YC Facelift: EXEC
kyrobeshay.com
kyrobeshay.com
First, and very simply, the existing Exec design is conspicuously weak and unprofessional. It looks copy+pasted from a million other sites, but without anyone with a good eye to look it over and pull the disparate copied elements together. For all the negative feedback, there should be more acknowledgment that Kyro's decision does a far better job aesthetically and in terms of polish than what exists now.
Second, when did marketing and design become conflated? Most of the criticism is about the approach the designer has taken to writing marketing copy and otherwise persuading people to sign up. Is that really the role of a designer? Maybe it is these days, but I think that means the role has now become a hybrid of two pretty unrelated disciplines.
A great designer takes a sense of experience and branding and translates it into abstraction: color, form, rhythm, etc. Kyro has done a good job of this. The design, text aside, reads as high-end, serious, appealing to professionals, and most importantly like a solid company that is trustworthy and can deliver on its promises.
A great copywriter or marketer is doing a totally different thing, trying to persuade people and get them to convert. From knowing some people who are pretty good at both things, I'm not convinced that these two roles should be turned into one. I think this is a vast improvement on design before I even analyze whether or not its a marketing copy improvement.
With respect to OP, I think it's fairly clear he took the role of a visual designer in his work and should be criticized more on that aspect. But in the larger picture, I think a good designer (of any capacity) should be able to at least consider the marketing and copywriting goals. While these roles should not be merged into one - there's a role for someone who can consider all these to coordinate these unique needs. I personally feel that a designer who has an understanding of business needs is better suited for this goal than the alternative (that's not to say its a necessity for all designers)
Fortunately, we live in the age of A/B testing. Rather than listening to any of the speculation in this thread, the thoughtful businessperson can actually quantify just how good or bad a design is at achieving its goal.
It's visually appealing, professional and a vast improvement over the current site. Critiquing anything else beyond that is moot.
When someone start expecting a designer to do copy writing, AB testing, marketing, then they will also expect them to code in HTML, CSS, JS, and before you know it, they're the classical example of those looking for unicorn designers.
Even some of the design critiques here are perfect candidates for clientsfromhell.com ie: "Make the gold golder."
The goal of good design is to communicate the values and value proposition of the site. Any website should look professional and visually appealing, but the fact that a website is professional or visually appealing tells you nothing about whether or not the site is actually well designed.
Meaningful feedback and constructive critique could be provided if the site was live, if we can see some hard numbers or we can do some user case studies as they use the site.
The bar for web design excellence on HN is way out of whack for what the bar actually is in the real world.
This matters because I think lots of people talk themselves out of launching out of concern that some web design enthusiast is going to come out of the woodwork and accuse them of being "conspicuously unprofessional". Trust me: people have driven a shitload of business through sites that I'm sure would make you throw up in your mouth.
My point was about the relationship between two designs: the original Exec design and the "facelift." The facelift is much more professional, and looks much less thrown-together. To add some context, too, I'm not "coming out of the woodwork" to criticize the company. I was responding to what seemed like a lot of misplaced negativity about the facelift.
I think it's definitely possible for a company to do very well without a well-designed website. But that's not really what we're talking about, is it?
What, exactly, do you think is more professional about the redesign?
Exec's launch website is unprofessional because it is unpolished, visually unresolved, and appears to have taken little time to create. I don't want to break down into a detailed argument over specifics, but the biggest problems have to do with spacing, type size, the crappy icons, and the hyper-generic elements like the buttons, background tiles and color palette. Also, the logo (which isn't very distinctive in and of itself) isn't even used throughout.
The redesign is very carefully proportioned and arranged. It uses somewhat less generic colors and buttons and so forth, and some simple visual ideas are repeated throughout to create a sense of continuity and harmony. Each section flows well from on area to the next.
Again, I think you might be projecting a little bit. Who's "hung up" on "unreasonable standards" of professionalism? The post is about a person redesigning Exec's landing page. The redesign is more professional, looks more polished and refined and careful, than the original. I don't think that's a huge deal, and I don't think that makes Exec a huge failure or something. I'm not insisting that they raise their design to any standard.
