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Thank you for the comment — feedback like yours helps us continuously find ways to improve! I'm really interested in digging in a bit deeper, as you've express

Thank you for the comment — feedback like yours helps us continuously find ways to improve! I'm really interested in digging in a bit deeper, as you've expressed some thoughts we haven't heard before, and I'm hoping to improve the site more. > I'm not getting any younger, and I find that the non-white background combined with the light weight of the font hard to read This is interesting. The text color is #000, and the background color is #fafafa. This is a higher contrast ratio than the wirecutter, hn, etc. Since the purple background is easier to read on, it might be that the text is actually too high-contrast. It probably doesn't help that our font is a bit on the narrow side. I have a couple of ideas on how to fix it, but don't have a great idea on how to test it. > I think adding screen grabs would help break up the monotony of long streams of text, and give people an idea of what the UI looks like for the product(s). One of the first things I look for on any SAAS landing page are screenshots, so I can see what the UI looks like. Adding screen grabs in your reviews would save some time for me. This is particularly interesting for me to hear. Would you be willing to elaborate a bit more on how exactly you use screengrabs in your decisions? In my personal experience (emphasis on personal), screengrabs don't provide much value because they're mainly used as feature demonstrations. We try to take an approach where we don't focus on the features, but rather the overall impact in aggregate (e.g. we won't focus on who has the best funnel analysis, but will ask who has the best core analytics functionality). We strongly believe that this synthesis approach is more useful, but it also means that features overviews are lower priority. However, I'd be curious to know how you use them, as it sounds like you get value from them beyond just feature understanding. With a better understanding of how you use them, we can go back and get screenshots that best fit the kind of value that you get from them.

slantyyz 6y ago
For the fonts: I think the stroke of the font is just too thin, or maybe it's the font's letterspacing as well. As far as sites go in general, my eyes struggle with reading the text on Satchel in particular. It could also be Windows' rendering of the font. I see that you're using Avenir Next? For what it's worth, it looks a little bit better on Firefox for Windows. Edge Chromium and Chrome look the same. I opened up the inspector and changed the body color to #fff and it is an improvement. The contrast in numbers might be better than HN or the Wirecutter, but I find that HN's font and the Wirecutter's font easier to read. In short spurts, the font is somewhat fine, but because reviews are so text heavy, it becomes harder to read. Keep in mind that all of this is highly subjective and based on my personal vision. For the screenshots: It's hard to explain, but I want to see how stuff is organized on the screen, etc. And while I would like to say looks aren't important, I'd be lying if I said that stuff didn't matter. If you are reviewing multiple products, I definitely want to see comparative screenshots for the same function. What would be even better would be short animated gifs showing how navigation work between apps. Oh, another thing I noticed. Your Consumer Reports style icons in the Ratings Matrix are great, but when I hover over them, I don't get a tip as to what they mean. IIRC, CR puts a legend for the icon on top of the pages that use those icons.
- Fission 6y ago
  re: fonts — I booted up my windows machine, and you're right, it renders abnormally narrow and is hard to see. No CSS rendering options could fix it, so I think it just comes down to how Windows handles the font. We'll try to swap it out for something more legible, but big thanks to you for bringing this up either way. re: screenshots — I think I see the point you're trying to make. We'll get something up and running and see how it works. re: tooltips — just pushed something to add them

slantyyz 6y ago

For the fonts: I think the stroke of the font is just too thin, or maybe it's the font's letterspacing as well. As far as sites go in general, my eyes struggle with reading the text on Satchel in particular. It could also be Windows' rendering of the font. I see that you're using Avenir Next? For what it's worth, it looks a little bit better on Firefox for Windows. Edge Chromium and Chrome look the same. I opened up the inspector and changed the body color to #fff and it is an improvement. The contrast in numbers might be better than HN or the Wirecutter, but I find that HN's font and the Wirecutter's font easier to read. In short spurts, the font is somewhat fine, but because reviews are so text heavy, it becomes harder to read. Keep in mind that all of this is highly subjective and based on my personal vision. For the screenshots: It's hard to explain, but I want to see how stuff is organized on the screen, etc. And while I would like to say looks aren't important, I'd be lying if I said that stuff didn't matter. If you are reviewing multiple products, I definitely want to see comparative screenshots for the same function. What would be even better would be short animated gifs showing how navigation work between apps. Oh, another thing I noticed. Your Consumer Reports style icons in the Ratings Matrix are great, but when I hover over them, I don't get a tip as to what they mean. IIRC, CR puts a legend for the icon on top of the pages that use those icons.

Fission 6y ago
re: fonts — I booted up my windows machine, and you're right, it renders abnormally narrow and is hard to see. No CSS rendering options could fix it, so I think it just comes down to how Windows handles the font. We'll try to swap it out for something more legible, but big thanks to you for bringing this up either way. re: screenshots — I think I see the point you're trying to make. We'll get something up and running and see how it works. re: tooltips — just pushed something to add them