IMHO only http://fairpixels.pro and http://airbnb.com are good. They both immediately tell me what they're selling and don't bombard me with visual information.
Stripe's page has so much detailed graphics and distractions on their site that it took me a moment to even realize I was on stripe's page. They even display a bunch of other product logos on their page more prominently (and in color!) than their own - as if intentionally trying to mislead me further [1].
Dropbox's page seems to have an identity crisis but they get away with it because people know what they really are. They're selling me some abstract "workspace" - I have no idea what that means and it's probably not what most people use dropbox for. They immediately want to sign me up for it though?
I'm heavily biased but I think that Mozilla Firefox's landing page is pretty great. (I had nothing to do with designing it, but I do work for Mozilla.)
Actually, that's downright terrible. I've used "Firefox" since it was called "Phoenix," but I know a lot of people that would click that link and go "huh? What is Firefox?"
The firefox homepage shouldn't be about advertising Quantum (which only applies to people already using Firefox and acutely aware of a new release (as it doesn't even introduce what Quantum is before diving in)), but rather about advertising Firefox itself.
These examples were originally selected by Kesler Tanner over at the Stanford Institute of Design. They represent what's going on as of mid-2017 in landing page design. The one shift that I've seen since this collection was last updated is the migration to bolder, more contrast-heavy color palettes that make use of more illustrations. Intercom and Dropbox's current sites are good examples here.
Nice page. Tough, I would make the whole picture clickable instead of just the eye icon. And, the "x" to dismiss is hidden unless I have the browser at full screen. Firefox dev 60.0b7
I had a tough time trying to find some of these websites, like "Scale." Which doesn't own scale.com or scale.io or any other derivative, but "scaleapp.com."
No, I too see a massive title header occasionally of you scroll up you can glimpse a page of tiny images very briefly as it scrolls under the massive header.
Request desktop site fixes it, though the loading screen is annoying AF.
I think it depends what you mean by landing page, and what you're hoping it'll achieve. Most of the pages listed in this thread so far are just good home pages. If you sent ad traffic to them, them will never convert as well as a page with no leaks other than the primary focus of your funnel.
is probably my favorite I've seen? It has very little information I admit but I like how a site made for designers has a very unique design itself. I am not a designer myself but I was impressed enough that I still remember seeing it.
Looks OK but it does suffer from the same problem as a lot of other sites. It wants you to commit before telling you what you are committing to.
Tell me what you offer and give me a rational as to why I should be interested. That's all I'm asking yet no one seems interested in answering those questions on a landing page.
I really like the mouse-following effect in the background. It's subtle enough to not be annoying, but playful. As an interaction designer, I love seeing these little hints of fun that sneak into otherwise "vanilla" projects.
I disagree, that page is way too crowded. I wanted to click off immediately. It still took me a minute to figure out what the offer was because of all the other stuff on the page.
That is the beauty of airbnb's landing page, you get a sense right off the bat of exactly what it is they are selling.
My god is that a laggy landing page if you haven't got a GPU behind your browser. Also I'm not sure what happened but just as I was closing the page I got a single note of what I believe to be electro(?) music
It was also clearly designed with access to smooth scrolling, I'm assuming Mac. The scroll is just awful without and the animations don't really play nicely.
I closed the page before I learned what Magic Leap is. Not the best for a landing page.
Dang. I have an MBP with an i7 and 16GB of RAM, and a landing page lags?! Hells no.
Also, I think it ate 1% of my battery in the blink of an eye. No thanks.
Update: 8MB for a landing page. Wait, waaattt?
I'll give you the first animation is somewhat cool, but a lot of visitors will definitely be turned off by the slow and sluggish experience, and I don't think it's the impression I want from a company (apparently) banking on Virtual Reality. I like my reality fairly instantaneous, thank you, so the goal would be to have my VR to behave in kind.
I've been working on this for a product launch we are trying to do and have had the problem you are talking about.
The problem is that explaining that without ending up mired in detail is much harder than people give it credit. I've found it very useful to actually write out the list of what I am trying to convey and look at it constantly while doing design work.
Also splitting out the work - the first forays have been what I realized was actually development work that I was hiding behind design. During design I put away the dev environment and just work with sketches.
If you're mentioning "less technical" I assume you're talking about tools? You can make good landing pages in Wordpress using a page builder like Elementor (just drag & drop).
