The app is far to feature rich for casual comments and a five-minute look to reveal anything. On first glance the top page has way too much distracting clutter and not information hierarchy to guide the user through it. Visual flow is poor.
Even the relatively easy to spot Signup and Tour buttons are adrift in "tag soup."
Clicking "Team" in the tag cloud takes you to the rather unanticipated Features Roadmap. Then clicking "Management" takes you to ....the same Features Roadmap page. Poor "information scent."
The Freature Roadmap is more of the same, an uninformative morass of internally-directed technobabble. Great if you were building the app, useless if you were looking for something about Teams or Management from the perspective of someone trying to learn why they shouldn't use something else -- of which there is plenty. Again, the page is set in tiny type, elements are shotgunned onto the page without rhyme, reason or a target user in mind.
All this leaves me less than compelled to signup or take the tour. Since I am a glutton for user abuse, I went and took the tour anyway. The tour is fair, a full step above the site up until now. It's more a collection of screenshots than a real tour that explains to the user why they should signup.
For examples you should check out, I would like to introduce you to the page layout for
Basecamp. Unlike Comindwork, this page is for a target user and aids that user with real words
and sentences.
Teamspace has also figured out the sentence trick. At this point I would like to introduce you to more innovations: Headlines, subheads, paragraphs and an overall hierarchy to page layout which aids readability.
Check out project.net, who takes the whole sentence thing up a level with copy that imagines a reader with better things to do than figure them out...
Quote:
The Project.net Experience puts that idea into the real world. We've taken examples of how our customers are using Project.net and created a scenario where people at various levels in a Global 2000 corporation use Project.net to track, manage and collaborate on a wide range of common (but vital) projects involving both internal and external resources.
Check out The Project.net Experience — you'll find some familiar people using Project.net to solve some familiar problems.
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Finally check out what differentiates a bunch of screeenshots from
a real tour our application section. I'm no fan of Flash, but then this could have been done without flash. The point is not the tool, it's the informative use-directed content. Note it lays out real project team members working through a scenario.
The site was designed in a user and competitive vacuum. In all the site needs a user test which will lead to a design makeover. The take-a-tour section should be redesigned with some purpose in mind, say getting a visitor to take the step of becoming a user. To that end you would develop a user story and use screen shots to walk the visitor through the scenario. Within the context of an actual project, you would then place callouts on top of the screenshots to explain user benefits -- not features.
You need to hire a designer -- not a programmer who scoffs at designers - a real designer. You need to hire a copywriter -- not a typist a
writer.
Further Reading:
Using Wireframe Prototypes to Improve Visual Flow and Web Page Layout
Storyboards, Scenarios, Design Personas
Information Foraging: Why Google Makes People Leave Your Site Faster
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