What's that?
spottedsun.com
spottedsun.com
What's wrong with writing, anyway?
When I think of software sold to businesses, I'm reminded of the place I used to work where the president had the IT department disable the speakers on all new PC's. He didn't want employees sitting around watching videos or listening to music on company time. It may be hard to fathom for some people, but there are offices where playing videos (even demos) is frowned upon - especially in a cube farm.
If you want to make conversions, think of all the barriers between you and the sale, and start knocking them down one by one. Making your products key features readable and crawl-able for search engines is an easy one.
>Would Dropbox convert better if they had descriptive text on their home page, or at least made the features link more visible than the one in the footer? We'll never know unless Dropbox tests it and publishes the results.
of course DB tested their homepage a ton
If video is your only explanation, I'll never come back.
Obviously a site should have both text and video but I don't blame anyone who does the video first.
About 20 seconds in, your video says:
Liveloop is a simple powerpoint plugin that lets everyone work on the document at the same time, seeing everyone else's changes as they type.
That is the quickest way to understand what you do. If I want to see it in action, I can click through to a video demonstration.
Liveloop is really real-time collaboration within Powerpoint
Collaborate in real-time, keystroke by keystroke, without ever leaving Office.
These aren't bad. I wonder if they have tested them with the target market.
I have sympathy. It's a hard concept to get across.
That said, it takes until 2:30 in the video before we see people collaborating on the same slide at the same time. And there might be a bit of meta-confusion because they're working on a presentation for "LiveLoop Zoo". I know that seems like a harmless self-reference, but I've seen people get tripped up on much easier ideas.
That seems a bit wrong. I wonder if, instead of a video where I have to press "play", we could have a silent animation that starts immediately on the home page. Show two cartoon figures typing into PowerPoint screens, with their changes reflected immediately. (And it's never bad to show human faces with emotions.)
Anyway, that sort of thing is hard, and they're to be commended for getting this far, my armchair criticism aside.
If you don't have a constant stream of fresh users walking through your offices, you can do something on http://www.usertesting.com/ .
- Web page with text as the primary -> a browser
- Web page with video as the primary -> a browser, sound device, sound output device, absence of anything else using the sound device (this means I have to pause my music), etc.
More requirements -> fewer useful impressions. And again, what's wrong with writing? Even YC makes applicants send a (text) description of their plan. It should be a red flag if you cannot describe your business in a short text snippet.
Liveloop is a simple powerpoint plugin that lets everyone work on the document at the same time, seeing everyone else's changes as they type.
That alone could be why the video converts better: it tells (not shows) what you do in a way the text doesn't. To do a fair test, you'd need to have text materially similar to what's in the video.
Another way of saying that is that the site's target audience is people for whom that video is the easiest/quickest way to receive knowledge.
You say a video is best, even though you also say that a video isn't best for your target audience?
Accessibility makes things better for everyone, not just those people who need it. If you'd approached this with accessibility in mind you'd have realised that a video was sub-optimal, and come up with some form of text. That (while not covering everything) would have been more helpful for more people. As can be seen from the comments here.
I agree that using subtitles everywhere is a good thing.
To make a gaming analogy: you can effectively market a JRPG through commercials, because, in essence, what people are buying is the narrative. But you can't market Tetris in a commercial, because what's being bought there is the experience of gameplay. Some things can simply be described; other things can only be shown; and still others need to be played with.
I joined dropbox when I heard from a friend how well-designed it was. I then proceeded to sign up for it _despite_ my frustration at the video-only front page. I never did watch the video.
Granted the contents in the video are not the same as the explanation text is, so might be attributable just to the difference in content. Or possibly just random chance (36 conversions 3784 visits).
> chisq.test(matrix(c(10,3784/2,26,3784/2),2,2))
Pearson's Chi-squared test with Yates' continuity correction
... p-value = 0.0129A substantial proportion of internet users are functionally illiterate.
If your website targets a mass audience, you will be dealing with a large proportion of users (probably about 15%) who have the reading skills of an eighth-grader or worse. They're the great invisible demographic in UX.
I know someone who is totally blind, has worked with MS-DOS while he could see, but got blind before Windows 3.1 even came out. Yet he works with and version of Windows, sends and reads email, searches videos on Youtube, and browses the web. That last one is becoming more and more tricky with div-onclick="location=somewhere;" (instead of a-href) and other Javascript all over the place.
Screen readers are made to read text. Flash is hard but sometimes possible, Javascript is becoming a good competitor to Flash in the sense of that it's rendering the web almost as inaccessible.
Images too are a problem of course, without alt attribute they are totally worthless to blind people.
So if you want to present something to the entire market, be sure to have either an accessible website or a mobile version, both preferably in the local language (you should hear how Dutch text to speech software reads English, sounds more like Chinese--literally). And there are about 160 million people blind around the world, even if only a tenth of that speaks English and has internet access, that are 16 million people. Nearly as much as the entire population of the Netherlands.
I don't know that search engines use tab order to parse fields, but they very well might and could.
I know that especially when it comes to web-based admin tools, something that:
1: Works well with keyboard navigation.
2: Works (at all) in a console-mode browser.
... is going to get a hell of a lot more interest from me than something which:
1: Doesn't readily support keyboard nav.
2: Doesn't work in a console-mode browser.
3: Requires Flash.
4: Requires some specific/minimum browser version/release.
5: Requires MSIE.
From 3 onwards, these are instant death for any enterprise tool I'm evaluating.
(For example I'm currently building a website which will also support everything from high-end desktops to text-based terminals. Only disqus comments are a pain, making the page size go from 23KB to over 500KB and requiring Javascript, but the tradeoff seems worth it--trust me, I thought it trough over and over and over lol.)
W3C has created the Web Acceptability Initiative (WAI) with the goal of creating a common set of web standards so that all people can access content. Check out the WAI homepage for best practices and code examples: http://www.w3.org/WAI/
You will never have me as a customer unless you move the video to a non-index page and instead lead in with copy+visuals. Offer a link to the idea for people who want the audiovisual explanation instead.
Prove me wrong and A-B test it against some good textual copy. Track actual conversions.
Use these guys as inspiration without stealing their design like those boneheads from a month or two ago: http://campfirenow.com
Regardless of the outcome, you win because now you have actual data to make a decision with.
For me to agree to sign up that your AB test wins, I'd have to proctor the test and at that point, you'd owe me for consulting services.
The fold becomes irrelevant when you give me offensive/non-content above it and no reason to go digging for more.
It only makes sense to go ahead and put plenty of content below the fold once you've hooked me and given me a reason to continue.
Videos leave me wanting and the browser tab closed. A video frame shouldn't be the first thing I see unless the domain is youtube.com.
I sometimes forgive start-ups for not captioning videos, but I think it's inexcusable when a large multinational corporation publishes a video with no captions -- especially if they pay for live captioning for employees in meetings (e.g., by using http://www.captionfirst.com/).
nslookup spottedsun.com 8.8.8.8
And even as a non-hearing-impaired person, I concur with the request for subtitles and/or not using videos so much because they waste time.