EDIT: FYI, I'm not really much of a web designer myself. Kyro can probably define the problems with the existing site in much more detail than I could.
I didn't mean professional in the sense of "money-earning," as you would use the term applied to participants in a certain field.
That's exactly what professional means. A professional web designer is someone who gets paid by others to design websites. Sometimes, artistic license is part of what customers want (see: professional chefs, painters, etc.). But web businesses like Exec generally want to earn money.
So any site that is optimized for profit qualifies as professional, regardless of how much you like their design.
Of course, there are caveats. Maybe some designs, while generating more conversions, would attract more short-term, price-conscious customers, instead of the upscale clientele that are ultimately more important to Exec's long-term profits. And maybe, for this service, it's important to be seen as "stylish" to generate good word of mouth. But, ultimately, whatever design is best for Exec is the most "professional."
To maybe put it more easily, and to bridge the gap between the two usages: the facelift looks like it was made by a professional designer and is thus a professional design. The existing site looks amateur because it appears as if the person who designed it would be unable to charge for their design services.
To argue the opposite would require some kind of weird personification of the design, as in, "this design is a wage-earning participant in its field," which just doesn't comport with how people use "professional" when they apply it to products and especially to designs.
I promise you: the industry of professional designers is full of people who believe that only professional designers can create sites that will pass muster with buyers in the real world.
The reality is simpler, cheaper, and fairer: there is indeed a minimum standard that company websites need to achieve to look like a "real company", but it is many many thousands of dollars cheaper than a professional design project. You can buy it for tens of dollars on Themeforest. Your customers, unless you sell primarily to designers†, will never notice or care.
Most professional design projects by pre-revenue companies are vanity exercises. A lot of professional design projects post-revenue are too.
It is completely f'd up to say that a company looks unprofessional because its website isn't the product of a professional design project. Professional designers are not the gatekeepers of professional startup site launches. They just aren't. People need to stop acting like they are, because it's keeping them from getting to market.
† Do not do this.
It's a bit much to obsess about semantics and then throw your hands up in despair that people make the kinds of distinctions that counter your points.
Who, exactly, is saying to you that "only professional designers can create sites that will pass muster with buyers in the real world"?
Your standards are too high. You may be tired of Bootstrap sites, but I assure you that the rest of the world isn't and while Bootstrap's particular look/feel may go out of style, the world isn't going to get sick of sites like this just because they're Bootstrap.
When you say something is "unprofessional", you are implicitly making a comparison between it and other companies in the industry. Exec is a new service, but it serves an existing market which includes Craigslist, Angie's List, Zaarly, TaskRabbit, and AskSunday. Despite being an almost- out- of- the- box- Bootstrap design, it is already better than several of those sites!
It's perfectly fine to not like Exec's design! I'm not faulting you for thinking the type is bad (I think you're wrong about "spacing" though) or the colors generic.
What's less fine is "unprofessional". Again: I think that assertion isn't just wrong; it's part of a meme that casts a pall over the whole site, which is chock full of people who would launch services except that they're waiting months and months and months to get "good design" that nobody in the whole world cares about other than a couple loud people on HN.
Since you bring it up, the top photo is fine but especially the photo of the desk looks quite poor. But hey! Still not suggesting that matters to the business's bottom line!
I haven't told anyone not to launch, I haven't said it's important for startups to look professional, and it's still true that Exec's design is a bit crappy and unprofessional.
This design does exactly the opposite. It suggests that EXEC is something I might pay attention to at approximately the same time as I start to consider time-sharing private jets.
That aside: pitching entire redesigns over the HN transom is a great way to start a meaningful conversation about positioning and branding, so, do more of these.
TaskRabbit, a 500startups venture.
Has anyone used this thingy? I've got a bunch of stuff I'd consider farming out.
Do you think the Marquis Jet positioning is the right way for Kan to go with EXEC?
Get to the Quiksilver store in Time Square
Purchase a Blu-Ray disc of Art Of Flight
Ship to a San Francisco address with FedEx Standard OvernightThis was in SF, FWIW.