You might need a bit of HTML/CSS here and there to customize things, but you should be able to get by without it.
Ah, the idea behind roastmy.site seems really cool, but the comments it gained so far seem really non-constructive. I didn't see any comment actually roasting the site, only compliments and one small suggestion (to add a comma somewhere).
I really hope that the idea will catch on, and that it will gain traction (and actual roasts as a result).
It's actually my hobby project and I put it together in a couple days time. Its still in early development stages, a lot of things are missing and some are not working.
Also, since there was no official launch, there is no traffic or users to actually submit sites and/or roasts. But they are coming soon and I think its going to be fun :D
Some criticism: I don't really like the buttons style, but more objectively, you should center text and take a look at their size, it made me super uncomfortable when I opened the page. Also, the "Try us for a week" at the bottom is shifting the page in the background to the left, leaving 20px of white space or so in the right side (Windows, Google Chrome). The "Start Trial" button that appears after clicking on "Try us for a week" looks much better.
I also wrote a "Landing Page Cookbook" that got to the top of Product Hunt, and that contains a bunch of examples for every element you might want to put on your landing page.
Don't hesitate to message me/email me if you've got specific questions about your landing page.
Note they are using real people's faces without permission (through randomuser.me / uifaces.com) for the avatars in those 'funny' sample notifications.
They do have permission though. The people used granted permission when they submitted their face to uifaces.com, in fact they even went so far as to submit their faces to the "authorised" section on uifaces
> those awesome folks allow their faces to be used on live products
They might not have ever imagined that their faces would be used in this manner, but they did give their permission.
If you read further down the Twitter feed, it's clear that this particular person didn't think she'd granted such permission, and the whole setup looks questionable on other grounds as well.
Putting someone's face next to suggestions of serious problems like drug abuse or STIs on a public site without their knowledge or explicit consent at least raises ethical questions, and then trying to argue that it's obviously a joke when apparently the person in question has been receiving concerned mail from friends who didn't know that makes it pretty clear that any joke has gone too far. The dismissive attitude of the site developer just makes it worse.
I did read the entire thread, the site developer offered two different solutions. But the other commenters seemed to dismiss both suggestions, preferring to fetch their pitchforks instead.
His “solution” would be to hack it to avoid that specific person's image, which is not really solving anything, other than the site author’s own problem.
The footer of uifaces still says _mockups_ and the FAQ/TOS haven’t been available for a while. This is clearly playing legal sword fighting and unethical.
I'm not sure I'd consider anything he suggested a good solution, though.
What he's done, and the aggressive/dismissive way he's handled a perfectly reasonable request afterwards, are what very expensive defamation lawsuits are made of. That is as it should be, IMHO, given that notwithstanding the developer's personal opinions about visitors understanding, the consequences of his actions demonstrably did reach someone close to the person whose photo was used and cause real distress and concern.
> Putting someone's face next to suggestions of serious problems like drug abuse or STIs on a public site without their knowledge or explicit consent at least raises ethical questions
This was the plot of a Friends episode like 20 years ago. Joey's face is used in a herpes ad in the subway.
I think he got paid but the issue is the same. Give someone carte blanche to use your likeness and there might be some negative consequences.
Give someone carte blanche to use your likeness and there might be some negative consequences.
But clearly in this case the lady didn't believe she'd given carte blanche to use her likeness even in such an obviously offensive manner, as she repeatedly mentions only expecting it to be used in mockups.
Moreover, such evidence as anyone has linked to from that Twitter feed seems to support her side of the story more than his so far. There is no explicit licence available anywhere that I can see, apparently there used to be some sort of separate area where people offered their photos for production use as well, but that no longer seems to exist, the FAQ no longer seems to be working, and there's no indication that this particular lady's photo was in that section.
In any case, the onus is definitely on the guy whose site is posting her photo next to that kind of content to justify his actions here. It doesn't take a genius to realise that this could seriously upset someone even if he is covered legally, and so far it's not even clear that he is covered legally. As I said in another comment, this is what very expensive defamation lawsuits are made of.
Cute app but I have to share something I learned a week or so ago: you can silence all notifications if you click the Notification icon in the top right corner. Then scroll UP and turn on Do Not Disturb.
The only reason I might like muzzle a bit more is that you don't have to remember to turn it on & off (according to the landing page, I have not yet tried it).
