Quote:
Originally Posted by TableBeeps
[snip]Can you elaborate a bit more on what is "confusing." I honestly get very frustrated when I hear that as feedback because I feel like I spend the most time thinking about ways to make it so clear that a monkey could understand it.
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Well, I don’t mean incomprehensible. The thing is people don’t read webpages, at first anyway, they scan them. It’s only when visitors determine that your site may be of interest to them do they actually begin to read and attempt to comprehend your offer.
What you want to do is think about all the elements on your landing page (logo, navigation, tagline, benefit statement, etc.) as having a sort of visual volume: the goal being to make what visitors want most, to know that the site benefits them in some way, the loudest. The problem with your site is there are too many equally loud elements competing for my attention and what you really want me to become aware of first, i.e. what you do and what you do for me, gets lost in all the noise.
Now I think you picked up on some of this, for example making your logo quieter by making it smaller, but in another crucial area, your tagline, you tried to overcome the loudness of the rest of your page elements by making it huge. There’s a reason an h1 tag is set ~36px, because that’s about as large a font size people can read without straining. Your h1 tag is a nearly unreadable 81px.
After you’ve prioritized the elements on your page, the next thing you want to look at is flow and how one’s eyes initially move around your page. My eyes track first to your “get started” button which is okay as a sort of “look here first” anchor. Next they go to the monkey’s eyes (mon.ki) then to the “teespring” image and then to the “mail’ette” image, back to the “get started” button, then up to “user testing for the lean startup” and finally down to your benefits’ checkmarks. What’s happening here is that you’re “loudly” answering a question with testimonials and examples I haven’t asked yet or trying to get me to do what I’m not ready to do. Customer logos and testimonials are credibility elements and while they need to be somewhere, they need to be in the background until a visitor has progressed down the funnel and is looking for credibility. Likewise with the sign-up: it’s there for when people are ready to sign-up or to indicate that a sign-up is required if they so choose to partake.
So assuming I’ve stuck around beyond the <2 seconds all the above occurs in, I have two questions: one, is user testing really a benefit to me and two, how does this thing work. Neither question is adequately addressed on your page. “But wait, there’s a scroll bar so I should scroll down to see how betapunch will help me and how it works, right?” Wrong. No answers there, just more things you want me to spend my precious time viewing.
As a remedy, what you want to do is focus first on what’s most important to your visitor, not you. Now a lot of that may have to do with your traffic source, but you should error on the side of visitors not knowing too much about user testing and structure your funnel accordingly. Meaning, make your tagline and benefits the loudest, but not screaming, and soften-up/quiet-up the other “needed” elements on the landing page. For example, colors in your customers’ logos are hugely distracting, so you need to set their opacity to ~50% and reduce their size, otherwise that’s the first thing visitors will be drawn to.
After they know there’s some benefit for them, the next thing they’ll be asking is how it works and how much it costs. You’re trying to get people to sign-up before answering those questions and basically saying, “welcome to betapunch… sign-up now.” That won’t work on cold traffic. What I mean is that it’s one thing to try that tact with warm or presold traffic or returning visitors, but you can’t expect that traffic source to last forever. For pre-sold visitors, it’s akin to responding to a help wanted ad, i.e. they’ll find their way around because they’re keenly aware of the benefits buried somewhere in your site. First-timers simply won’t jump-thru hoops the way you want them to.
Anyway, I hope you don’t take the above too critically. You’re doing what everyone starts out doing: “I’ve made my first logo… ergo I’ll use half the screen to show my brilliant design to the rest of the world…” Ditto with huge and/or “red” text. Those design elements are there for impact, but if everything you’re saying is equally loud, they lose their effect.
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