It's a terrible design, I'd agree with you there. Money poorly spent. In your examples mentioned though, I'd imagine Skype and Apple spend a lot on web design (by design I don't just mean pretty skins, I'm including IA and user-testing). So it's not really a matter of too much money, just poor decision making and advice
TerenceEden
· 10 months ago
I love my Spinvox account... but that site. BLEUGH!
It takes ages to load (and I'm on a very fat pipe with a pretty fast laptop). I clicked on a link and - I kid you not - it spent a minute flipping through every page in the "comic" to get me there.
The link? "Get Spinvox". The link which, I would have thought, allows customers to give them money. Putting barriers between yourself and your customers' wallets is not smart.
To make it worse, there's no way I could find of getting back to the main menu! I've tried clicking the edges of the pages, tried dragging, nothing. I ended up hitting refresh in order to get back to the index.
Don't get me wrong, it looks gorgeous. And very expensive. Very slick. The sort of thing I imagine a naive Venture Capitalist would fall for.
But in terms of keeping existing customers happy - or helping new people sign up....
jamesgpearce
· 10 months ago
No (voice-based) accessibility, and no mobile support? Surely this has to be some sort of deliberate irony.
I also thought we'd seen the end of unbookmarkable, non-portable, SEO-drops-like-a-stone, developed-world-only Flash sites.
But at the end of the day it's designed to be jaw-dropping brochure-ware. On this count it succeeds. I really like the idea, the visuals, and the story it tells.
In other words: love the end, shame about the means :-)
Paul Walsh
· 10 months ago
It's that bad I'm wondering if it's done for some kind of publicity stunt - i.e. to attract comments to attract new visitors. All of the technical points mentioned already, are well documented and understood by half-brained designers. Who designed it?
Dave Withnall
· 10 months ago
Urggh the new spinvox site takes way too long to load, and once it does load, is really laggy!!
Bring back the old HTML site, or at least give an option to view the site similar to how it was!!
ollysk2
· 10 months ago
The biggest issue I have is that it's 'form' over 'function'. It's a very cool design, but is resource intensive to the point of me saying 'pass'.
Dan Field
· 10 months ago
Nope, don't like it.
Its all very nice, clever design and everything but very much year 2000... a flash site with a click here to skip button?
Where is the usability of the site? There looks like they have not put much thought into how their customers (And potential customers) will use the site.
Coming to the site as someone who doesn't use spinvox, I was imedately put off their service when I clicked "Get Spinvox" and had to wait whilst the design flicked through all the pages.
They sell a product, not a comic book! Looks like the design team have taken over at spinvox.
Would be very interested to know just how badly their sign-up rate has dropped today.
Dev
· 10 months ago
Someone let a creative run away with themselves on this one. It's dreadful! I love the comic book styling - but a pure Flash website? With an intro screen?? Is it the 1990s all over again??!?!
On top of the high bandwidth demands, clunky animation, fuzzy and poorly rendered video and massive usability and accessibility issues....the site is seriously borked from an SEO point of view. 55/100 according to Website Grader.
If I was the client on this one I'd have it pulled immediately and revert to the old HTML site.
Techn0tic
· 10 months ago
I like it, the site demands attention in the face of so many "me too" lookalike app sites. The main problem I can see with it is that it's a great sales pitch but very little use to current users of the service. I think all it needs is a fork in the road right at the start so that new users can get the super-duper comic site whilst current users can access support or other functions that are important to them. Instead of: "about", "screenshots", "feature list", "yawn..."; this is a web service site that screams "LOOK AT ME!, I'M DIFFERENT!"
I wouldn't be surprised if the concept was designed to stimulate a discussion. Regardless whether the feedback is good or bad, it must be creating plenty of traffic for Spinvox.
Kat (IAmKat)
· 10 months ago
I hate it, I'm working on a latop with 3G dongle, the site is slow to load (minutes not seconds) once you finally skip the intro and get into the site the cartoon format is cheesy and not in keeping with something I often point out to others as a potential corporate support tool.
It's a shame because it's a good product but I think the new site will actually put new users off rather than attract them.
Gezd
· 10 months ago
Hmm - undecided. I like the decision to dare to be different. However the time it takes to load IS off-putting.
Also it's difficult to navigate. This could be easily solved with a nav menu for the "chapters". It's not immediately clear that you need to click the top outside edge of the page to go forward and back. I know a curly edge is a bit of a cliche, but some indication of how to turn the page would be useful. And there should be a HTML version for mobile browsers.
Once these teething problems are sorted I think it will be fine.
Matt
· 10 months ago
As twittered - utterly horrible - if you hadn't blogged that the company sold mobile products I wouldn't have guessed as I was too busy clicking the back button to get back here. The pageflip thing gave me a headache and It conforms to most of the worlds worst usability practices. I hope they didn't pay a lot because every penny has been wasted.
RichardAlvin
· 10 months ago
I love Spinvox and whilst i like the idea of what can only be described a nice and highly expensive piece of flash intro this is just wrong wrong wrong.
You won't be able to view this on a mobile and also don't Spinvox run the risk of being shafted by those pesky google bots too having this.
If i were Spinvox i'd go back to html and have this video as a 'click here to watch our funky video' type thing.
Emilicon
· 10 months ago
I'm only bothering to comment because I ♥ the Spinvox voice-to-text services so much and am always promoting them to busy friends.
