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Comment by wingerlang | Hacker News Reader

I disagree with the one you replied to. I instantly understood what it was about, and with the example it solidified my thoughts.

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However, it wouldn't hurt if the home page had the above explanation explicitly written, and if they mentioned who is behind the site.

Also, common questions like "where are my documents stored", "is it secure", "how do I share the result and who can see it"... remain unanswered.

As it happens, they do have a FAQ answering those questions; it's hidden behind the signup process. It just didn't occur to them that it would be useful to have it at the home page. It seems they didn't really learn the lesson.

Thanks for the feedback! I work with Leo at Kivo. We've gone through a fair few iterations of our home page and we know it's not perfect yet. Right now we're trying to throw people right in to the product itself and then if they have more questions after that then they can find them in the site. But you're right we need to be upfront about a lot of information, it's just a balancing act, we're trying to find the right point. Thanks again.

That's the problem - I couldn't find the information I was looking for at the site. It took a leap of faith to sign up to find the FAQ, expecting that the interface for registered users would be more complete; exactly the same problem you were trying to solve when removing mandatory signup.

The only parts of the site that should be hidden behind the sign up process are those that only affect logged-in users; learning about the site and business is not one of those. Most of that information does not need to be located at the front page itself, but there must be a link allowing the user to find it.

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