Comment by kintamanimatt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kintamanimatt | Hacker News Reader

The design of your website heavily impacts your business' perceived credibility. That stock image of the guy grabbing money instantly erodes any chance of appearing credible. Also, photos of people looking straight at the camera cause the viewer's eyes to look at their eyes, stealing all attention from everything else on the page. Look at the results of this famous eye tracking study that show that eyes go where eyes go: http://i.imgur.com/Vr1xOi8.jpg

It took me a second to work out why I'm turned off by this site but in large part it's the color scheme. You're rocking a color palette inspired by a wasp and it screams "danger danger"!

In spite of the fact you're appealing to tech savvy people, if you're handling money you have to appear as credible as a bank. There's absolutely no way a bank would appear like this and I don't trust you because of it. This is something you need to work on as a priority IMHO.

I strongly doubt a one page site with a call to action that only requests an email address is sufficient. What happens next? I have no idea. How do I get paid? No idea. Can I use this if I'm outside the US? -shrug- How do I pay you? I have absolutely no idea and I wouldn't dream of using this service if I had to use PayPal.

Also, you might consider offering a free trial, or if this isn't possible, do what Stripe does and offer a way to kick the tires with a dummy account. Give people the option to convert that into a live account.

There are other barriers to trust, including lack of contact information. The details here matter because I'm trusting you with money.

Also, why aren't you running all connections over HTTPS when you're asking for contact details?

In short, you're an escrow service that needs a lot of polish, attention to detail, and hints that people should trust you.

(Side note: I don't understand why your main site looks so incredibly different and polished, but this page looks like a rough first draft.)

Do you have more background info on that eye tracking study? I ask because the first thing that came to mind was that this was a more seductive photo. It seems to me most photos with a single person do in fact look at the camera. If they are not looking directly into the camera where should they be looking? Took a quick look at basecamp.com just to check since I know they did some testing with using photos with humans.

As for using stock photos I totally agree with that, it always comes off as fake.

It's been written about quite extensively. Google stuff like "eye tracking study conversion optimization" and you'll come up with a ton of hits. Lesson #6 on this[-2] blog post also has another example.

A/B test everything, and, while this isn't a hard rule, generally the model's eyes should be looking where you want to viewer to look.

The reason I think 37Signals successfully breaks this "rule" is because the headline is by far the most dominant thing on the page.[-1] Not so with OP's design.[0] On the Basecamp site, it's virtually impossible not to be able to see the headline first and read what it says before moving on to anything else on the page. 37Signals would be wrong to have the model's eyes looking in any other direction. If she were looking to the left she'd be looking away from the call to action. If she were looking to the right she'd be looking away from the social proof. This is one of those times that they understood the "rules" so well that they were able to break them for greater effect.

[-2] http://www.quicksprout.com/2013/08/01/7-conversion-optimizat...

[-1] http://i.imgur.com/0XWFn9v.png

[0] http://i.imgur.com/HAW2JTv.png

Thanks for the feedback!

Sorry it's harsh, but I tried to be as honest and constructive as possible.

Which is exactly why we posted this to this community. Appreciate it.

I agree entirely with the OP. For a good color scheme, I suggest blue and white, with perhaps a touch of green. I imagine it's not a coincidence that these are also the colors used by escrow.com

For a little more information regarding color usage in web design: http://www.vanseodesign.com/web-design/color-meaning/

OP can use orange, it's just the juxtaposed orange and black that the problem. After all orange is one of the primary brand colors for ING, but that's probably because they're originally a Dutch brand and orange is a Dutch color.[-3] Rabobank also has orange as one of their primary colors, presumably for the same reason.[-2]

HSBC has a primary brand color of red, but note they separate all their red from the black on their page with a decent amount of whitespace.[-1] Santander do the same.[0]

[-3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Orange

[-2] http://www.rabobank.nl/particulieren/

[-1] http://www.hsbc.co.uk/1/2/

[0] http://www.santander.co.uk/

Exactly, orange isn't the issue (although they definitely need to use a lighter orange, #f[a-c] range to convey a more refreshing vibe). I will add that orange is very difficult to get right in any design--it comes off as being too strong for many users. Notice that over time even at&t has used less and less of it.

For inspiration the OP can also checkout http://inspirationfeed.com/inspiration/websites-inspiration/... As one of my favorite colors most of those sites would annoy me if I had to view them regularly.

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