Some of the things I've found useful --
Write notes about a webinar, following instructions on key things to notice and questions to ask. http://www.taskrabbit.com/virtual/t/take-notes-from-a-1-hour...
Attend a lecture, write a trip report, take pictures. http://www.taskrabbit.com/seattle-wa/t/attend-a-talk-at-uw-a...
Count number of businesses on FB matching certain criteria. http://www.taskrabbit.com/virtual/t/estimate-number-of-faceb...
Handle the legwork for contacting ~30 vendors on aliexprss.com to open initial discussions about custom clothing. http://www.taskrabbit.com/virtual/t/virtual-assistance-resea...
Helping me attend a meeting via Skype in a different city. http://www.taskrabbit.com/san-francisco-ca/t/help-me-attend-...
At Everlane we used TaskRabbit all the time for random, around-the-city tasks, including fetching things from IKEA (the nearest one is across the Bay Bridge in Oakland), bringing them to the office, and assembling them.
Very cost effective, and can save hours of work.
It's what Zara and H&M do. High-end design makes customers feel important; low prices let them know they're shopping in the right store.
I'm worried now that everyone is going to feel the need to explain the concept of a status good to me, or explain why some products get marketed as luxury goods. People: I get it. There are products where a niche can be carved out by luxury positions. But something else about the markets for those products: they're all super competitive. This isn't some remarkable insight on my part; it's banal enough to be in Porter's _Competitive Strategy_. Even MBA's know it.
The redesign fits the name, but does it fit the product? Without the company's vision/style guide, it's hard to do a redesign. I think it's a great job provided the information gleamed from the current website and the company name.
Just because a little is good, doesn't mean that twice as much is better. I think the name does a great job at subconsciously making people feel a little bit important, but I think having the rest of site designed around exclusivity actually undermines the positioning they are going for. They're targeting young professionals who are willing to spend some extra money if it can make them more productive, not celebutante wannabes.
ie: They could target more than young professionals - what about people who have disabilities? Maybe they can set up a weekly Exec service for groceries for handicapped people. Exec is a startup and they're no doubt iterating their product, and customer discovery and all that jazz. I feel it's unfair to look at a site, then comment on the design, when neither knows Exec's target customers (even when Exec is still discovering themselves).
This thread is a good case study for nerdly misconceptions about marketing. I suspect that to a lot of HN readers, "marketing" means "what feelings you're expected to have while using the product", like, "this is gold and black for the same reason that Github has Star Wars imagery on their 404 page". No. Marketing is first and foremost about subsetting people into groups, predicting what those groups will pay for a good or service, and then picking the group. The "feelings" business serves that goal, not the other way around.
So, first, you'd want to decide "am I going after the same people that Hertz #1 Club Gold is" (ie, the kinds of people who spend 5 figures a month solely on travel expenses) and then say "let's class up the website a bit".
And that - in the right circumstances - can be a very, very good thing. I've seen designers sweat blood to get that kind of feel :-)
http://www.taskrabbit.com (see also API at http://taskrabbit.github.com)
http://www.zaarly.com http://www.gigwalk.com http://www.gigboard.com
Exec differentiates on up front pricing ($25/hr), fast fulfillment (within 10 minutes), and on positioning toward executive assistant services. There's an interesting comparison table to be made with columns like "number of active workers," "geographic regions covered," "pricing model," "top 5 tasks" etc.
There's also craigslist, of course, which is highly liquid and has high reach. Craigslist doesn't have a great experience, though, for hiring people.
First, current tells me EXEC will do anything for $25/hr, yours tells me they will buy my groceries for $25/hr (cutting the mass appeal down IMMENSELY)
Second, and much more importantly, EXEC's current design works within real constraints. For one thing, you mocked up all this social proof that likely does not exist for an early stage startup. That takes up about 50% of your design.
There are some things you improve on (more frequent calls to the primary action etc.), but the problem with doing design like this is you end up focusing almost entirely on aesthetic stuff, as well as cookie cutter things you can plug into any site (ie: testimonials etc.), instead of the real task at hand. If you want to improve your design skills you have to get some real constraints. Design without constraints isn't.