Seriously though. For those of us who need our chat on despite the frequent unpopular rants of our sister/brethren, I welcome this attempt to filter.
Btw - excelent landing page!
Mac pro tip: Option-click everything. It's remarkable how many secrets are lurking behind near every UI element.
And once you've option-clicked, also option-shift-click, command-click, control-click, etc.
An easy favourite is the Wifi menu bar item. Option-click to see all sorts of useful info about your current connection, including IP address, MAC address, connection speed (Tx Rate), the amount of noise, etc. And when you've option-clicked the menu, hovering over network names shows you the key info about that network.
Yeah, pretty much every icon in the menu bar has an Option-click alternative. I very often Option-click the volume button, which lets you select input and output devices without opening the sound preferences pane.
I don't get why Apple just doesn't provide more UI tips, like tooltips on first use of the UI. There are so many little things like this that would be great to know. For example on Windows Dialog popups, the labels for each option underline the letter for the keyboard shortcut. Did you know that Apple has keyboard shortcuts for dialog popups too, if you press CMD+letter? It took me years to figure that one out.
1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by writing a shell script, compiling your own custom X server, and then monitoring the screen state for full-screen apps. For Windows or Mac, you just remote desktop to your Linux box with built-in software.
2. It doesn't actually reroute the notifications. Most people I know want to be able to perform presentations without the visual clutter of notifications, but they still carry a phone to check their Instagram while presenting. This does not solve their notification issue.
3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
In reality, this is a great landing page and a cool idea for an app. Also, I have nothing but respect for people who share their honest, thoughtful assessments on HN. The future is tough to predict.
> It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
Does everything have to be a moneymaker? Like you said, this would be trivial to setup yourself. It's a nice piece of software that provides some advertising for his other products.
I’d very much focus on something more business-oriented and believable, like a question about a report and in an extreme case, possibly speaking about a client in a less than professional tone.
“meet me in the bathroom” is not within the realm of feasibility for anyone I know.
I don't think that's the point. Many of us have ourselves or seen someone we know go up to present and have private notifications be displayed as they hustle to turn on Do not Disturb. While they aren't as extreme as this, these are funny and make the viewer recall a time when they were in this situation, and perhaps see how much better they'd be if the downloaded the app.
Actually it isn't. It does not talk about a lot of important details/questions one might wonder before downloading the app, like:
- "how does this app do it"
- "how is this app any different than macOS's Do Not Disturb feature"
- "where's the source code for this app, why would I trust this software with full access to my compute (it requires that)"
A lot of folks who may download this app are unlikely to care about any of those questions. They only care that their problem is solved. If they landed on this website during their searches for an app to snooze notifications, the above the fold first paragraph answers that succinctly, promptly followed by a download button.
If there's one thing I realized as a technical person/programmer: it's that other people do not think like this at all. Barely anyone give a crap about source-code, it could be written in an amalgamation of COBOL, ActionScript, windows .bat files and C#/.NET to glue everything together. As long as it does what it does without causing major trouble, it's fine for them.
I guess you could add a link to a FAQ with answers to questions you might be interested in for those who do care.. and they do have that, so it's no problem whatsoever.
So I get that you can Option + Click on the Notifications icon in the upper right to turn on Do Not Disturb... but I love that this does it automatically for you.
And it's free. No brainer. Yes, this app is great.
I've been a senior product marketer at Heroku and Realm (AKA the person responsible for leading the creation of product landing pages), and I gotta counsel y'all: when you're looking at landing pages, what makes them great has a lot less to do with the visual design, and a lot more to do with the story and message they tell.
They're fundamentally narrative media: a landing page proceeds serially from top to bottom. What you see first matters most; like every good story, it also needs to give you a reason to proceed down the page.
It's great when they converge — where the visual design, structure of the page and the copy itself all come together in a beautiful statement of the brand's values and the product's value propositions. But none of that can happen without a story that resonates powerfully with the people who it should matter to. On a cursory examination of landing pages, it's easy to forget that they're speaking directly to a specific group, and miss the real magic simply because you aren't in that group.
Bad advice. While this works in some cases, you’d lose a lot of money on some products because the would be customer has not realized the full value of your product. A product generating 500% roi may mean $100 to one business and 1 million to another - should they pay the same price?
