Mistakes Web Designers Make
ninjasandrobots.com
ninjasandrobots.com
It's not enough for me to know what the product is -- I need the details -- why does it exist? What does it do specifically, and what does it not? Sometimes I'll find myself checking if there's a Wikipedia page for the site, just because the site can't manage to tell me directly just what the heck it is, exactly.
(A particularly egregious example of this is when a site focuses on presenting a product as a "solution" and tells you what it solves -- well, without telling me exactly how you solve it, it's pretty useless to me.)
"Last week 6,033 companies signed up for Basecamp to manage their projects. Today it’s your turn."
It's clear that Basecamp is some sort of tool to manage projects. A project management tool.
An about link is okay but it should be obvious as soon as you land on the homepage, or any landing page, what the product does. Basecamp actually clearly describes what it does as soon as you hit the homepage.
Why is this even a thing? Who thought microscopic text was attractive? It's such a turn off. I instantly close a page if I have to strain my eyes to read the text.
Though I do notice when text is well laid out. A nicely chosen font, a page that's comfortably wide-but-not-to-wide, good spacing and thought out contrast. As well, when there's nothing but the text (or as little else as possible) it's just perfect.
I've really tried to do that with my own projects like http://xwl.me . I really just wanted the nicest reading experience for random [0]things that I feel like writing and posting on the web.
Btw, I'd actually love it if there's more I can do for readability. I really just want this to be as easy on my eyes as possible, but I'm often not the best judge of that.
> Anything from 45 to 75 characters is widely regarded as a satisfactory
> length of line for a single-column page set in a serifed text face in a text size.
> The 66-character line (counting both letters and spaces) is widely regarded as ideal.
The measure on your site is around 99 characters and that's a bit large. The best way I've found to work on the character length involves a dead simple tip I appropriated from Trent Walton[2]. If you add an asterisk at the 66 character of a line, you can easily manipulate the font-size up and down (I prefer percentages on the body element and ems on the individual elements, and then fuss with the single percentage) until you achieve an appealing measure.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Typographic_Sty...
I have actually seen this quite a lot amongst less popular websites, such as websites for local dental practices. I work for a marketing company in the UK and I've even seen our own contracted designer do this. If I don't do it myself, I'm often asked by the client to increase the font size. It's quite pervasive.
xwl.me is readable and I like how it's very simple too. I might tint the background colour but not so much that it kills contrast between the BG and text. I notice my eyes feel scorched using editors with pure white BGs after some time and I'm not surprised; #fff creates the brightest light source for a monitor and it's never pleasant looking directly at a light or, more extreme, the sun.
If I always wore my reading glasses, which I usually don't, I would probably set this to 120%. With reading glasses, my vision on this retina display is razor sharp, and I still think the text on most web pages is too small for maximum comfort.
I create/sell websites for photographers and this is very true. One specific mistake I see them make is labeling their contact link something non-obvious (presumably to be hip/different). The anchor text of their contact link will be something like "inquire" or "connect" or "say hi". I should probably run some tests but my hunch is this is bad.
The first steps to achieving this and therefore avoiding the mistakes you mention are to cohesively join your UX and UI teams or designers into one fluid process. One will never work well, without the other. What are you saying and how are you saying it is the basis for ensuring your core company message is translated effectively over any medium.
If in doubt always ask yourself, 'would my mum get it', she might not be the target audience but your design should be that simple to understand and decipher. No-one wants to have to go to an about us page, or scroll endlessly down a page to 'get it', otherwise why do we bother having headlines on newspaper articles? Simplicity is difficult, but this is the challenge all great designers should embrace.
Stopped reading there.
Really? Testimonials? Out of all of the potential and made-up customer feedback, you've hand-selected a few data points to advertise on your homepage. Even if they were randomly selected (obviously not), reducing the data down to mere anecdotes is... stupid. Insanely stupid. I can't even wrap my head around why people would ever base a decision on that.
And so when it presents the thought bubble of the woman thinking about how she uses Basecamp and the fact that, of the extremely unbiased sample of people who use Basecamp (haha), 97% of them recommend Basecamp, I'm just unimpressed.