Listing them all:
- YC startups using Exec - we already know they are, check.
- Videos of people using exec - are you kidding me? The founder of Justin.TV would struggle to make a couple of nice testimonial videos from trustworthy looking people? check.
- Names of people who use Exec - see first point. check.
- Profiles of execs. easy. check.
- Quote from Paul Graham. Should take about 20 seconds to bang out an email. check.
- Quote from Elon Musk. I don't know if he's connected to YC/Khan/etc, but I would be surprised if that was more than one or two phone calls away if that was really needed. That said, any other reputable figure will do. check.
- "Millions of people" - ok, that's not true yet. So change it to thousands of people (probably true already).
"Here's real people testifying about Exec".
Zero doubt that Exec could put together "social proof" that YC companies use and love the service. But that's not their target market, is it? It's not the targeting that this redesign uses. I'm commenting on the redesign. I'm not arguing whether it would be good for them to leverage the YC network on their front page. This redesign doesn't do that.
Incidentally: quotes from Musk and Graham are (I'd suggest) counterproductive. Exec is priced for the mainstream. They're following TaskRabbit's price point. Look at TaskRabbit jobs; they're all bachelors getting shit out of their 4th floor studio apartments or assembling Ikea furniture. Why would Exec adopt a message of "this is a service targeted at the Elon Musks of the world"? How many FT PA's does Musk already have? I think he has some of them in space.
I think you're (accidentally) moving the goalposts.
I like the idea that the founder of Justin.tv can, because of his amazing video powers, generate compelling videographic social proof for any product. Maybe he should sell those super expensive Vertu phones too. ;)
I don't know, you'd have to ask the Exec team.
Me, I think that's a great starting target market. It's not enough as a final objective, but if they can saturate that market, they're in a good position to expand to the rest.
OP's design proposes a slideshow showing concrete examples of what exec can do for you. Concreteness trumps vagueness.
I think task rabbit does it better. http://www.taskrabbit.com/
functionally, I would try to establish more of a visual hierarchy as you go down the page - the yellow color accent throws me off as I go down and the path that my eye intuitively follows is all over the place.
aesthetically, consider introducing a third accent color (maybe grey?) to round out the gold and white content you've got going on.
nice job!
I've no idea if this was a deliberate choice in the case of the current site - but having neutral visual branding can be a very effective technique for organisations to exploit for a couple of reasons:
1) The visual brand isn't the only factor that effects conversion. When you're exploring your product/market fit it can be much more cost effective to work with a neutral visual brand and tweak your other positioning mechanisms, rather than create multiple visual brands that target different markets.
2) It's relatively easy to evolve a neutral visual brand into something more targeted. It's much harder to go the other way.
Basically - if you're going to go strong in one direction you need to be pretty sure that it's the right direction.
To pick one real world example. I did some usability testing work on a franchise of bed'n'breakfast style "holiday" hotels. We were looking at a couple of design alternatives. One of which was very plain and "vanilla". The other was considerably more "polished", included some nice professional photography, tours, etc.
The "polished" design performed _far_ worse. It put-off some of the low-end users (by looking "polished" it no longer looked "cheap") while not really increasing conversions in the high-end group. In contrast the "plain" brand worked well across everybody - by neither looking "cheap" or "expensive".
Before we did the testing many folk commented that the polished design was "nicer" and was "more designed". It wasn't. It was a different design. A neutral visual brand is still branding.
http://dreamersofday.com/Exec-Redesign
I like your color scheme and how you focused on convincing prospective customers that Exec is a trusted and vetted service.
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/EJEPcYv2P/iamexec.com
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights#url=i...
Also, what do we need SSL for on a landing page?
Just because something is pretty doesn't mean it's targeting the right group of people or telling the right story. I've gone through four rounds of revisions on the new web startup I'm doing in the last couple weeks for this reason. With every revision it's actually getting significantly uglier, but also more closely aligned with telling the story we want to tell to the users we see as our early adopters, so ultimately better.
