I downloaded this application a few weeks ago, and I had such high hopes. Connecting to people based on interests is such a great idea. I think it's a significant reason that Reddit is so strong, and I would love to see a product take it to a deeper level (multi-interest connections).
I was immediately disappointed by hello. The pre-defined interests are limiting and the presentation is nothing more than an instagram feed. Over a period of days, people were adding me as connections, and I had no idea why. None of it made any sense. When I log into the app, all I saw was random content completely unrelated to any interest at all.
This isn't about connecting based on interests. It's about being bored and needing instant gratification from notifications.
I take issue with the current 'standard' design, but only indirectly. I feel like giant home screens give companies the freedom to create a great looking webpage without any actual content - like a giant landing page. Since they all look the same, it's easy to compare and contrast.
I can recall a number of times scrolling through the entire home page for a company, only to still be confused about what the product actually does. I see a huge banner image, coordinating colors, tons of whitespace, very high-level text content...but little that says, "Our product will specifically do this, that, and the next for you!". I have to click around to find that out. By that time, I'm quite annoyed, and I'm not sure if your product is worth my effort.
Maybe my expectations of a home page are wrong though.
"I can recall a number of times scrolling through the entire home page for a company, only to still be confused about what the product actually does."
This seems to be a major problem lately with startups, especially ones promoted on YC. The home page is often one big image with a little vague text and a "sign up" button. Half the time you can't even tell if it's a shipping product, or much about what it does.
There are people who will click on anything, so this strategy looks, at first, like it's working. ("We have a zillion users and signups! We're ready for another financing round!") As the clickbait advertising industry has discovered, the click on everything crowd does not buy much. Most clicks come from about 10% of users, and they're not the users with money.
Me too. If the company is notable enough to have a Wikipedia page, usually the article's first paragraph tells you what you want to know of the company much better than its landing and About page.
When it comes to 'landing pages' (where describing the purpose of a company or product is the goal), I think the problem is primarily that it's just really hard to do right, content-wise. The visual design is at most a secondary problem.
A more general-purpose home page has it's challenges, of course, but often it's really just about showing something pretty and guiding users to pages such as 'pricing', 'buy/shop', 'contact', 'about us', etc.
A landing page, on the other hand, is basically the same as creating an ad or a commercial. You have a limited time to 'sell' something, and the fact that you need a page for it means that it's not immediately obvious what you're selling. You have to write ad copy, consider the visuals, target audience, selling points, etc. This is much more difficult than just having a few pages that do very specific things, and a home page that points to them.
Finding out what they do is a fairly unusual need though, right? When I look up a company website (rarely) I'm not looking to find out what they do, typically. My use cases are something like: I want to order something, I want info on a specific product they sell, I want support for something that has gone wrong, or rarely I may be looking for info on working there. I typically know what they do before going to their site, otherwise I wouldn't be there in the first place.
In fairness though, whilst people's needs when visiting a company homepage vary, they're almost never "admire almost-full-screen header image, read bullet points beneath 3 icons selected more for layout purposes than because they convey the most useful information" which is what the design trend discussed in the article optimises for.
A side effect of the current design trend is that navigating to a specific piece of information, or seeing what's changed usually takes another click or a lot more scrolling precisely because the actual products and support contacts are relegated to a lower priority than the full screen "We make software (and have good taste in stock photos)" message.
The 8:00pm bug is why I had volunteered to transition into project management at my job. Actually, I kind of just took on the job informally. I balanced a ratio of coding/project management until I wasn't really coding anymore.
I'm not sure what entices a developer into pursuing management. As the above post pointed out, they didn't see a viable career path. I'm going to guess another reason is that many are fed up with how things are currently being done at their workplace, and they feel they can do a much better job than their current manager. This was my case.
Maybe the next statement is a little naive, but if you want to make things better, than just do it. Insert yourself wherever possible. Learn what you need to learn. If you end up hating it, at least you tried. It's a lot of effort to support yourself, but it can be well worth it. For me, I was able to introduce a Wagile workflow for our team, which had dramatic effects in just a month. I'm now actually starting to do product work as well as transition everyone into a full Agile approach.
I was immediately disappointed by hello. The pre-defined interests are limiting and the presentation is nothing more than an instagram feed. Over a period of days, people were adding me as connections, and I had no idea why. None of it made any sense. When I log into the app, all I saw was random content completely unrelated to any interest at all.
This isn't about connecting based on interests. It's about being bored and needing instant gratification from notifications.