I feel like most of the time, pricing decisions involve a lot of information and it feels like a digression to have it all on one page. For simple apps and pricing structures, it's doable — my Rdio-to-Spotify app was $5, and said so up front – but the point of the landing page is to help someone decide if you're useful to them or not. Get them to the "yes, if" stage before showing them pricing, imo.
Depends on what you're selling, how complicated the pricing structure is and whether price is likely to be a major factor in people saying "yes" to your product.
And above all whether the goal is to get people to click the "buy" button, to get people trying the service to see how much they might need it or to get people to contact your enterprise sales team
Like andkon said, convince me that your product is something I need or compel me to need it. I might hit your landing page with little to no prior information.
If I can't be convinced your product is worth my time, does price even matter at that point?
Spot on. The highest converting landing page I have ever done was downright ugly. However, it made thousands of dollars with just a headline, a paragraph, and a buy now button.
People often confuse visually pleasing with financially pleasing.
Could you provide some concrete examples? I see you work at a marketing agency in SF. That probably means you could have some good ones to share. Like a/b comparisons of pages that saw such improvements.
Not sarcasm or passive agreesivesness. I'm genuinely interested in the data from someone in an agency.
A more concrete personal example is when we ranked "HTML Color Codes" with essentially zero feature improvements beyond nice UI/UX. Now ranked #1 in Google for several queries...making $5k/mo passively. More detailed write up on Indie Hackers (https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/growing-to-1-300-mo-b...).
can you elaborate on colors (Groove)? Why does the landing page has orange, green + two shades of blue? Blue is in their logo, but red is missing. Instead there are orange and green.
I have little to no experience in visual design. But intuitivelly I would expect fewer colors and better adjusted to match brand colors.
I think your examples do not really prove the role of visual design conclusively because in the 18 month time-frame, the folks at Groove must have had several efforts running concurrently with the explicit goal of increasing revenue. The web site facelift you were engaged for happened to be one of the steps they took towards that goal.
For instance, they would have intensified sales, marketing, customer success, fixed bugs in the product etc in addition to the revamped website, so we can't really pin the significant jump in revenue from $1m to $5m on visual refresh alone.
Not trying to diminsh the work that you did, merely trying to put things in perspective because our tendencies as humans is to misattribute causation, which is bound to happen if all contributing factors to a thing's success are not properly considered.
Client examples are indeed impossible to determine direct outcomes. But to add context, they added two team members in that time but the largest change came from landing larger clients, which was the whole point of the redesign.
Also added the personal example as a more controlled experiment to show the value that design can have.
I really like your phrasing, "serious customers who can "trust" their company based on the site." Design isn't a "bell and whistle," it's the first impression of your product and the first opportunity to stand out. Someone who invests in good design has shared values with me, is willing to make permanent investments in there company, and is confident in their image and their product.
While I do think your design is good. I think the main reason you got more conversions are that you put more focus on social proof, so instead of showing technical details you show how many are using the software as well as a smiling face of satisfied customers.
Without knowing any existing pages or stats from the original page this claim is weak bravado.
I worked out one time Ive more than 300 million online sales/signups/downloads under my belt. I like to think that gives me some credibility. And I agree with OP that simple, basic and even ugly pages can be extremely effective.
up for that. This is probably because design value cannot be easily quantified and gives too much space to office politics, both things are not what many HN people like.
I feel like my original answer ended up playing to that tendency to undervalue design here. Which ain't great. I guess my point was that it's super easy to look at a design and feel like it looks great and miss the fact that design is developed closer to the conclusion of a process that begins with developing a compelling message and story. Because folks miss that, "what's a great landing page?" is a question that usually ends up delivering a lot of landing pages that look the dopest, appeal to the most people, whose design and message is accessible, rather than landing pages that are actually successful at doing what they need to do (which may fly right by folks not in the intended audience).
Fwiw, I think you're right. 3x is probably what the match of design and message results in, especially because a lot of what software does can't be described merely in words. It needs design to put the accent on the right things, or else will fail to communicate (most of the time).
Not really. I can concur with HN and developers in general not giving a shit about design. I can’t tell you how many developers I’ve spoken to who tried launching their own product only to go silent after I sent them a design proposal. Devs seem to have a very limited understanding of value of design.
