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Comment by theturtletalks | Hacker News Reader

It really comes down to first impression. Your website design is your company’s first impression. If the design is clean, people will believe the product is clean and robust as well. Similar to how people think things that cost more and probably high quality and better overall.

As for this website, the best component is the ASCII animation in the hero and you can’t even copy that component. In fact, that nice ASCII hero is what gave me a good first impression to go thru all the components.

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It's there: https://vorpus.github.io/performativeUI/#/components/ascii-h...

Ah it’s in the hero section, kind of scanned that section but had lost interest by that point

So the thing that made you go through all the components didn't even hold your attention enough to make your argument true

I was on mobile and a lot of the pages are overflowing. After going thru half, it got a bit annoying. I actually keep a directory of all these tailwind/shadcn registry websites and this one drew me in more than others.

My first impression when entering websites with such "hero animations" is noticing my gpu usage spiking and my power consumption increasing by 20W because somebody thought it was cool to have some pointless but "cool" canvas/WebGL/CSS (or whatever it is) animation.

What's the point of having the GPU if you never use it, right?

I want to use my compute resources for stuff that are actually useful/relavant. I have no problem if somebody makes some animation that actually conveys something relevant for the topic of the website/product/article etc, eg some animated plot to showcase some data, esp when that can convey more than a classical visualisation. To be fair, I also dislike hero images in general, as they are distracting/useless, consuming bandwidth resources and screen space (esp in mobile). But "hero animations" take this a step further.

I worked at a startup that had an unusually fancy landing page. I noticed that it was sluggish on my laptop. Someone pointed out there phone tended to heat up when showing it off to customers. We poked into what the contractor had done. They apparently used some bezier curves to animate stuff in a nice way. Each time the animation moved it computed the entire bezier curve to some superfine detail then picked a point in it and put the elements on the page.

Also on the HN homepage: https://cognition.ai/blog/frontier-code Not quite ASCII but pretty close!

explain why Craigslist, temu, etc. are all popular then? :p

Sometimes utility can be so good, users don’t care about design. I was also thinking of it as a business coming to a SaaS website. B2C is filled with so many dark patterns, first impression probably plays less of a role.

Craigslist became popular when that was the clean look for a website, and then never bothered updating. Network effects in action.

Temu offers people the ability to save money. If your product is "X, but cheaper" you can have a worse UI than X.

Amazon is a hideous looking website too and always has been. Ebay is similar too in that aspect and plenty of others.

They were established when hideous websites were common changing would cause uproar and possibly alienate a large group of users. Look at Googles web page just a text box on a blank page, no way you are launching with that UI in 2026.

See? It is about goals.

There is a reason why landing pages don't use distraction.

As a platform lead and product lead with millions of customers, be assured that you are not your customer. Never ever think of you as the focus of your website if you want to have success in business.

If you want to sell or marked and money as well as the slightest bit of seriousness is involved, you have to follow industry standards and never your own taste which is highly misleading.

Boring first is a good statement and principle to follow. Always track and A/B. There is a reason why all landing pages look the same kinda, and at least follow a certain structure.

Any deviation from it won't help you, even though you personally enjoy your personal website. You would be surprised what other visitors think about your website, how they perceive it, use it, and I mean literally everything: browser size, smartphone model, screen size, scrolling, click behavior, colors - everything.

I am so glad the psychology of online sales has matured. It is in everybody's interest to work in a trustworthy environment and using the right approach signals a company acknowledges and appreciate its customers.

I learned it the hard way, but got the lesson. I am totally different. I find many landing pages fishy, while they are the most successful there are, and like exploring on my own as well as fantastic animations.

On the other hand, I value the text only principles of everything serious from archivex and Pubmed. I am a developer fist, who loves animations sind decades. But this is bad for business. ;)

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