Too many animations. Probably loading in a lot of custom js. Honestly keeping it simple is probably the best bet it already looks pretty generic for these kinds of sites the animations don't really help. Often the goal for those is subtle which is why people spend a lot of money on ux designers to do just that. Overall it's fine but some stuff should probably just be removed. Your site isn't really accessible but that shouldn't matter for your userbase.
We're using Webflow with one of the premium templates. I'm not sure whether it's Webflow that is slow or the template is making the site slow. We just started the website a month ago. I'll take a deep look at the performance and experience.
1. Completely broken with javascript disabled. Which is to say, completely broken.
2. When permitted javascript, it appears to use it to... intentionally fill in page contents slowly? It's hard to fully convey how obnoxious this is.
3. I assume you're aware that the "Pricing" link at the top goes to a page that contains no information whatsoever about pricing?
4. For the FAQ page (which is somehow also the pricing page, despite the lack of pricing?), having to manually open and close each question is cumbersome and annoying. Or rather, it would be only cumbersome and annoying, except that you have once again introduced the "intentionally slow down displaying content" javascript, which makes it outright infuriating.
5. Clicking on "Products" does absolutely nothing. Hovering over "Products" brings up some obnoxious little micro-lightbox bullshit.
6. Clicking on either of the items in the obnoxious little micro-lightbox bullshit takes you to... the front page of the site. The entire site appears to only have two pages, so why are you insistent on pretending that it's four?
7. The fact that one of the first problems that this site with wretched UX claims to be able to solve is "Poor UX" is some absolutely top shelf comedy. My compliments to whichever troll managed to sneak that joke in.
Piling on to #2, get rid of the fancy animations and fade ins. For a developer audience especially this is meaningless posturing that's impressing no one.
I'm a hard disagree here as a dev. The timing is too slow for me (i'd half or third the delay) and perhaps lower the transition duration a hair. But the effect itself was quite nice and gave me a strong sense of polish and quality.
I'm in-between you and the comment you replied to on whether or not to keep the animations or if they add value. I kinda don't care one way or the other.
However, I think the current implementation is a real problem. I'm using an old phone. I scroll down and there's nothing but white for a while until things start popping up. It's blank long enough for me to start wondering what's wrong. At that point, I'm not really thinking about the content.
I'd advise OP to keep #1 going: As a fledgling company you don't want to waste time time on the kind of person who sticks a 2x4 in their bike tire and then yells at you for not being more accomodating.
The light chasing affect before each page load is hopefully a bug (it's ok to show that once, but every page change gets old)
Overall clearly the site is incomplete, I think OP should go through the site on Chrome and Safari and clean up the broken links. I suspect OP wanted a brutal review of their core offering (ie we'd put in API links)
Unfortunately it's not easy to get people to do that OP: You're asking for API access without showing what the product does. I'd move your screenshot of a terminal up as a hero image (for inspiration: https://www.warp.dev/warp-ai) and hopefully you'll get a better conversion rate to actually trying it out.
Also maybe a creative "cheat" here, OpenAI plugins require publicly accessible APIs. Maybe instead of asking people for their own schema, offer reviews of the publically available plugin APIs (which there are a ton of)
Their call on the first bit, but I can assure that that your last statement is at least off by one. My budget for this year was eight figures, and extends to things like what this product appears to be.
And while I'll admit that I wouldn't make a purchasing decision based exclusively on javascript fuckery, it definitely does mean that my first impression is to doubt their technical judgment.
1-2. We're using Webflow and it seems these guys required jQuery and similar javascript libraries.
3. Pricing link is broken we didn't realize it.
4. Agree, we'll change FAQs to full view.
5. Yup, it only shows on hover. We can change it to click I think that's much better.
6. I thought having important links in the nav-bar makes it easier for the users. Anyways I'll take another look and fix it.
7. Lol!
Thank you so much for the feedback! It seems lot to improve!
The tiny screenshots in the bottom of the page should be right at the top and bigger showing what this product can provide. Let your product do the selling.