There's always time to make the website pretty later once you nail the story and have a core group of users it resonates with, but making the website pretty for the sake of having a pretty website is always a huge mistake.
Additionally, the way you write a good design brief is by figuring out what you want the site to subconsciously remind people of, and then finding a bunch of design elements from other sites that meet this goal. To me this reminds me of one of those 'me too' social networks for video gamers because of the dark colors, the slick gradients/shadows, and the flash-game style UI. It emphatically does not remind me of FreshDirect, which would be a much more appropriate type of website to borrow design inspiration from.
Redesign: "this is a product, and a brand".
Also, very smart idea to do facelifts to YC companies. Many coming out of this batch have really weak design chops (the screen sharing site looked like an SEO landing page) and by focusing on YC companies, he increases his chances of being noticed. \
1. What happens when you click 'Hire an Exec', or 'Sign Up'?
2. Why are there two different calls to action - 'Hire an Exec' and 'Find an Exec near you'?
3. Design isn't just about pretty pixels. Where's the content, and why is there dummy content in its place?
4. Where did the 'In the News' section go from their original design? It must have been important enough to put it at the very top. What assumptions did you make that led you to remove it, or move it down to the footer?
5. In general, what assumptions did you make and how did they influence your design?
Maybe try purple for royalty.
In all seriousness, yeah. Gilt went from black/yellow to predominantly black/white for a good reason.
I do like how the yellow pops though. Unfortunately, it also makes my eyes bleed. Maybe try a duller yellow, like goldenrod. My emacs theme is goldenrod on dark gray and it is pleasant.
The proof to me that your design is better was my initial reaction to it. Speaking for myself, I would never hire someone from a website that doesn't look professional. Your design instantly felt like an upgrade, even if there are things that could be improved. Most people aren't taking into consideration how difficult it is to design something without any input.
The changes I'd suggest are..
1. Focus on one call to action. You have 2 currently. 2. After the 1,2,3 limit the amount of yellow on the page. It's overpowering. 3. Remove the tagline just below the picture. You don't need it and everything else can move up 4. Social proof is great but there's a lot going on at the bottom of the page. Keep the user focused on the goal of getting them into the site. 5. Use lorem ipsum for dummy text
Anyway, keep hustlin'! I'm looking forward to next week's design..
Alex3917 might be true but I think the superfluity of Bootstrap designs might slowly become deterrent to any first-time visitor. Of course, the functions are important but so much in interaction design is about colors, structure and individuality.
Let me give you an example. As a programmer, you come into a room and you often don´t care if it is furnished yet. All you care about is the room arrangement, electrics, the light, how fast you can access which room, what is nearby etc. You focus on functionality. The inside might look like pigsty headquarters but you can still imagine how it can look like once you do the interior design. In a nutshell: The average HN reader might be this kind of visitor.
The usual -non HN reader- visitor cares about functionality too, but he does´t want to enter a construction work. And as he does´t want to challenge his imagination, he might expect good impressions, giving him the incentive to visit this place again.
I like the yellow but I agree that there could be a little less of it.
Also, if a company plates it's offices with real gold, it means that they are taking too much money from me.
It's funny that it only took a few months to get sick of the Twitter Bootstrap look, felt like it took a year to get sick of the 37Signals/Basecamp rip offs.
The purpose of a painting in an art gallery or an Ansel Adams photograph is to make the viewer experience the beauty of the art. That's the primary purpose. The primary purpose of an ecommerce site is to make sales and get customers what they need. These are two very different goals. Just because a website happens to exist in two-dimensions does not mean that beauty or brand tie-in's (like the gold trim) are the most important considerations. If it were, Gmail wouldn't be the most successful email client on the planet.
My 2 cents: when I saw Exec's real page I thought, "Interesting idea, not for me." When I saw Kyro's redesign I thought "This product seems awesome! I could definitely see myself using it." Kyro's design looks far more welcoming and professional and it does a much better job of making me think the product stands out. It reminds me of heroku and gilt groupe's excellent designs (albeit it's not quite there yet). I think those are good design's to mimic for Exec's desired demographic.