I marketed premium cottages with sales cycle between half year and a year and a half. Long read approach works well with those. However when you sell courses, headline, short paragraph and large Buy button works well too. It really depends on what are you selling.
Just the other day I threw together a landing page for a whale watch crypto app and posted about it on Facebook. It had a conversation rate of 70%, an oddity I’ve never before accomplished. Point being, it’s all about relevance to a very very specific audience.
I agree that the messaging and story are the most important components. But you still need to have a clean and elegant design to get people to consume the story and message. You can make the content more digestible by making use of white spaces, having adequate line height and line width, including appropriate imageries and graphics, and using lots of bullets. If the page is too ugly or too overwhelming with texts, more readers will bounce.
> In online marketing, a landing page, sometimes known as a "lead capture page" or a "lander", or a "destination page", is a single web page that appears in response to clicking on a search engine optimized search result or an online advertisement. The landing page will usually display directed sales copy that is a logical extension of the advertisement, search result or link. Landing pages are used for lead generation. The actions that a visitor takes on a landing page is what determines an advertiser's conversion rate.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 261 ms ] thread[2] http://stripe.com
[3] http://airbnb.com
[4] http://dropbox.com
Stripe's page has so much detailed graphics and distractions on their site that it took me a moment to even realize I was on stripe's page. They even display a bunch of other product logos on their page more prominently (and in color!) than their own - as if intentionally trying to mislead me further [1].
Dropbox's page seems to have an identity crisis but they get away with it because people know what they really are. They're selling me some abstract "workspace" - I have no idea what that means and it's probably not what most people use dropbox for. They immediately want to sign me up for it though?
1: https://i.imgur.com/IcpYiOR.png
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/
The firefox homepage shouldn't be about advertising Quantum (which only applies to people already using Firefox and acutely aware of a new release (as it doesn't even introduce what Quantum is before diving in)), but rather about advertising Firefox itself.
https://design.crowdbotics.com
These examples were originally selected by Kesler Tanner over at the Stanford Institute of Design. They represent what's going on as of mid-2017 in landing page design. The one shift that I've seen since this collection was last updated is the migration to bolder, more contrast-heavy color palettes that make use of more illustrations. Intercom and Dropbox's current sites are good examples here.
I had a tough time trying to find some of these websites, like "Scale." Which doesn't own scale.com or scale.io or any other derivative, but "scaleapp.com."
Request desktop site fixes it, though the loading screen is annoying AF.
FF 58 Android.
is probably my favorite I've seen? It has very little information I admit but I like how a site made for designers has a very unique design itself. I am not a designer myself but I was impressed enough that I still remember seeing it.
Tell me what you offer and give me a rational as to why I should be interested. That's all I'm asking yet no one seems interested in answering those questions on a landing page.
You get the explanation, the selector and the recommendations all in one page.
That is the beauty of airbnb's landing page, you get a sense right off the bat of exactly what it is they are selling.
http://pages.xyz
https://www.magicleap.com/
It is so amazing and beautiful. I wonder what technologies they use to build the front end.
It was also clearly designed with access to smooth scrolling, I'm assuming Mac. The scroll is just awful without and the animations don't really play nicely.
I closed the page before I learned what Magic Leap is. Not the best for a landing page.
Also, I think it ate 1% of my battery in the blink of an eye. No thanks.
Update: 8MB for a landing page. Wait, waaattt?
I'll give you the first animation is somewhat cool, but a lot of visitors will definitely be turned off by the slow and sluggish experience, and I don't think it's the impression I want from a company (apparently) banking on Virtual Reality. I like my reality fairly instantaneous, thank you, so the goal would be to have my VR to behave in kind.
I have an i3 with unimpressive specs and it runs perfectly smooth on chrome.
In any case, even w/o the lag, the page is still way too slow to load and quite heavy. Not really the best approach for conversion.
- explain in a few words what your product is, so it can be understood by everyone
- explain what your product does
- how your product is different from everything else
- pricing
I know it sounds obvious, but I often have no idea what the product is after reading a landing page
The problem is that explaining that without ending up mired in detail is much harder than people give it credit. I've found it very useful to actually write out the list of what I am trying to convey and look at it constantly while doing design work.
Also splitting out the work - the first forays have been what I realized was actually development work that I was hiding behind design. During design I put away the dev environment and just work with sketches.
