I’d rather be building out features, but it looks like I need to revisit the Product Pounce landing page design sooner than later. This wasn’t completely unexpected since I’ve been adding more features to the site and want to showcase them right off the bat. The current homepage is barebones at best; it is designed to say what we do and how simply how it works. As of right now, some of that content is out of date.
Layout
The most obvious difference is internal pages, they now have a more Pinterest’esque flow to them. So both the screenshots and the intro video show incorrect content.
Features
Quick Add
I’ve also added a “quick add” feature where you can just paste the URL to the main page and if we have default pricing rules for that site, we’ll create it on the spot. It doesn’t sound like much, but I find myself using that method more than anything else.
Watch It! Button
The original version made no distinction between default supported and regular sites. If it was supported by default, the bookmarklet would just redirect back to Product Pounce and create the site. The new version is more intelligent where it displays the supported values and if you wanted to watch something else, you can still do that right from the product page. It’s a pretty big different and I think a great feature.
Public Product Watches
The feature that actually caused me to shift focus to the landing page design was the sharing of Product Watches. With this new update, more people can get an idea of what’s hot and clone the Product Watch. It takes a page from the “show, don’t tell” playbook. I want to show people what is being watched and that they too can get notified when it goes on sale. The issues I ran into was there was no seamless way for me to demonstrate this on the current homepage. Everywhere I placed it just felt cumbersome and not natural.
My options were pretty clear:
- Landing page design
- Stick it wherever I can
- Do nothing
Landing Page Design
This is a large effort and even though it was on my backlog, it certainly wasn’t scheduled for any sprint, let alone a release. I have a decent amount of content and a fairly clear picture of what I want to say so the design aspect is where I need to focus.
Stick it wherever I can
I tried this and it doesn’t feel right. The page feels forced and muddled. Even though it sounds like it’s better than doing nothing, I think it has a negative effect.
Do Nothing
This is simple, I’ve already done it! However, this doesn’t further my ultimate goal which is to showcase the strength and value of Product Pounce and this certainly doesn’t feed into that.
tl;dr: Mo’ features mo’ design problems opportunities. Even though the homepage wasn’t due for a redesign, in order to further the upfront value add of Product Pounce, it needs to get done sooner than later.