The homepage impact
For a second let us pretend that Twitter and friendfeed are dead even when it comes to features. You are a visitor who is trying to see what the geek hype is with these sites and this is what you see:
Which one seems more appealing? Which one gets to the gist of what you are doing on the site? Which one would you sign up for?
And hell I don’t even like the Twitter homepage that much, but come on Friendfeed, it is like you aren’t even trying. Don’t hire the designer taking CC classes in Photoshop and learning about reflection and gradients. Get one of your smart engineers who can’t even design and doesn’t own Photoshop and tell him just to make something easy.
Twitter just gives the appearance of being a more fun place to be. Facebook is clean like Friendfeed, but it has a tighter design. A more professional feeling. Friendfeed is stuck in the design ghetto trying to look appealing, but also easy.
Yes, sometimes it just comes down to your features. Yes, many sites excel in spite of their design. When I go to a site I don’t expect design gallery quality, but I also don’t want to run away. I have visited Friendfeed many times since it launched and have maybe used it once. I just can’t do it with the design they have. Sorry guys.
Okay now you can go back to realizing the world isn’t fair and all sites aren’t created equal.
2 Responses
John Phillips / 04.13.09
Yeah I 100% agree. The FriendFeed homepage is awful. Considering that you’d want to try and sell [potential] users on signing up, they do a very poor job. They could find a freelance designer to do that for low cost.
Paul Scrivens / 04.13.09
From what I have been reading they have a ton of cool features and do a lot of interesting things, but they do a very poor job of selling users on what they do.
If they want to stay with the geek crowd I see no reason in breaking what they already have, but I think for them to hit mainstream they have to think about some changes.
Then again I don’t run a million user site so what do I know?