You might need a bit of HTML/CSS here and there to customize things, but you should be able to get by without it.
https://hyperpixel.io https://verynicesites.com https://onepagelove.com
And once you’ve finished design and build of your landing page, submit to https://roastmy.site to get feedback :)
I really hope that the idea will catch on, and that it will gain traction (and actual roasts as a result).
It's actually my hobby project and I put it together in a couple days time. Its still in early development stages, a lot of things are missing and some are not working.
Also, since there was no official launch, there is no traffic or users to actually submit sites and/or roasts. But they are coming soon and I think its going to be fun :D
Interestingly, to my surprise, not many people actually post. Lots simply browse.
I should work more on engagement and commenting and make it easy
Loads nothing on Firefox without Javascript ...
> https://verynicesites.com/
Connection not secure error box ...
> https://onepagelove.com
<slow clap> Nicely done.
http://www.verynicesites.com/ <-- that was my fault, typed from mobile without checking if they had SSL or not. They didn't :)
OnePageLove works fine for me.
"I want you to think of landing page optimization from the perspective of desire:
Conversion = Desire (Increase this) - Labor (Decrease this) - Confusion (Decrease this)
It's less work to reduce a visitor's labor and confusion than to increase desire."
And here's our landing page: https://www.loopsupport.com/
This article is quite popular: https://yourlandingpagesucks.com/startup-landing-page-teardo...
I also wrote a "Landing Page Cookbook" that got to the top of Product Hunt, and that contains a bunch of examples for every element you might want to put on your landing page.
Don't hesitate to message me/email me if you've got specific questions about your landing page.
https://land-book.com
Does a great job of demonstrating the value of the product.
https://twitter.com/ohhoe/status/970753038406373377
> those awesome folks allow their faces to be used on live products
They might not have ever imagined that their faces would be used in this manner, but they did give their permission.
Putting someone's face next to suggestions of serious problems like drug abuse or STIs on a public site without their knowledge or explicit consent at least raises ethical questions, and then trying to argue that it's obviously a joke when apparently the person in question has been receiving concerned mail from friends who didn't know that makes it pretty clear that any joke has gone too far. The dismissive attitude of the site developer just makes it worse.
The footer of uifaces still says _mockups_ and the FAQ/TOS haven’t been available for a while. This is clearly playing legal sword fighting and unethical.
What he's done, and the aggressive/dismissive way he's handled a perfectly reasonable request afterwards, are what very expensive defamation lawsuits are made of. That is as it should be, IMHO, given that notwithstanding the developer's personal opinions about visitors understanding, the consequences of his actions demonstrably did reach someone close to the person whose photo was used and cause real distress and concern.
This was the plot of a Friends episode like 20 years ago. Joey's face is used in a herpes ad in the subway.
I think he got paid but the issue is the same. Give someone carte blanche to use your likeness and there might be some negative consequences.
But clearly in this case the lady didn't believe she'd given carte blanche to use her likeness even in such an obviously offensive manner, as she repeatedly mentions only expecting it to be used in mockups.
Moreover, such evidence as anyone has linked to from that Twitter feed seems to support her side of the story more than his so far. There is no explicit licence available anywhere that I can see, apparently there used to be some sort of separate area where people offered their photos for production use as well, but that no longer seems to exist, the FAQ no longer seems to be working, and there's no indication that this particular lady's photo was in that section.
In any case, the onus is definitely on the guy whose site is posting her photo next to that kind of content to justify his actions here. It doesn't take a genius to realise that this could seriously upset someone even if he is covered legally, and so far it's not even clear that he is covered legally. As I said in another comment, this is what very expensive defamation lawsuits are made of.
Whoever did the writeup for that one - you have all my respect.
“StackOverflow: How to add numbers”
http://i.imgur.com/Q3mkcnl.gif
They have 18 decimal places.
The only reason I might like muzzle a bit more is that you don't have to remember to turn it on & off (according to the landing page, I have not yet tried it).
That's awesome.
Seriously though. For those of us who need our chat on despite the frequent unpopular rants of our sister/brethren, I welcome this attempt to filter. Btw - excelent landing page!
And once you've option-clicked, also option-shift-click, command-click, control-click, etc.
An easy favourite is the Wifi menu bar item. Option-click to see all sorts of useful info about your current connection, including IP address, MAC address, connection speed (Tx Rate), the amount of noise, etc. And when you've option-clicked the menu, hovering over network names shows you the key info about that network.
