New corporate homepage

We put up a new homepage today. A lot of the content has been refreshed to better reflect the way we've been doing business lately: focusing on specific business solutions vs. a swiss army knife approach and using a delivery methodology as the basis for working with our clients. We also have tried to better describe how our software can be deployed and what features it has to continue to differentiate ourselves from our competition.

You can click to the site and have a look yourself, but what I wanted to really discuss in this post is a great testing utility called Five Second Test one of our friends at GrubHub told us about. Basically you take a screenshot of your draft design and it gets put in front of people for 5 seconds. You can either ask them to click on the things they notice the most in those 5 seconds, or just view the design, then write everything they remember after the 5 seconds.



The couple rounds of testing we did were certainly illuminating. For example, we know the two most important things on our site are driving people to set up pilots and reading about our business solutions. As you can see on the click map, they got noticed, but only after we made the buttons opaque vs. translucent. The translucency looked cooler but function needed to follow form in this case. We also learned people were clicking on things we hadn't made linkable. In response, we made sure to eliminate all those dead zones so every major element goes to something.

One aspect of the design I'm still concerned about is the link to login or sign up to our public marketplace. We used to have a sticky with some handwriting on it that people complained they missed when on our site. This time I used the "highlight color" in our palette to help it stand out against the darker background, but people still didn't notice it as much as I would have liked in our testing. Fortunately Five Second Testing makes it really easy to go through a number of iterations and get feedback in minutes which we'll surely continue to do.

If you get a chance, have a look at the new site and let us know what you think. We even welcome you to stay longer than 5 seconds.

Oh and be sure to click on the paper fold in the upper right!