The website is slow to do an initial load and when scrolling it takes longer than a second to load the next section. The website seems mostly static, (except for the PerfAI terminal) it shouldn't be this slow.
It looks like you're using Webflow, not sure if it's possible to make it faster.
I'd say you need to start again. Make sure your content is solid first, then your layout, then your color scheme.
Only play around with JS and animating once you're sure it's absolutely needed. Most animated reveals are wishful attempts to look high tech that just irritate the visitor. If you're in doubt, just follow how a major company like stripe.com does it.
For me on mobile it was scrolled halfway down the page when it loaded. Agree with the other commenters that the slow-loading content is really annoying and caused me to lose interest very quickly.
I like that it's relatively clean. No huge images or animations. It has a bit of Google feel to it with focus on central text field and limited distraction.
Being that simple, it should be blazingly fast. It appears it uses code to... make things slower? That's going to divide audience, to those who like cute effects and those who just want to get to it. Who's more likely to be your buyers?
It was not at ALL obvious to me that I should scroll down. Again, it evokes google, there's a search box, and four sections / buttons / numbers at bottom that seemed to indicate end of content/page.
Your pricing/faq structure is confusing to me. Pricing goes to FAQ, FAQ goes to pricing#FAQ. There's no pricing either way :D
I don't know if there's enough description right up front, or an easy enough link, to understand what it does / what's your sales pitch / why this is worth the time. But I like that you can try it right away with minimal hassle. Goes back to my first point though - if your audience are no-nonsense techies, reconsider the value of intentionally slowing / fading things in :)
FAQ letters are either somewhat low contrast/hard to read if cursor is not on them, or very hard / extremely low contrast to read if cursor is on them (which it typically would be if you click on it). Likely to be another pet peeve of the HN audience :)
I feel it is not expected behaviour for "Products" button to not do anything, only open your choice of specific product lines. My expectation would be that I can hit "Products" root button to see overview and comparison of your products. I don't want to chase them one by one - I don't have the information to make informed choice yet. Edit: Clicking those two links just scrolls me on the front page which is somewhat unexpected behaviour (it's structured to make me feel it's a separate page), but more importantly it's strangely slow. It pauses then scrolls then fades in. It feels like the automatic gearbox in older cars - nothing, nothing, oh wait did you press gas? Hmm should I do something about it? Oh! Yes! I'm a transmission! I should downshift! Yes! Here you go! ==* :->
With that in mind, the more I use the site, the more little delays accumulate. I feel like in 1998, netscape could instantly go to anchor inside the page. I feel like in 2023 on my Fibre gigabit, I'd expect clicking a button that does the same thing should be... like, faster than instantaneous :->
That being said, I cannot evaluate how good your product is - I did not interpret that to be the gist of your question, just the website itself.
It is similar to a presentation deck, with plenty of empty whitespace, tiny low-contrast text, some Pioneer plaque-like graphics, and in the end the punchline is "Request a demo".
Just set a price, don't ask people to request a demo because they won't.
Some what I would suggest is:
- More contrast between the text and the background
- Less text
- Put the most meaningful text earlier
- Create "plans": basic, pro, enterprise. Keep the "Contact sales" button only for enterprise.
I think they are using the AI to generate test data but the site is so obtuse I am not sure. When I hear performance my first thought is throughout, latency and such. If it were a search engine people might consider accuracy as a kind of “performance” and if it were selling stuff the effectiveness it has at that could also be considered “performance”. (e.g. a salesperson gets “performance-based” pay.)
So they are doing really bad at explaining themselves and it’s particularly dangerous in a field like A.I. that attracts so many bullshitters.
OP you're getting a lot of criticism in this thread, and 100% going through it will be the best thing you have ever done. People are doing God's work here and you are to be applauded as well for wanting this honesty in the first place. Good luck.
I agree the author should be applauded. That said, trying to please everybody on HN is impossible.
It would be more useful if these comments explained why they think things are important, so the OP can assess the importance of feedback within the context of their own site. Too many of the comments assume all websites should be built in the same way, and criticise anything that isn’t.
