Infographics might be more fun to look at than a company website | Hacker News Reader

Infographics might be more fun to look at than a company website

yjord.userapp.io

In this particular situation, it doesn't work at all. The infographic didn't teach me anything about the product.

It starts with a segmented wheel that seems to describe the "Overall time saved". But where does that come from? Time saved doing what? Time saved by whom? And 2 cells are in grey, why is that?

The graphic right below ("Future add-ons") has weird labels. What do "Good", "Great", and "Awesome" mean here? The progress bars hint at the fact that the X-axis is a quantifiable value. But they're actually arbitrary opinions. It looks like "Payment integration" is more awesome than "Advanced user search", and Referall Program and Launching Soon Page are just good. By the way, why are these two in white?

The "What happens next" section displays those progress bars again. Looking at the X-axis, I see Php, Ruby, Java... So it looks like a ranking for programming languages? Well, it also says Mailchimp, Social Login and Analytics. So what is it supposed to tell exactly?

I closed the infographic and went to the website. First thing I read: "User Management in the Cloud". Ok, I finally know what you do. These 5 words taught me more than your 3 Million pixels image.

Thanks for the feedback. I fully agree with you that I should have written an explanation about the product. Your comment as well as the other have triggered me to try to improve the infographic.

I will create a new post on the blog shortly with an improved infographic and some statistics on today's blog traffic.

How could you not understand the time saved? It says right below that don't reinvent the wheel every time you make a new app. It's pretty clearly a programming library to implement user login and management instead of writing your own. Time saved is clearly development time. I don't think you even read the text, just skimmed the titles, but then it certainly isn't strange you don't understand anything about the product.

'There's an xkcd for that' may be hackneyed but really applies in this case:

https://xkcd.com/1273/

I noticed that their popularity is perfectly justified when I didn’t remember even once closing an infographic before scrolling down to the very end of it (and some of them has been very long).

I don't think this is true, and even if it is, unless you're in the business of making mouse wheels a user scrolling to the end is not the goal - getting a conversion (sale, signup, phone call, etc) is. The fact you scroll to the end isn't very interesting - do people call the companies they see infographics from? I don't.

A good infographic is a representation of interesting data with an imaginative and informing design. Making something into an infographic doesn't have any inherent benefit. They need real thought and hard work to be useful. There are popular, dare I say even beautiful infographics, but many are dull, unimaginative ways of reporting data without actually adding anything. They're created as if Excel had an "export table as cartoon" feature.

People are as likely to ignore a bad infographic as they are to ignore a bad website.

The infographic may be more fun to look at, but it is far less obvious where the "call to action" might go. In fact, you may be hard pressed to place one at all.

And I think this is a fundamental result of the nature of the graphic Vs text.

With text, however arranged, there is a flow, a direction, and we are used to gaps, pauses, and beats - punctuation, paragraphs, chapters....

A graphic is closed. A graphic attempts to present everything. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Achieving flow and direction in a graphic is difficult - and I'll assert, blindly and without evidence, that flow is essential to the placement of the call to action. "Ah, the end of [sentence|paragraph|story], now I [click|call|shout with joy]!"

With a graphic, a button is just another part of the picture, no?

The infographic is very interesting, intriguing. I just don't know what to do with it. Like shots from USA Today, it seems to tell me something, but I don't know what to conclude, and I move on to the narrative of the sports section.

Your current home page tells a good story by simply outlining the benefits of your app. I don't have to think to "get it" when reading your existing home page.

The new infographic shows me the benefits but it is harder for me, personally, to digest. I had to strain my brain to "get it."

Compelling information that promotes organic engagement is more fun to look at.

Designing infographics requires someone adept at visual storytelling to understand exactly what to put where. Pretty graphs and large fontography(?) are merely the byproduct, not the catalyst.

Hrm.... It could just be me, but that color scheme really doesn't do it for me. Maybe use a different or at least lighter green?

I'm not a visual design kind of guy, but having white and black close to each other on the green background doesn't invite my eyes to read. It seems to make it so that I have to focus more on the text/images to get the content, more than I would with a more natural color choice.

For me, it certainly puts the infographic at a significant disadvantage. I may very well be a negligible subset of readers.

You might consider that infographics repel some folks - they think "what a waste of time, I'm definitely hitting the back button now". I don't know the demographics, buts its probably bigger than one (me).

I haven't even bothered with your site. you are onto something with the infographics. then it has hit me an infographic homepage

"Feature Description: 146 hours."

If that is your core message then you have succeeded.

Eeeenteresting - I very much want to hear how this turns out.

Stay tuned, will create a follow up post on the results.

All I thought was: that's some expensive beer!

You have not ordered beer in Sweden, right? ;)

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