Comment by KRAKRISMOTT | Hacker News Reader

Comment by KRAKRISMOTT | Hacker News Reader

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The way your landing page is laid out isn't doing you any favors. If you are going to build a rapid application development platform, look at Retool for inspiration in terms of designs and copywriting. Cut the token stuff, otherwise you will lose customers or self select for crypto bros. The license you chose will turn off most professional development shops and the ones using the platform would be based in places like eastern Europe where the license will be ignored entirely. Your landing page design is fifteen years out of date, this is the sort of design used to bamboozle small trades shops and non tech companies in places like the midwest and the US south, you will have a hard time attracting the sort of web engineers that will help make it go viral. Again, it depends what sort of customers you are trying to sell to, but if you intend to make a profit, the usually advice would be to offer a cloud offering like WordPress. Selling web frameworks rarely work out unless your product is a specialized database.

Your copywriting gives off strong old school enterprise sales vibes with a dash cryptomania. You are not going to get much organic product led growth among the US under 40 crowd here. I suggest taking a look at https://payloadcms.com/ and study their design, execution, and copywriting.

You seem to know what you’re talking about.

I checked out payloadcms though, that site is pretty terrible…

I am afraid that if you think that then there is no help.

Umm... are you serious? I could believe you perhaps with your criticism but then you say this is the future of web design?

The site you held up as the example I should emulate feels like some kind of terminal from the 80s movie "Hackers"... are we "hacking the gibson"?

It features white text on a black background, overlaid on animated white text on a black background...

Then you scroll down, and it has TEXT IN A GIANT SIZE going slowly across the screen..

Then it turns to white and has a video that doesn't fit

Then it has text of all different sizes, and code examples, which is irrelevant to most customers.

I am not making this up. It's literally here, I would invite anyone to look at these images and tell me whether this is unironically what I should make the Qbix site look like: https://imgur.com/a/IMT6pgB

Are you affiliated with that site or project?

You cant take this stuff personally. I think people just try to help. I dont think payloadCMS site is some kind of incredible achievment but its very well done site in line what developers are used to. Qbix website in my opinio has so many issues it is hard to point out which one to fix and how. Sorry but i think is simply a mess. There is too much information crammed together, to many various elements that dont really fit together and it makes is for anyone that visits the site really harder than it needs to be.

But what i meant is that with that defensive approach you have… it is going to be tough to make it better.

I mean no disrespect, but imo you need to get a modern UX designer involved in rethinking and redesigning your site. Message-wise, your site has too many angles, sells too many use cases, and has too many general marketing statements and not enough concrete examples. This only confuses readers.

In terms of design, the site design (1) doesn't promote a linear flow of reading, (2) doesn't space out information with enough padding, (3) doesn't make good use of text sizing to create an information hierarchy, (4) has too many disparate and messy screenshots, and (5) has distracting cursor animations and alignment shifts when hovering over the top navbar. Overall, it makes for a messy, cluttered reading experience and imo likely turns many people away. Here's the page I'm talking about:

https://qbix.com/platform/welcome

The important thing is to present a very clear "how this is used" right away, targeted at a narrow set of use cases, in an easy-to-follow, nice design. Not too many examples; one key feature at a time. For the audience of devs, they need to see how the platform is used at the most basic level (the code and UI screenshots on that Payload CMS site are good examples). If you find that Payload site's layout confusing, you're probably out of sync with modern design. In any case, I hope this feedback helps.

Please see the sister comment. If this is what “modern design” looks like — no wonder things are so bad.

Instead of clear text sizes and simple messaging like in https://qbix.com/communities, there are texts of at least 5 different sizes jumbled in.

Instead of contrast so you can read text — there is white text on black over white text on black.

There is also text that is gray and low contrast until you scroll it into view, but then it gets covered up by code examples. Most regular customers are scared by code examples.

Instead of one clear button or call to action per section, there are 20 on the screen, making the user unsure what to click and what the Information Architecture / hierarchy is.

And moreover, all the links are black on white or white on black — just like the text. No clear visual separation of where to click. It violates like every UX guideline I have read in the last 12 years.

It has GIANT TEXT HORIZONTALLY SCROLLING ACROSS THE SCREEN the minute you start to scroll down. Then when you get past that, it has a GIANT VIDEO THAT DOESN’T FIT and doesnt look like a video, more like some more text in many font sizes.

I could go on… but why? Do you actually prefer this monstrosity to clean design: https://imgur.com/a/IMT6pgB

By contrast, if you land on https://Qbix.com it looks empty and clean, and asks you who you are before showing you a page: a customer, an investor, a developer, etc. Then that page is specifically tailored to what you need.

Text is text. Colors are colors. A large black menu bar is unmistakably at the top, organized neatly so you don’t get lost, not scrolling out of the way.

