Landing Page Advice?
https://mercuryplatform.com is the landing page for the MVP of our platform. It isn't terribly detailed and we are still building out our platform, but are now taking beta users so we want it to be a good landing page while we gear up for launching the product.
We are looking for any advice on making it better and of course if you consult or otherwise would like to be part of our beta program, let me know!
Thanks in advance for your input and/or interest!
It does the job but looks a bit outdated, like designed in the 2000-2005 era.
There are way too many different fonts being used.
I miss a navigation topbar with buttons.
Also note that the laptop slideshow controls are very buggy (latest Chrome @W10).
I went back and forth on a few of these things. So, thanks for the input. That's weird with the slideshow, I use the same setup (chrome/W10) and it works fine for me...I've been considering changing that anyway so maybe a good thing to look more seriously at changing.
I would use some accent color different from white/black/gray palette. In the current state it looks kind of depressive :)
Thanks! That makes a lot of sense and I'll be working on that soon :)
What's the difference with tools like Clubhouse or Basecamp? I don't like the design of the website to be honest. Especially the UI of the app. Looks like you could use a designer.
There is different permission-based visibility and movement of items for users and the communication is sequesters to the stage of the cycle the item is in. The trouble with the other options out there is they are great for the technical team, but non-technical (especially clients of freelancers/firms) tend to get confused and end up changing requirements, defining poor requirements, not knowing where they are in the cycle, etc.. Also, firms/freelancers end up using (confirmed through our surveying of firms/freelancers) multiple different tools for their internal communication and tracking and their client-facing communication and tracking (if there is any).
On the design, we def. agree, but we've been spending more time on the actual functionality for the MVP but do plan to get a designer once we are out of MVP.
Thanks for the input!
"There is different permission-based visibility and movement of items for users and the communication is sequesters to the stage of the cycle the item is in."
Most tools have this same feature (especially Basecamp).
"The trouble with the other options out there is they are great for the technical team, but non-technical (especially clients of freelancers/firms) tend to get confused and end up changing requirements, defining poor requirements, not knowing where they are in the cycle"
Almost all teams/freelancers I know use some sort of tool to show a clear roadmap to their customers of where they are at. That certainly doesn't help with clients that change requirements or when requirements are poorly defined. I wonder what your tool does differently since just displaying the roadmap doesn't seem to be enough.
Also, another concern I have is that some times technical tasks take more time than expected or are hard to explain in a story. In those cases, you could end up with a technical team that needs to use a different tool to keep track of their internal communication. I wonder how that would affect your platform (I understand that it tries to be a single source of truth).
"Also, firms/freelancers end up using (confirmed through our surveying of firms/freelancers) multiple different tools for their internal communication and tracking and their client-facing communication and tracking (if there is any)."
I wouldn't trust any tool that tells me that it will replace all the tools I use. It's just not going to happen. Maybe your value is somewhere else? Or needs to be phrased differently?
Also, are you using the tool internally? I found that for me that was the best thing when it came to improving it. As a user, you see a lot of things some times.
Thanks for the detailed reply. Yes, we are spinning this out of a dev. firm that I was CEO of and customers and our dev. partners (we outsourced the actual development) liked a lot.
What our tool does differently is make it impossible for clients to change specs (they don't have the ability to change or even see the specs while they are worked on, just a general overview). Also, it sets up an agile-like system that clients understand and have control over (they approve things and start sprints), but also makes sure all the collateral is there such as designs etc.. when they are moving forward. It will take some input from the dev. team, but it was setup to be clear to non-technical users, in broad strokes, what is needed in the first place and to set up more recurring (agile) development than the waterfall version that is common enough in the outsourcing world.
It also has different views for only the technical team, only the client, only design, etc.. That is for what you suggest, sometimes you need that in order to not overwhelm the client, but still get all the details to development so the right things are developed.
We def. will be integrating in the future with dev. tools and other platforms because we agree that people won't change, but you have to start somewhere, you know?
I'm also not explaining everything because using it is really the best way to deal with it and we are still developing the MVP of this version (the one we used was for our team only and needs some changing for the true SaaS version we'll be launching here soon.
Thanks again for the replies and feel free to sign up to try it out for yourself, we'd love to have someone with good opinions on our early versions so we can make something that helps everyone.
It looks OK; better than average. I have to admin, to me it sort of looks like just sales platform or marketing for your outsourcing management services. And, because you're using swim lanes in your screenshots I immediately think of Trello and similar apps so my first thought is "what makes this different or better than those".
It's also worth noting that a few of your screenshots have a "sprit lane", which I assume is supposed to be sprint.
Not sure if that helps but hope it does,
It does help, thanks! We don't offer outsourcing services and I am using our mockups for the pictures so thanks for catching the misspelling of "sprint" (oops).
I get why it seems like Trello from looking at it, there is an element of that in it, but it also incorporates slack-ish functionality along with other products and ultimately is aiming to help outsourcing firms/freelancers (to start) communicate with their non-technical clients and really act as a "home" so anyone on the team (even outside of outsourcing use-cases) can find the status of any task quickly and easily.
People will use their own tools, but Mercury will act as THE place to go for whole-team communication & coordination instead of using tons of other tools.
Therefore, seeing "trello" and "sales" makes a ton of sense and kind of is what we are after (along with other things that aren't as easy to communicate in mere images.
Thanks again for the input it will help us a lot!
Hey, the landing page looks pretty good!
In the future or if you still are looking for quality feedback on your designs I'd love to help you out! I recently started a design feedback website called Pastryy, we can provide quality feedback on your logos, websites and mobile app designs.
You can check us out here: www.Pastryy.com
Here's a sample of our feedback as well: https://www.notion.so/saucedesigns/Ugenly-Feedback-a7639dc9016b4aa084a2831762aed34d