouldn't be frowned upon. I applaud any efforts to make what was once a drudgery, now semi-interesting.

op. Thanks for sharing this.

Here's a great one: http://wistia.com/about/team Type 'dance'.

Heads up, this doesn't work if you have Flashblock or something like that enabled. I told them via their live-chat widget, which is actually super impressive, especially because Jeff responded right away.

Aaaa http://www.technologywithpassion.com/about-us/team/

Another one http://www.hl2.com/who-we-are/meet-the-team/

wow, this is really awesome!

That one just nails it (but it's in Flash).

Cool until you click on their "contact us" page, and get a map. Do they think I'm going to fly to Seattle to meet with them, just to contact them? huh.

Edit: Ohhh you have to scroll down. Could be improved for dummies like me! :) http://www.hl2.com/contact-us/

Nice. Am I the only one that gets ~7 screen heights of spam for a specific brand benzodiazepine on that page (above the header) though? Also in the title "xxx Without Rx". Wtf?

Using FF7 with Flashblock. It's right there in the page source.

Edit: oh. they've closed shop. Here's how the frontpage looks for me: http://i.imgur.com/E7ER0.png

Come on guys, make that top left logo clickable.

Done!

Cool!

I almost miss the thing as I use vimperator+firefox, I don't use the mouse that much.

Funny anyway.

I had to whitelist at least 4 different scripts and cross-site requests to get the desired effect. It's quite funny, but nothing I would usually notice due to my Firefox setup (NoScript, RequestPolicy and some other script/tracker blockers).

I have to say though, I like how the website works without all the scripting. It's rather rare to find a website that works decently and doesn't look severely broken without Javascript and Flash enabled. Which is really, really sad.

Practically speaking it's a choice between few visitors feeling really really sad and spending development cycles on CSS-only layout. Something like a sticky footer can be done with one line of JS or with some obscure CSS voodoo and markup. For many companies the choice is a no-brainer, assuming the NoScript users are detected and notified appropriately.

I'm not saying every website should work perfectly without scripts - I know full well what I got myself into when I started using all these filters. What annoys me are websites which are completely un-fucking-readable without dozens of scripts, x-site requesting and/or (which is the worst offender by far) Flash.

I'm fine with whitelisting your website so you don't have to bother with CSS voodoo. I am willing to whitelist your image/static domain so your site can load its content from there. I'm getting annoyed if your website requires more than three scripts and/or cross site requests to work properly, but I can put up with it depending on how much your site interests me. And finally, it's an instant ^W if I open up the NoScript menu to find dozens of scripts, trackers and other shit while your site looks like a page from a broken printer and is unusable.

a few others...

http://dm11sto.com/ http://arc90.com/people/ http://www.think.eu/who-we-are/our-people/

I can't tell if this was overlooked or a joke on the arc90 page:

Third row, last column. Name: Lorem Ipsum

It goes to an actual employee page on click...

Well I can tell it's purposely done because the background hover has a lorem ipsum background and if you read the bio he has done major stuff in the content strategy realm.

it's because of what he has done... probably thats what they call him in office... "aaye lorem... where's my content dude"... #lol

The company address is in California, but the phone number given is “+77071120122”. Do they actually have a landline in Kazakhstan, or is that a typo?

I'd bet they physically are in Kazakhstan most of the time, even if they incorporated in California. They could have gone all the way and got an US phone number forwarded to them OTOH.

The US area code 707 covers northwestern California, so it is possible that the +7 should be a +1.

Except 112-0122 does not represent a valid US 7-digit phone number, because it starts with a 1, and local numbers can only start with 2-9. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NANP.

That's one thing SkypeIn is good for... I've had the same US number for many years now (with an area code in the same city as my mail-forwarder.. plus the number is a palindrome!), in spite of moving out of the country 5 years ago.

I'm not sure where Skype is headed now that their under Microsoft's auspices, but there are other companies that offer internationally redirected numbers as well (though it's generally much pricier).

You can change to Russian language, so I bet they are from that area.

Twitter links for the two guys on the left are broken. Also, no bios or expertise? It looks more like a contact page than an About page.

Just was listening to classical music while i came across this... directing them to the music was incredibly entertaining.

Really? I don't see what's so awesome. Not saying its bad, just it's not much different than others.

Edit: reading comments I get impression it has mouse overs and other stuff that doesn't do anything on touch devices

Now I think it's kind of fail

That's far from a fail; if anything, it's a good sign that the stuff that doesn't work on touch devices is extra fluff, rather than the core interaction of the page.

They should've done a tilt version for mobile devices.

Awesome about page. Awesome that the creators are on here taking feedback/recommendations and implementing some of them. Thanks for sharing! Keep up the great work and keep having fun.

Fun page. Even has a little easter egg when you point to the cheese. I think this spawns an adage: It's not whether you're first, it's whether you're first to hit HN front page.

If you do it just right you can make them do the head-bobbing dance from "Night at the Roxbury". WHAT IS LOVE? BABY DON'T HURT ME.

I like the about page, but as for the site---what's to differentiate this from Google Analytics Realtime?

I'm not sure their business model is based on coming up with completely original ideas.

Notice the UserVoice/GetSatisfaction-style feedback tab on the right-hand side of the page... that leads to a site called "UserEcho", with some familiar faces on the about page.

What's the 11th image for in the background sprites?

The cheese.

No, there are nine for the directions, one for the cheese, and another, the eleventh. IOW, the bottom-left one here. http://userlook.com/s/img/IKA_spectrum.jpg No code seems to make it appear.

Cheese!

Great, now I have the Brady Bunch theme stuck in my head.

Hey, wasn't the third guy in the Man From Uncle?

...Sorry, I couldn't help myself!

Cute, but I'd have thought that one of the purposes of the Team pages is to associate that person with the company through a search engine. So this might look good, but in my mind doesn't meet the primary requirement of the Team page.

hahahhahahha

Personally I think this is very clever and a great hack. However, I'd like to know how long it took to create this and point out that the time would probably be better spent directly building the product given the startup's stage, rather than superficial pages. Then again, maybe the intention all along was to get traffic from HN, in which case I'm sure it was worth it.

Heh. You know, if you realize by the end of your comment that your initial point was wrong, you aren't still obligated to post the whole thing.

It probably took the better part of a day (or even two, considering the photographs required etc.), and was probably time well-spent.

Sorry if I came off as overly critical or attacking, I didn't mean to. I actually didn't know which was the case. To be honest, I have done similar "clever marketing" pages and spent much more time than I should have on them. Unfortunately for me, my goal wasn't to get HN traffic, nor did I even think about it. I just thought my users would like my startup better, but I realized they would like 1-2 days spent on the product even better.

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