1. Get rid of the JavaScript. All of it. If you need JavaScript, you're doing it wrong.
2. Information density is way too low, the entire page could fit on one 1080p monitor.
3. I don't know what I'm even looking at immediately after opening the page. What is the information you want to convey? Put it front and center on the page, make it the first thing I see. That interactive text box is useless to me, because I don't know what anything is.
4. Gray text on white background is an insult to peoples' eyes. Use black text on white for maximum readability. You're trying to convey information here, this is not an art piece for your high school project.
The first thing is a prompt to enter a Swagger definition url. Without context, how do I know if I am singing up for DDoS as a service or something legit? It doesn't tell what it does but prompts me...
The page assumes that the reader knows what it's about. That I care about putting a swagger url, and get... something as the output. Tell me what's the goal, what's the value of the output.
Device screen aspect ratios are not consistent, especially on mobile. This is a very annoying problem for many websites. There is a simple solution though: make the entire masthead section square. Cut the gordian knot.
During YC, we relentlessly practice our “two-sentence description.” It’s roughly of the form “ACME makes soup taste better. We do it with a seasoning that chefs add to their broth.” That is, what you do, and how you do it (or an example.)
Yours might be “Perfai makes APIs faster. We do this by ?” The “how” is unclear.
Are the case studies from actual users? Why all of the disclaimers?
Your site mostly makes the claim that “slow APIs lead to churn.” If that is true, it is not obvious to me. I almost wonder if the copy was written by AI, as it uses plausible-sounding verbiage but is unconvincing.
I believe the real problem is that you haven’t talked to enough potential users about their API problems. If you were able to quote their pain points in their own words, I think the copy would more convincingly demonstrate there is a problem and how your solution fixes it.
1. Instead of doing a "two-sentence description" I did "problem-solution-result" style i.e. "Poor API performance results in negative UX and high customer churn. Deliver high-performance APIs to stop churn and boost 3x retention.". I like your suggestion "PerfAI makes APIs faster. We do this by" and I'll work on it based on your feedback.
2. Our CS team published the case studies at the last minute without a proper review. We'll fix it.
3. Most of the claims are actually backed by one of the Google white paper. We'll add its references to make it sound convincing.
4. You're correct we don't have customers we just started. We're in the process to getting potential users.
Kudos to you for asking for honest feedback. I don't mean to pile on; only to clarify something about the pitch on your website.
The thing with "problem-solution-result" style descriptions is that they can rely on (insider) knowledge about both the problem and the solution. Your pitch / tagline works great for people who know about both... even though this is unlikely to be the case outside of people working for your company. I.e. you want readers / potential customers to imagine how your solution applies to their problem, not to the one you've described for them.
If a user / potential customer is tech-savvy enough to know about API testing, it's a good bet that they won't just take it on faith that AI testing will hand-wavily solve their problem. I think you can trust that your potential customers don't need to be heavily sold on the idea that API performance is critical. Instead, I recommend focusing on coming up with marketing copy to address the following questions:
* What does your AI testing do that internal engineers and a set of tests can't?
* How can perfai.ai augment engineering efforts?
* Can perfai.ai find things that traditional test-suites miss?
You sort of address this in the "No Code / No Config" section, but it's none too clear and takes some digging to figure out. Speaking of which "bringing the concept of Shift-Left to API active performance" is inside baseball.
You are on the right track, but you haven't reached your destination, so to speak.
"Value" isn't a property inherent to the copy on your website (or any text, for that matter), it's a property of the relationship between the copy and the reader. One way in which people recognize value is when they gently realize that they are (at least a little bit) wrong.
What are people wrong about re: API testing?
You currently have:
> AI-Powered API Performance Testing
> No-Code, Self-Learning!
None of this implies that I have a problem. And this is because if I am building a website, I already test my API.* So it doesn't matter that your product is automatic, no-code, and self-learning. Instead, you have to point out how my testing of my API is incomplete.
*Or so I may think. I might be convinced that I am testing my API even doing something as simple as '> rake routes'...
