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Am I the only one who really hates these opaque landing pages? They all just look the same and you never know what the hell is actually being sold. Like that po

Am I the only one who really hates these opaque landing pages? They all just look the same and you never know what the hell is actually being sold. Like that popwork one he's glowing over in the video. It's like you're walking down the street and bums keep handing you shiny wrapped presents. At first they all look shiny and you want to open it but then you've opened enough of them to know they're probably full of shit. So I stop bothering opening them. No, I don't want to create an account and give you my email so that you can spam me for months merely to know what's inside the box. Frankly my next stop is finding a video on YouTube of someone actually showing how to use... whatever it is. Or people talking about using it in a forum or something.

ollymeakings 5y ago
You watched the video so you know at 1 minute in I say how important it is to simply tell people what you actually do. I also advocate for plain language and showing the product not just talking about it.
- fluidcruft 5y ago
  Yeah, I saw that but still. It starts off with 1-on-1 meetings with managers and employees but then I guess it's actually just some scheduled survey like a weekly qualtrics to /dev/null that admin pushes at us already or whatever. Finally. That's what I got from that. I guess what I would say is that the pop.work* landing page seems to want to sell itself as scratching an itch or solving a problem, but doesn't tell us what that itch or problem is or even show us how it solves it. It's just vague and no details (which is a major red flag about a landing page for me personally). *lots of alternate "popwork" out there and you don't even link it or anything so I had to google text from the landing page in the video to find what and where it even was or if they'd completely pivoted to a different product (popwork.com)
  - onlyfortoday2 5y ago
    but still what? stop moaning LOL
sosborn 5y ago
My theory: the person in charge of a landing page doesn't want people bouncing off the site from the page they control (don't want the metrics to look bad!), so they tend to make it opaque to encourage click throughs. It doesn't matter what the best user experience is because they don't get measured on that. They get measured on bounce rate.
hinkley 5y ago
As a developer I've had to pound into people's heads that as the company grows, very few things we have worked on rank as 'special' for more than a little bit. You do the reader a favor if you get to the 'why do you care' part immediately, because in fact it may turn out that they don't. Documentation eventually turns into a data warehouse. There's so much of it and you can't keep it straight, so some memorable fraction of the time, going to a Wiki page or your bookmarks or - god forbid - browser history. It's basically a fishing expedition. You know that there's a thing that did X, but you don't remember which thing it was (and code names make that basically impossible), so you're just going to scan a bunch of them until you find the right one. If every page is like those cooking recipes that are held hostage by the life story of the creator, you're going to get pretty grumpy. Landing pages remind me a lot of this, because I've looked at twenty tools and I can't remember which one is for Postgres backups and which one is for Javascript minification. No, this one is for JSON. Next tab.
- atatatat 5y ago
  > You do the reader a favor if you get to the 'why do you care' part immediately, because in fact it may turn out that they don't. Here's why the web is a mess: We've turned it over to Google, through search, and Google penalizes sites' rankings in search results for having Chrome users leave if they read the first line and realize the site or service isn't for them. After all — your site is less engaging than the site that most users ended up on — right?!
  - hinkley 5y ago
    Perverse incentives. Also I don't know about you, but when I'm researching something I open a new window, and I middle click all the reasonable looking links on the search page. My time with that tab open has nothing to do with that tab. It's mostly to do with the tabs chronologically before them, and whether I see something shiny that distracts me.

ollymeakings 5y ago

You watched the video so you know at 1 minute in I say how important it is to simply tell people what you actually do. I also advocate for plain language and showing the product not just talking about it.

fluidcruft 5y ago
Yeah, I saw that but still. It starts off with 1-on-1 meetings with managers and employees but then I guess it's actually just some scheduled survey like a weekly qualtrics to /dev/null that admin pushes at us already or whatever. Finally. That's what I got from that. I guess what I would say is that the pop.work* landing page seems to want to sell itself as scratching an itch or solving a problem, but doesn't tell us what that itch or problem is or even show us how it solves it. It's just vague and no details (which is a major red flag about a landing page for me personally). *lots of alternate "popwork" out there and you don't even link it or anything so I had to google text from the landing page in the video to find what and where it even was or if they'd completely pivoted to a different product (popwork.com)
- onlyfortoday2 5y ago
  but still what? stop moaning LOL

sosborn 5y ago

My theory: the person in charge of a landing page doesn't want people bouncing off the site from the page they control (don't want the metrics to look bad!), so they tend to make it opaque to encourage click throughs. It doesn't matter what the best user experience is because they don't get measured on that. They get measured on bounce rate.

hinkley 5y ago

As a developer I've had to pound into people's heads that as the company grows, very few things we have worked on rank as 'special' for more than a little bit. You do the reader a favor if you get to the 'why do you care' part immediately, because in fact it may turn out that they don't. Documentation eventually turns into a data warehouse. There's so much of it and you can't keep it straight, so some memorable fraction of the time, going to a Wiki page or your bookmarks or - god forbid - browser history. It's basically a fishing expedition. You know that there's a thing that did X, but you don't remember which thing it was (and code names make that basically impossible), so you're just going to scan a bunch of them until you find the right one. If every page is like those cooking recipes that are held hostage by the life story of the creator, you're going to get pretty grumpy. Landing pages remind me a lot of this, because I've looked at twenty tools and I can't remember which one is for Postgres backups and which one is for Javascript minification. No, this one is for JSON. Next tab.

atatatat 5y ago
> You do the reader a favor if you get to the 'why do you care' part immediately, because in fact it may turn out that they don't. Here's why the web is a mess: We've turned it over to Google, through search, and Google penalizes sites' rankings in search results for having Chrome users leave if they read the first line and realize the site or service isn't for them. After all — your site is less engaging than the site that most users ended up on — right?!
- hinkley 5y ago
  Perverse incentives. Also I don't know about you, but when I'm researching something I open a new window, and I middle click all the reasonable looking links on the search page. My time with that tab open has nothing to do with that tab. It's mostly to do with the tabs chronologically before them, and whether I see something shiny that distracts me.