Unless you think apple.com is old outdated design and modern UX is the payloadcms site?

Hi, I made the Payload site

Apparently it triggers you. I don't claim that it's perfect by any means (actually I think some of what you're saying is right).

Sorry if my criticism sounded harsh. I was not triggered by it, but simply going into depth why I do not think I should spend time making my site look like that.

My response was simply a reaction to the scope of criticism and the claim that this is the new best practices. Because the other site was held up as an example of what I should spend days emulating and making my site look like, the sheer time investment and “well, if you think it isn’t good, then you can’t be helped” made me believe that this is some canonical example of best practices and design. So I naturally critiqued it and said exactly why I thought the latest design standard was crap. That’s why it came out like that.

If I knew the author would be reading it, I would have been a lot more tactful in my criticism. But I do stand behind what I am saying. (For what it’s worth, the developer section of Qbix also needs a lot of work, but the OTHER sections + overall design of the site I think are good — but happy to take specific and constructive criticism in the same vein I gave it.)

Don't worry, I've been a designer for 15 years and I know intimately that I can't please everyone.

It's hard to get under my skin. That's actually I think what your takeaway should be here - - you can't please everyone, but you should take all feedback as valid and try and deliver something that solves for your problem the most widely.

If someone feels something, then they felt it. Including your reaction to my site, and the others' reactions to your site.

While some of what you say is correct (e.g. about the scrolling text and the messiness in parts of the Payload site), overall your criticisms show that your view of what's easy to follow is pretty out of sync with developers here. What you perceive as "bad" isn't really taken as bad by most others here, and I'd guess they're more likely to have positive impressions of Payload than Qbix.

The Qbix Communities page is definitely cleaner and more linear than the Developers/Platform page, no doubt. But it still looks very basic and again doesn't give enough focus to specific features. Instead it presents two videos (which aren't necessarily a good way to get people interested, since they may not even click on them). And at the bottom, it has two dense columns of smaller text packed together, which doesn't really invite people to really think about the features. Would be better if the text points were spaced out, given larger header text sizes, and accompanied by representative icons or even screenshots.

I also watched the first video, and the example Yang 2020 app you demonstrated also looks cluttered and squeezed due to the similar text sizing and lack of spacing things out. To me it looks like it's from 10+ years ago, before flat, material design really took hold of the mainstream and became consistent across many web apps and SPA. (Pity about Yang 2020!)

Sometimes it's best to question why others are having such a contrasting response to you. It does mean something. Letting go of your own opinions and preferences can be helpful for finding greater success in a wider community. Seriously, think about getting opinions from a few UX professionals, and give them some weight when you evaluate them, even if you disagree with them.

I do question it. I am happy to have substantive conversations, and improve things. You may not realize it but the current site(s) other than the Development page are the result of years and hundreds of iterations with people who expressed criticism just like yours. Including professionals. And thus what you say at this point is one data point — but you can’t please everyone.

People often point out problems in design aesthetics, and imagine that the opposite solution somehow can be realized in a consistent way that makes everyone love the result and will make the difference in platform usaage, but no. That’s not how it works at all. It’s like the people who say “your app doesn’t work” to a developer (with no details on a solution should be), and imagine that somehow this will lead to a much better app with no bugs that everyone will use.

At the end of the day, adoption matters far more. Facebook is cluttered and ugly compared to many other clean beautiful apps, but people are super used to it. Discord is totally bewildering, with tiny gifs for flair and many controls are extremely hard to discover and operate, but people are used to where things are. Craigslist is ugly but at least it’s straightforward. Many more beautiful sites fell by the wayside as they tried to take it on (remember kajiji? others?)

As for Yang 2020… your criticisms are fine but you should realize the design wasn’t ours. It was, in fact, following the design guide here since each community designs their own portal:

https://cdn.hackaday.io/files/1665227124477248/Yang%20Gang%2...

You see, when you are designing a tool can be reused in many different environments with hundreds of variations that could go either way, and still has to work, then you realize that the design decisions aren’t so simple and that these may be the least bad after having gone through exactly the process you described.

Look, if Payload’s GIANT SCROLLING TEXT and white text in black over white text on black was the unavoidable result of hundreds of iterations, then I’d accept it. I personally think there are good reasons for what we have done, having tried tons of other variations. But I don’t think the GIANT SCROLLING TEXT, or making all links look exactly like the text, is necessary or the inevitable result of iterating. We HAVE been listening to criticism and THIS is the result.

Could do with some improvements, a template, maybe a CSS framework if you're not using one yet

https://i.imgur.com/RYEo7Gv.png

I agree about the developer portal. Have you seen the other sections of the site? Start at the welcome page

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