But users will likely respond to the following value propositions:
> Most people don't even know they aren't testing their APIs properly...
> Doing it right is actually quite tricky, due to... (e.g. effort, time, money)
> By relying on unit tests, engineers miss the forest for the trees...
> For example...
^^ Build this out first, and a snappy way of wording it, as well as a heading / tagline will follow.
The more you understand your true audience, the more you can "tune" this copy to specific issues they might have in their API test coverage. If I build a Rails site in a month by myself, am I likely to need your product? What about if I'm at the scale of Shopify? Or is your intended audience somewhere in between?
I used to have this line earlier. I changed it after criticism from the other users. I agree that your suggestions is valid to have a reason as well.
I'll add this line back.
"According to Google poor API performance leads to negative user experience and high-churn. Deliver High-Performance APIs with our Self-Learning and No-Code platform."
re: 3 - It may be true that google has a white paper describing the impact of api speed on retention. But beware, your users will need to have experienced this pain themselves, not theoretically, for them to be interested. They will need to have identified that latency (or churn - what is the actual problem you’re solving for users, that their api is slow out that they have churn?) is a problem that they want to solve right this second.
Make the value proposition extremely clear, and try to really help the user focus on a pain they have right now and that you can solve it.
I added this text
"According to Google, poor API performance leads to negative user experience and high-churn. Deliver High-Performance APIs with our self-learning and no-code platform."
What it results in is scrolling, seeing a completely blank screen for a second or so while scrolling happens and updates are deferred, and then showing something. It could have been there all along.
113 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 202 ms ] threadAt which point I bailed.
Unclear how AI helps here. I'd rather know what the product does and why it is better than scripting curl or something like that.
2. Slow websites stop users from using the system.
1) Why should I care?
2) What are you going to do for *me*?
Features < Benefits
Thank you so much!
2. When permitted javascript, it appears to use it to... intentionally fill in page contents slowly? It's hard to fully convey how obnoxious this is.
3. I assume you're aware that the "Pricing" link at the top goes to a page that contains no information whatsoever about pricing?
4. For the FAQ page (which is somehow also the pricing page, despite the lack of pricing?), having to manually open and close each question is cumbersome and annoying. Or rather, it would be only cumbersome and annoying, except that you have once again introduced the "intentionally slow down displaying content" javascript, which makes it outright infuriating.
5. Clicking on "Products" does absolutely nothing. Hovering over "Products" brings up some obnoxious little micro-lightbox bullshit.
6. Clicking on either of the items in the obnoxious little micro-lightbox bullshit takes you to... the front page of the site. The entire site appears to only have two pages, so why are you insistent on pretending that it's four?
7. The fact that one of the first problems that this site with wretched UX claims to be able to solve is "Poor UX" is some absolutely top shelf comedy. My compliments to whichever troll managed to sneak that joke in.
However, I think the current implementation is a real problem. I'm using an old phone. I scroll down and there's nothing but white for a while until things start popping up. It's blank long enough for me to start wondering what's wrong. At that point, I'm not really thinking about the content.
Thank you!
We're going to improve the load time by half.
Thank you so much!
Thank you so much!
The light chasing affect before each page load is hopefully a bug (it's ok to show that once, but every page change gets old)
Overall clearly the site is incomplete, I think OP should go through the site on Chrome and Safari and clean up the broken links. I suspect OP wanted a brutal review of their core offering (ie we'd put in API links)
Unfortunately it's not easy to get people to do that OP: You're asking for API access without showing what the product does. I'd move your screenshot of a terminal up as a hero image (for inspiration: https://www.warp.dev/warp-ai) and hopefully you'll get a better conversion rate to actually trying it out.
Also maybe a creative "cheat" here, OpenAI plugins require publicly accessible APIs. Maybe instead of asking people for their own schema, offer reviews of the publically available plugin APIs (which there are a ton of)
And while I'll admit that I wouldn't make a purchasing decision based exclusively on javascript fuckery, it definitely does mean that my first impression is to doubt their technical judgment.
Thank you so much for the feedback! It seems lot to improve!