Here's my number one beef with homepages: I still don't what your product actually specifically does. I don't want generalizations like "manage your projects" and "keep track of every file, discussion, and event" (what the hell is an event?). I want something concrete like "Basecamp lets you write words, puts checkboxes next to them, then moves them around randomly" (I'm not a fan of the product so my summarization may be biased).
Unless your product is developed for engineers, having testimonials in your sales materials is a must, and throwing lists of hard facts and functions is a sure way to scare customers off.
The disconnect comes in the implicit question I suppose: Are they really like me? I doubt most developers are likely to see the world as being full of kindred spirits with sharp minds that distinguish quality.
It's like Amazon reviews for earphones, (or whatever.) If there are a load of really terrible reviews then that's good evidence that something really is terrible. But since most people know little about a product or class of products their ability to compare things to the top-end is pretty much non-existent.
If they really are like you, then the deal makes sense. If you know a bit more about the subject than average then the deal is atrocious.
An even better deal would be if they were like an idealised you, I suppose. Make the choices that you'd make if you knew better. But you can't communicate with most people on those grounds for obvious reasons.
That's one step beyond believing an "independent, third-party" report commissioned by McDonalds to show that their burgers make you healthy or cure cancer or whatever. Basecamp is not even pretending to be neutral.
If you assume a company's lying, there's probably very little that they can say to get you on board.
But there are ways to present information that don't seem stupid. In particular, Basecamp is doing two things here that are misleading. First, they're not actually presenting data, they're presenting anecdote(s). Second, they're presenting them in a medium which should be viewed with extra skepticism.
I don't want to know what percentage of your paying customers like you (seriously? 3% of your customers use you but dislike your product?). What I want to know is what specifically you do and how you do it. Everything else is noise - and so the entire page is noise.
Still, I can understand why you'd feel that way, and I don't really disagree with you that that's more what I'd find interesting. But as to whether that's what most people would be interested in, and whether that's what would sell.... -shrug- I'm not sure that all attempts at sales makes you a con man. Trying to demonstrate to people who may not understand how a certain thing would advantage them that it would, or that people who are like them think it would, doesn't necessarily amount to a stitch up job. I can understand that you'd view it as noise, but it seems to me at the moment to perhaps be a little harsh to call someone who may just be trying to put the best foot forwards a con man when they may be operating in good faith.
Also, testimonials have always generally had an impact on conversions when I've used them. If you have a product with a decent amount of unique visitors p/m and decent testimonial then split test it if you don't believe me - you have nothing to lose with a 30-day VWO sub and some time setting it up. I can't give access to the data I have access to, this isn't mine to give away, but great testimonials always help.
Also, the second mistake was "Pretend that no one says anything nice about you". Basecamp actually does the opposite by featuring a testimonial on the homepage, which is meant to be the right thing to do.
I think "manage your project" and then further "keep track of every file, discussion and event" is fairly decent brief description because that's exactly what it does. To the people I work with, an event is pretty straight forward: a calendar event (which is how you manipulate them in basecamp).
Either way, "Basecamp lets you write words, puts checkboxes next to them, then moves them around randomly" or "Basecamp lets you make todos" is never going to make a sale or pique interest. My notebook and pen does this fairly well.
Was there something specific about the page that you had a critique on?
> Last week 6,033 companies signed up for Basecamp to manage their projects. Today it’s your turn.
This is not a description of what Basecamp is.
> For all of my projects, I use Basecamp to keep track of every file, discussion, and event from beginning to end—all in one place.
This pretends to describe Basecamp but I could also use it as a description for Dropbox, MediaWiki, and Eventbrite (seriously, what the hell is an event?).
> 97% of customers recommend Basecamp.
COLOR ME IMPRESSED!
To quote myself: I want something concrete like "Basecamp lets you write words, puts checkboxes next to them, then moves them around randomly" (I'm not a fan of the product so my summarization may be biased).
That's great that you think that, but (and don't take this the wrong way), it's irrelevant. I'm fairly sure 37signals tests their design/copy/layouts and if this one wasn't working to make them more money, they'd tweak it as necessary.
Do you honestly think the Basecamp homepage communicates what it is? As stated earlier, the description could apply just as well to Dropbox, MediaWiki, or Eventbrite.