I actually think it's not respectful of visitors' time to only describe your site in a video. I know, it's only 30 seconds, but that's about 25 seconds longer than it takes me to read a short text description. And if I need to find my headphones, it's not 30 seconds anymore.
Enthusiastically seconded. Nothing makes me hit the back button faster on a startup/app website than a mostly-empty page with a video on it. Especially when the video is just a close-up of somebody's face talking, i.e. there's nothing that requires a video to demonstrate.
I'm curious if videos really do scare people away. If you take a look at dropbox and cloudflare they do a really good job at using a video to demonstrate their product. Now taking into consideration the size of dropbox's and cloudflare's users, I'm more inclined to the idea that "videos work".
It's not that videos scare people away, but they need to be augmented. Would Dropbox convert better if they had descriptive text on their home page, or at least made the features link more visible than the one in the footer? We'll never know unless Dropbox tests it and publishes the results.
When I think of software sold to businesses, I'm reminded of the place I used to work where the president had the IT department disable the speakers on all new PC's. He didn't want employees sitting around watching videos or listening to music on company time. It may be hard to fathom for some people, but there are offices where playing videos (even demos) is frowned upon - especially in a cube farm.
If you want to make conversions, think of all the barriers between you and the sale, and start knocking them down one by one. Making your products key features readable and crawl-able for search engines is an easy one.
As someone from the affiliate space where EVERYTHING gets splittested I can tell you that videos generally own all other forms of website content when trying to get the user to do something (download, signup, buy).
>Would Dropbox convert better if they had descriptive text on their home page, or at least made the features link more visible than the one in the footer? We'll never know unless Dropbox tests it and publishes the results.
They don't scare me. I just don't bother watching them if I don't know what will be explained in them beforehand. I am a quick reader, but I cannot accelerate your video.
If video is your only explanation, I'll never come back.
We have a text description at http://getliveloop.com but to tell you the truth, the video is the easiest, and dare I say, quickest way to understand what we do. The reason we have the text is that our target users are PowerPoint users, who often work in settings where they cannot listen to audio.
Obviously a site should have both text and video but I don't blame anyone who does the video first.
Unless they just changed it, they seem to have snappy taglines that explain it well already:
Liveloop is really real-time collaboration within Powerpoint
Collaborate in real-time, keystroke by keystroke, without ever leaving Office.
These aren't bad. I wonder if they have tested them with the target market.
I have sympathy. It's a hard concept to get across.
That said, it takes until 2:30 in the video before we see people collaborating on the same slide at the same time. And there might be a bit of meta-confusion because they're working on a presentation for "LiveLoop Zoo". I know that seems like a harmless self-reference, but I've seen people get tripped up on much easier ideas.
That seems a bit wrong. I wonder if, instead of a video where I have to press "play", we could have a silent animation that starts immediately on the home page. Show two cartoon figures typing into PowerPoint screens, with their changes reflected immediately. (And it's never bad to show human faces with emotions.)
Anyway, that sort of thing is hard, and they're to be commended for getting this far, my armchair criticism aside.
How about doing hallway usability testing? Show the page to people in the target market for five seconds and then ask them "what does this company do?" Five of these will tell you everything you need to know.
If you don't have a constant stream of fresh users walking through your offices, you can do something on http://www.usertesting.com/ .
A/B testing understanding might not be feasible, but in the end, they are trying to sell their plugin so A/B testing for signups or sales or something like sounds like a good correlation to understanding.
I don't disagree that the video is the easiest and quickest way for you. The point is that it's harder for many/most users than reading text. Think about it in terms of system requirements:
- Web page with text as the primary -> a browser
- Web page with video as the primary -> a browser, sound device, sound output device, absence of anything else using the sound device (this means I have to pause my music), etc.
More requirements -> fewer useful impressions. And again, what's wrong with writing? Even YC makes applicants send a (text) description of their plan. It should be a red flag if you cannot describe your business in a short text snippet.
Yes, I saw the page. I'm not sure how you test that the video is getting more responses, but could it be that this is the case because you don't have your one-sentence pitch in text on the site? This is the pitch from the video, which isn't on the home page:
Liveloop is a simple powerpoint plugin that lets everyone work on the document at the same time, seeing everyone else's changes as they type.
That alone could be why the video converts better: it tells (not shows) what you do in a way the text doesn't. To do a fair test, you'd need to have text materially similar to what's in the video.
> The reason we have the text is that our target users are PowerPoint users, who often work in settings where they cannot listen to audio.
You say a video is best, even though you also say that a video isn't best for your target audience?
Accessibility makes things better for everyone, not just those people who need it. If you'd approached this with accessibility in mind you'd have realised that a video was sub-optimal, and come up with some form of text. That (while not covering everything) would have been more helpful for more people. As can be seen from the comments here.
I did design it with accessibility in mind. There is a text description right under the video, and there are captions on the video itself. But neither of those change the fact that the video is the most compelling way to communicate what we're doing.
I agree completely. I can't remember how many times I clicked a link on HN, discovered that there was nothing but a video on that page, and just closed the tab. Text is great, pictures are OK, but a video? You just added unnecessary friction. There goes your conversion rate.
The difference is that Dropbox was a product everyone already understood the concept behind--nobody needed five paragraphs of text to understand "it syncs files"--but was sold entirely on the execution, and how much better that execution was than all the challengers who had failed to penetrate the space before it. And you really can't get execution from a speel.
To make a gaming analogy: you can effectively market a JRPG through commercials, because, in essence, what people are buying is the narrative. But you can't market Tetris in a commercial, because what's being bought there is the experience of gameplay. Some things can simply be described; other things can only be shown; and still others need to be played with.
I joined dropbox when I heard from a friend how well-designed it was. I then proceeded to sign up for it _despite_ my frustration at the video-only front page. I never did watch the video.
Not sure what's wrong with writing, but candyjapan.com without a video on the page converted at 0.5% and with video at 1.3%. Of course no reason not to have both video AND text.
Granted the contents in the video are not the same as the explanation text is, so might be attributable just to the difference in content. Or possibly just random chance (36 conversions 3784 visits).
Another way to say conversion went from 0.5% to 1.3% is to say visitors were over 2.5 times more likely to convert if there was video than if there wasn't. In those terms, random fluctuations seem less likely as the reason for the difference.
Yes, but it's just because it sounds different. IMO both the absolute and relative number of people lay in a range of what I would expect to be random fluctuations.
A substantial proportion of internet users are functionally illiterate.
If your website targets a mass audience, you will be dealing with a large proportion of users (probably about 15%) who have the reading skills of an eighth-grader or worse. They're the great invisible demographic in UX.
What's wrong with writing, anyway?