It looks more like a concept than an actual new homepage, but it's live for me. About does a lot of A/B testing. So, you might not see it unless you clear your cookies.
Some thoughts:
- New tagline: Guidance, not Guesswork. The design does nothing to reinforce that.
- I still don't know what About is from this homepage. Is it a search engine?
- The Guide concept of passionate enthusiast experts is lost. (Guides are About's content developers. Their job is to be a Guide to the Web for that specific topic like a Zagat is for restaurants.)
- Navigation is lost.
Having said that, I've spoken with Jennie about a minimalist concept for homepages before. I think there's merit somewhere in there. The homepage is most usually entered by loyal visitors through direct navigation or is the second page visited after someone comes in from a search engine to an article page that doesn't meet their needs. Unfortunately, that page tends to be a cluttered and unfocused representation of our brands.
Could a minimalist design focused on common needs succeed?
5 Comments:
Maybe what we could explore is a brand focused home page which by nature would be less cluttered. The home page could serve the dual purpose of reinforcing the site brand and benefits to the user whether they entered the site at the home page or from an article, (especially if, as in Prescott's example, an article did not fulfill the user's needs.)
Separating the benefit and giving it room to breathe might have a greater impact on the user as too often our pitches are surrounded by a lot of content/ vendor ads and call-outs. Maybe all of those elements suffer in that environment?
--start about.com crit--
New new tagline: Guesswork, not Guidance.
I'm still guessing what sits behind those left and right arrows on the homepage. Do they auto-populate? How is the content related to me? Are they the latest topics put out by the people from About? Hmmm...
If I was to make some rearrangements, I would have given the search bar more prominence than that of the suggested topics About.com plans to help me out with.
In doing so, I think the workflow to this site would make more sense.
1) Run a search on a topic
2) The site then pulls in the term you searched for and suggests other items you might be interested in the "We'll Help You" area... yes, Amazon-style. Ignore this if they already plan on doing this...
Right now, the order is just mind boggling.
--end about.com crit--
--re: to question on minimalism --
Google. The concept and execution is strong, clear cut, and to the point. All meat. No fat.
And as for minimalism and our sites, I think there's a need for a diet plan.
There's some stuff that just doesn't work anymore, but we still use them with the assumption that people still might find them useful. While we have these specific products on our sites, we introduce new products and now we have conflicting content fighting for the user's attention even if it's not really all that relevant to the user.
Anyways, perhaps something better will come with Drupal. :)
i love this homepage. although it's not revolutionary and i see a lot of sites trending this way, i think it was really brave of about.com to make such a bold move. and even though the homepage has been streamlined, i don't think it's any less intuitive to navigate.
@gene: I'd love to put our homepages on a diet. Perhaps we could talk to the OADM's about what's working and what isn't?
@jennie: I love that you loved it when I panned it. I agree it was bold, and I plan to ask my friends over there how it's working out for them.
@gene: I agree on the search placement, except that I know that they don't want to be thought of as a search engine. (or didn't use to)
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