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.
If you don't have a constant stream of fresh users walking through your offices, you can do something on http://www.usertesting.com/ .
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.
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.
- 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.
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.