The site usability issues aren't new, one friend asked me to help them navigate through the site ~2 weeks ago -- they wished to sign up for a voicemail account & didn't need any further justification, were ready to go and would be the type to promote it to others -- It took me around 10mins to find an appropriate page, and when the request was submitted we received nothing further so I decided to follow-up through Spinvox people instead. I wondered if Spinvox was trying to dissuade customers for voicemail until they finalised voicemail partnership arrangements/similar as it really did seem as if they were going out of their way to deter business with the site design - no link on the homepage linked to a simple 'sign up here for voicemail services'.
On reading about the re-design today I hoped this might have been fixed, but it's worse - still difficult to find the sign-up pages, pretty for investors, but flash, what?!? (except for cute flash games of course, they're brilliant), it's still so difficult to navigate -- anyway, on the plus side, @whatleydude shared a sign-up link through Twitter today, so if you'd like to sign-up or forward to friends the best link to use, that may now work, is the Spinvox Free Trial link.
There are some fantastic people working at Spinvox, including experts in human factors & usability, so this issue isn't about clueless people in the company, this seems to be about the decision-makers choosing poorly (though it may make perfect sense from an investment perspective?).
Paul Walsh
· 10 months ago
"experts in human factors & usability" either they don't, or they should be fired - either because they don't know what they're doing or because management don't care for what they have to say.
There's no way in the world, that any form of performance, user testing or accessibility compliance testing was performed on this site.
Emilicon
· 10 months ago
Hey Paul - I don't know those involved in the site design, people change roles and use other skills & it's not a tiny company - I'm giving my feedback about the site design to anyone I can including to your blog as I think you've made a good point. If you get a chance to talk to their management you'll find out who's making their decisions and know far more than I do...
Robert
· 10 months ago
If I didn't already use Spinvox, I wouldn't get past the first page on their site. It's everything a web site shouldn't be. :-(
All Comments
It takes ages to load (and I'm on a very fat pipe with a pretty fast laptop). I clicked on a link and - I kid you not - it spent a minute flipping through every page in the "comic" to get me there.
The link? "Get Spinvox". The link which, I would have thought, allows customers to give them money. Putting barriers between yourself and your customers' wallets is not smart.
To make it worse, there's no way I could find of getting back to the main menu! I've tried clicking the edges of the pages, tried dragging, nothing. I ended up hitting refresh in order to get back to the index.
Don't get me wrong, it looks gorgeous. And very expensive. Very slick. The sort of thing I imagine a naive Venture Capitalist would fall for.
But in terms of keeping existing customers happy - or helping new people sign up....
I also thought we'd seen the end of unbookmarkable, non-portable, SEO-drops-like-a-stone, developed-world-only Flash sites.
But at the end of the day it's designed to be jaw-dropping brochure-ware. On this count it succeeds. I really like the idea, the visuals, and the story it tells.
In other words: love the end, shame about the means :-)
Bring back the old HTML site, or at least give an option to view the site similar to how it was!!
Its all very nice, clever design and everything but very much year 2000... a flash site with a click here to skip button?
Where is the usability of the site? There looks like they have not put much thought into how their customers (And potential customers) will use the site.
Coming to the site as someone who doesn't use spinvox, I was imedately put off their service when I clicked "Get Spinvox" and had to wait whilst the design flicked through all the pages.
They sell a product, not a comic book! Looks like the design team have taken over at spinvox.
Would be very interested to know just how badly their sign-up rate has dropped today.
On top of the high bandwidth demands, clunky animation, fuzzy and poorly rendered video and massive usability and accessibility issues....the site is seriously borked from an SEO point of view. 55/100 according to Website Grader.
If I was the client on this one I'd have it pulled immediately and revert to the old HTML site.
Instead of: "about", "screenshots", "feature list", "yawn..."; this is a web service site that screams "LOOK AT ME!, I'M DIFFERENT!"
I wouldn't be surprised if the concept was designed to stimulate a discussion. Regardless whether the feedback is good or bad, it must be creating plenty of traffic for Spinvox.
It's a shame because it's a good product but I think the new site will actually put new users off rather than attract them.
Also it's difficult to navigate. This could be easily solved with a nav menu for the "chapters". It's not immediately clear that you need to click the top outside edge of the page to go forward and back. I know a curly edge is a bit of a cliche, but some indication of how to turn the page would be useful. And there should be a HTML version for mobile browsers.
Once these teething problems are sorted I think it will be fine.
You won't be able to view this on a mobile and also don't Spinvox run the risk of being shafted by those pesky google bots too having this.
If i were Spinvox i'd go back to html and have this video as a 'click here to watch our funky video' type thing.
The site usability issues aren't new, one friend asked me to help them navigate through the site ~2 weeks ago -- they wished to sign up for a voicemail account & didn't need any further justification, were ready to go and would be the type to promote it to others -- It took me around 10mins to find an appropriate page, and when the request was submitted we received nothing further so I decided to follow-up through Spinvox people instead. I wondered if Spinvox was trying to dissuade customers for voicemail until they finalised voicemail partnership arrangements/similar as it really did seem as if they were going out of their way to deter business with the site design - no link on the homepage linked to a simple 'sign up here for voicemail services'.
On reading about the re-design today I hoped this might have been fixed, but it's worse - still difficult to find the sign-up pages, pretty for investors, but flash, what?!? (except for cute flash games of course, they're brilliant), it's still so difficult to navigate -- anyway, on the plus side, @whatleydude shared a sign-up link through Twitter today, so if you'd like to sign-up or forward to friends the best link to use, that may now work, is the Spinvox Free Trial link.
There are some fantastic people working at Spinvox, including experts in human factors & usability, so this issue isn't about clueless people in the company, this seems to be about the decision-makers choosing poorly (though it may make perfect sense from an investment perspective?).
There's no way in the world, that any form of performance, user testing or accessibility compliance testing was performed on this site.