It looks like you're using Webflow, not sure if it's possible to make it faster.
Lighthouse on my MacBook Pro 13-inch 2020 i7:
https://imgur.com/a/dSPmea2
Also on mobile the button below "Get a free assessment done by our expert performance engineering team." only shows the letter "S"
This is on iPhone 14 pro
Thank you so much for the feedback!
Only play around with JS and animating once you're sure it's absolutely needed. Most animated reveals are wishful attempts to look high tech that just irritate the visitor. If you're in doubt, just follow how a major company like stripe.com does it.
I like that it's relatively clean. No huge images or animations. It has a bit of Google feel to it with focus on central text field and limited distraction.
Being that simple, it should be blazingly fast. It appears it uses code to... make things slower? That's going to divide audience, to those who like cute effects and those who just want to get to it. Who's more likely to be your buyers?
It was not at ALL obvious to me that I should scroll down. Again, it evokes google, there's a search box, and four sections / buttons / numbers at bottom that seemed to indicate end of content/page.
Your pricing/faq structure is confusing to me. Pricing goes to FAQ, FAQ goes to pricing#FAQ. There's no pricing either way :D
I don't know if there's enough description right up front, or an easy enough link, to understand what it does / what's your sales pitch / why this is worth the time. But I like that you can try it right away with minimal hassle. Goes back to my first point though - if your audience are no-nonsense techies, reconsider the value of intentionally slowing / fading things in :)
FAQ letters are either somewhat low contrast/hard to read if cursor is not on them, or very hard / extremely low contrast to read if cursor is on them (which it typically would be if you click on it). Likely to be another pet peeve of the HN audience :)
I feel it is not expected behaviour for "Products" button to not do anything, only open your choice of specific product lines. My expectation would be that I can hit "Products" root button to see overview and comparison of your products. I don't want to chase them one by one - I don't have the information to make informed choice yet. Edit: Clicking those two links just scrolls me on the front page which is somewhat unexpected behaviour (it's structured to make me feel it's a separate page), but more importantly it's strangely slow. It pauses then scrolls then fades in. It feels like the automatic gearbox in older cars - nothing, nothing, oh wait did you press gas? Hmm should I do something about it? Oh! Yes! I'm a transmission! I should downshift! Yes! Here you go! ==* :->
With that in mind, the more I use the site, the more little delays accumulate. I feel like in 1998, netscape could instantly go to anchor inside the page. I feel like in 2023 on my Fibre gigabit, I'd expect clicking a button that does the same thing should be... like, faster than instantaneous :->
That being said, I cannot evaluate how good your product is - I did not interpret that to be the gist of your question, just the website itself.
Just set a price, don't ask people to request a demo because they won't.
Some what I would suggest is:
- More contrast between the text and the background
- Less text
- Put the most meaningful text earlier
- Create "plans": basic, pro, enterprise. Keep the "Contact sales" button only for enterprise.
If you built something that will make APIs with an OpenAPI spec faster, can you say that in a way that doesn't seem like you are selling snake oil?
So they are doing really bad at explaining themselves and it’s particularly dangerous in a field like A.I. that attracts so many bullshitters.
1. Writing a custom Performance plan for the API
2. Learning how to invoke API endpoints
3. Applying Performance Top-10 coverage/categories, etc.
Thank you for your feedback!
1. Writing a custom Performance plan for the API 2. Learning how to invoke API endpoints 3. Applying Performance Top-10 coverage/categories, etc.
What I need to do is explain how AI is helpful.
But thank you for your feedback!
It would be more useful if these comments explained why they think things are important, so the OP can assess the importance of feedback within the context of their own site. Too many of the comments assume all websites should be built in the same way, and criticise anything that isn’t.
I think they're smart enough to ignore that or at least realize that a total rewrite is silly.
Thank you so much!
2. Information density is way too low, the entire page could fit on one 1080p monitor.
3. I don't know what I'm even looking at immediately after opening the page. What is the information you want to convey? Put it front and center on the page, make it the first thing I see. That interactive text box is useless to me, because I don't know what anything is.