1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by writing a shell script, compiling your own custom X server, and then monitoring the screen state for full-screen apps. For Windows or Mac, you just remote desktop to your Linux box with built-in software.
2. It doesn't actually reroute the notifications. Most people I know want to be able to perform presentations without the visual clutter of notifications, but they still carry a phone to check their Instagram while presenting. This does not solve their notification issue.
3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
---
In reality, this is a great landing page and a cool idea for an app. Also, I have nothing but respect for people who share their honest, thoughtful assessments on HN. The future is tough to predict.
Does everything have to be a moneymaker? Like you said, this would be trivial to setup yourself. It's a nice piece of software that provides some advertising for his other products.
I’d very much focus on something more business-oriented and believable, like a question about a report and in an extreme case, possibly speaking about a client in a less than professional tone.
“meet me in the bathroom” is not within the realm of feasibility for anyone I know.
I guess you could add a link to a FAQ with answers to questions you might be interested in for those who do care.. and they do have that, so it's no problem whatsoever.
https://github.com/riley-martine/inappropriate-notifications
And it's free. No brainer. Yes, this app is great.
They're fundamentally narrative media: a landing page proceeds serially from top to bottom. What you see first matters most; like every good story, it also needs to give you a reason to proceed down the page.
It's great when they converge — where the visual design, structure of the page and the copy itself all come together in a beautiful statement of the brand's values and the product's value propositions. But none of that can happen without a story that resonates powerfully with the people who it should matter to. On a cursory examination of landing pages, it's easy to forget that they're speaking directly to a specific group, and miss the real magic simply because you aren't in that group.
edit: apparently HN disagrees
Price is a data point a customer needs to make the decision.
Give them all data points you can.
Particularly if you sell to enterprises. Many companies will make more money by sizing them up and giving them an optimal custom price.
And above all whether the goal is to get people to click the "buy" button, to get people trying the service to see how much they might need it or to get people to contact your enterprise sales team
If I can't be convinced your product is worth my time, does price even matter at that point?
People often confuse visually pleasing with financially pleasing.
Willing to put a bet down you could 3x traffic/conversion with design improvement.
Not sarcasm or passive agreesivesness. I'm genuinely interested in the data from someone in an agency.
The best client example is Groove (https://www.groovehq.com/). In 2014 they hired us to take the existing site (https://web.archive.org/web/20141223145657/https://www.groov...) and make it attractive to serious customers who can "trust" their company based on the site. Went from 1M ARR to 5M in 18 months.
A more concrete personal example is when we ranked "HTML Color Codes" with essentially zero feature improvements beyond nice UI/UX. Now ranked #1 in Google for several queries...making $5k/mo passively. More detailed write up on Indie Hackers (https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/growing-to-1-300-mo-b...).
I think your examples do not really prove the role of visual design conclusively because in the 18 month time-frame, the folks at Groove must have had several efforts running concurrently with the explicit goal of increasing revenue. The web site facelift you were engaged for happened to be one of the steps they took towards that goal.
For instance, they would have intensified sales, marketing, customer success, fixed bugs in the product etc in addition to the revamped website, so we can't really pin the significant jump in revenue from $1m to $5m on visual refresh alone.
Not trying to diminsh the work that you did, merely trying to put things in perspective because our tendencies as humans is to misattribute causation, which is bound to happen if all contributing factors to a thing's success are not properly considered.
Client examples are indeed impossible to determine direct outcomes. But to add context, they added two team members in that time but the largest change came from landing larger clients, which was the whole point of the redesign.
Also added the personal example as a more controlled experiment to show the value that design can have.
I worked out one time Ive more than 300 million online sales/signups/downloads under my belt. I like to think that gives me some credibility. And I agree with OP that simple, basic and even ugly pages can be extremely effective.
Design is incredibly undervalued on HN, and I make contrarian claims to not only ruffle a few feathers, but because it’s a fundamental thesis of mine.
Note aesthetics are also a functional beauty to me, I enjoy both refactoring code and typesetting a landing page as part of the design process.
Fwiw, I think you're right. 3x is probably what the match of design and message results in, especially because a lot of what software does can't be described merely in words. It needs design to put the accent on the right things, or else will fail to communicate (most of the time).
Looks like we're reading different HNs.
> — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landing_page