4. Gray text on white background is an insult to peoples' eyes. Use black text on white for maximum readability. You're trying to convey information here, this is not an art piece for your high school project.
Thanks for the feedback!
Device screen aspect ratios are not consistent, especially on mobile. This is a very annoying problem for many websites. There is a simple solution though: make the entire masthead section square. Cut the gordian knot.
Thank you so much!
Yours might be “Perfai makes APIs faster. We do this by ?” The “how” is unclear.
Are the case studies from actual users? Why all of the disclaimers?
Your site mostly makes the claim that “slow APIs lead to churn.” If that is true, it is not obvious to me. I almost wonder if the copy was written by AI, as it uses plausible-sounding verbiage but is unconvincing.
I believe the real problem is that you haven’t talked to enough potential users about their API problems. If you were able to quote their pain points in their own words, I think the copy would more convincingly demonstrate there is a problem and how your solution fixes it.
1. Instead of doing a "two-sentence description" I did "problem-solution-result" style i.e. "Poor API performance results in negative UX and high customer churn. Deliver high-performance APIs to stop churn and boost 3x retention.". I like your suggestion "PerfAI makes APIs faster. We do this by" and I'll work on it based on your feedback.
2. Our CS team published the case studies at the last minute without a proper review. We'll fix it.
3. Most of the claims are actually backed by one of the Google white paper. We'll add its references to make it sound convincing.
4. You're correct we don't have customers we just started. We're in the process to getting potential users.
Thank you for your feedback!
The thing with "problem-solution-result" style descriptions is that they can rely on (insider) knowledge about both the problem and the solution. Your pitch / tagline works great for people who know about both... even though this is unlikely to be the case outside of people working for your company. I.e. you want readers / potential customers to imagine how your solution applies to their problem, not to the one you've described for them.
If a user / potential customer is tech-savvy enough to know about API testing, it's a good bet that they won't just take it on faith that AI testing will hand-wavily solve their problem. I think you can trust that your potential customers don't need to be heavily sold on the idea that API performance is critical. Instead, I recommend focusing on coming up with marketing copy to address the following questions: * What does your AI testing do that internal engineers and a set of tests can't? * How can perfai.ai augment engineering efforts? * Can perfai.ai find things that traditional test-suites miss?
You sort of address this in the "No Code / No Config" section, but it's none too clear and takes some digging to figure out. Speaking of which "bringing the concept of Shift-Left to API active performance" is inside baseball.
Hope this helps!
AI-Powered API Performance Testing No-Code, Self-Learning!
Since AI learns how to interact with the API and validates every path in it. Is the new sub-heading any better than the previous one?
Also, shortened all the other sections.
Thank you so much for the feedback!
"Value" isn't a property inherent to the copy on your website (or any text, for that matter), it's a property of the relationship between the copy and the reader. One way in which people recognize value is when they gently realize that they are (at least a little bit) wrong.
What are people wrong about re: API testing?
You currently have:
None of this implies that I have a problem. And this is because if I am building a website, I already test my API.* So it doesn't matter that your product is automatic, no-code, and self-learning. Instead, you have to point out how my testing of my API is incomplete.*Or so I may think. I might be convinced that I am testing my API even doing something as simple as '> rake routes'...
But users will likely respond to the following value propositions:
^^ Build this out first, and a snappy way of wording it, as well as a heading / tagline will follow.The more you understand your true audience, the more you can "tune" this copy to specific issues they might have in their API test coverage. If I build a Rails site in a month by myself, am I likely to need your product? What about if I'm at the scale of Shopify? Or is your intended audience somewhere in between?
I'll add this line back. "According to Google poor API performance leads to negative user experience and high-churn. Deliver High-Performance APIs with our Self-Learning and No-Code platform."
Make the value proposition extremely clear, and try to really help the user focus on a pain they have right now and that you can solve it.
What it results in is scrolling, seeing a completely blank screen for a second or so while scrolling happens and updates are deferred, and then showing something. It could have been there all along.
Thank for your feedback!