from Hacker News

YC Facelift: EXEC

by reason on 4/9/12, 2:38 PM with 87 comments

  • by ForrestN on 4/9/12, 6:33 PM

    I'm surprised by a lot of the response to this post for a couple of reasons.

    First, and very simply, the existing Exec design is conspicuously weak and unprofessional. It looks copy+pasted from a million other sites, but without anyone with a good eye to look it over and pull the disparate copied elements together. For all the negative feedback, there should be more acknowledgment that Kyro's decision does a far better job aesthetically and in terms of polish than what exists now.

    Second, when did marketing and design become conflated? Most of the criticism is about the approach the designer has taken to writing marketing copy and otherwise persuading people to sign up. Is that really the role of a designer? Maybe it is these days, but I think that means the role has now become a hybrid of two pretty unrelated disciplines.

    A great designer takes a sense of experience and branding and translates it into abstraction: color, form, rhythm, etc. Kyro has done a good job of this. The design, text aside, reads as high-end, serious, appealing to professionals, and most importantly like a solid company that is trustworthy and can deliver on its promises.

    A great copywriter or marketer is doing a totally different thing, trying to persuade people and get them to convert. From knowing some people who are pretty good at both things, I'm not convinced that these two roles should be turned into one. I think this is a vast improvement on design before I even analyze whether or not its a marketing copy improvement.

  • by tptacek on 4/9/12, 3:51 PM

    Isn't the "gold club" positioning counterproductive? How does it benefit EXEC to claim exclusivity? They're as-yet- unchallenged in their market. Their goal should be to broaden their base of customers as much as possible and establish the normalcy of their service; in other words, to give the kinds of people who do not have Hertz #1 Club Gold membership permission to give EXEC their money.

    This design does exactly the opposite. It suggests that EXEC is something I might pay attention to at approximately the same time as I start to consider time-sharing private jets.

    That aside: pitching entire redesigns over the HN transom is a great way to start a meaningful conversation about positioning and branding, so, do more of these.

  • by wdewind on 4/9/12, 3:49 PM

    The original EXEC page is much better.

    First, current tells me EXEC will do anything for $25/hr, yours tells me they will buy my groceries for $25/hr (cutting the mass appeal down IMMENSELY)

    Second, and much more importantly, EXEC's current design works within real constraints. For one thing, you mocked up all this social proof that likely does not exist for an early stage startup. That takes up about 50% of your design.

    There are some things you improve on (more frequent calls to the primary action etc.), but the problem with doing design like this is you end up focusing almost entirely on aesthetic stuff, as well as cookie cutter things you can plug into any site (ie: testimonials etc.), instead of the real task at hand. If you want to improve your design skills you have to get some real constraints. Design without constraints isn't.

  • by byalice on 4/9/12, 4:27 PM

    I like it. People who've commented before me seem to have very specific criticisms regarding how your design conveys brand but remember that this is a _redesign_, not an absolute final product to be shipped by the company. and by the way, this is way better than the current site. in the sense that it actually conveys a brand - whereas the original is far more neutral (thanks twitter bootstrap).

    functionally, I would try to establish more of a visual hierarchy as you go down the page - the yellow color accent throws me off as I go down and the path that my eye intuitively follows is all over the place.

    aesthetically, consider introducing a third accent color (maybe grey?) to round out the gold and white content you've got going on.

    nice job!

  • by JGuo on 4/9/12, 5:19 PM

    Well that's interesting... I redesigned the Exec splash page as well.

    http://dreamersofday.com/Exec-Redesign

    I like your color scheme and how you focused on convincing prospective customers that Exec is a trusted and vetted service.

  • by jaredstenquist on 4/9/12, 3:22 PM

    The new design idea is great. The lower hanging fruit for conversion is addressing the ~5s pageload time. I was left without graphics for nearly 4 seconds (10mbit duplex connection)

    http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/EJEPcYv2P/iamexec.com

    https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights#url=i...

    Also, what do we need SSL for on a landing page?

  • by Alex3917 on 4/9/12, 3:21 PM

    I don't like this redesign. Exec just launched, and they are still in the phase where they are trying to teach early adopters what the site is and what it can do for them. This doesn't do that.

    Just because something is pretty doesn't mean it's targeting the right group of people or telling the right story. I've gone through four rounds of revisions on the new web startup I'm doing in the last couple weeks for this reason. With every revision it's actually getting significantly uglier, but also more closely aligned with telling the story we want to tell to the users we see as our early adopters, so ultimately better.

    There's always time to make the website pretty later once you nail the story and have a core group of users it resonates with, but making the website pretty for the sake of having a pretty website is always a huge mistake.

    Additionally, the way you write a good design brief is by figuring out what you want the site to subconsciously remind people of, and then finding a bunch of design elements from other sites that meet this goal. To me this reminds me of one of those 'me too' social networks for video gamers because of the dark colors, the slick gradients/shadows, and the flash-game style UI. It emphatically does not remind me of FreshDirect, which would be a much more appropriate type of website to borrow design inspiration from.

  • by cemregr on 4/9/12, 8:11 PM

    Current design: "we built this in 10 minutes with twitter bootstrap to test our MVP".

    Redesign: "this is a product, and a brand".

    Also, very smart idea to do facelifts to YC companies. Many coming out of this batch have really weak design chops (the screen sharing site looked like an SEO landing page) and by focusing on YC companies, he increases his chances of being noticed. \

  • by azolotov on 4/9/12, 3:16 PM

    I think this is a great design graphically, and an interesting concept. I was asking myself the following questions though:

    1. What happens when you click 'Hire an Exec', or 'Sign Up'?

    2. Why are there two different calls to action - 'Hire an Exec' and 'Find an Exec near you'?

    3. Design isn't just about pretty pixels. Where's the content, and why is there dummy content in its place?

    4. Where did the 'In the News' section go from their original design? It must have been important enough to put it at the very top. What assumptions did you make that led you to remove it, or move it down to the footer?

    5. In general, what assumptions did you make and how did they influence your design?

  • by zitterbewegung on 4/9/12, 2:54 PM

    Black on yellow seems to hurt my eyes. I'm not sure its a good choice.
  • by egallardo on 4/10/12, 3:55 AM

    I respect the balls it takes to do something like this. Like someone else said, with design, everyone feels entitled to critique it. Yet, there are people on here who are defending the current design of iamexec.com.

    The proof to me that your design is better was my initial reaction to it. Speaking for myself, I would never hire someone from a website that doesn't look professional. Your design instantly felt like an upgrade, even if there are things that could be improved. Most people aren't taking into consideration how difficult it is to design something without any input.

    The changes I'd suggest are..

    1. Focus on one call to action. You have 2 currently. 2. After the 1,2,3 limit the amount of yellow on the page. It's overpowering. 3. Remove the tagline just below the picture. You don't need it and everything else can move up 4. Social proof is great but there's a lot going on at the bottom of the page. Keep the user focused on the goal of getting them into the site. 5. Use lorem ipsum for dummy text

    Anyway, keep hustlin'! I'm looking forward to next week's design..

  • by jermaink on 4/9/12, 3:51 PM

    I think your approach is both a nice idea and a nice result.

    Alex3917 might be true but I think the superfluity of Bootstrap designs might slowly become deterrent to any first-time visitor. Of course, the functions are important but so much in interaction design is about colors, structure and individuality.

    Let me give you an example. As a programmer, you come into a room and you often don´t care if it is furnished yet. All you care about is the room arrangement, electrics, the light, how fast you can access which room, what is nearby etc. You focus on functionality. The inside might look like pigsty headquarters but you can still imagine how it can look like once you do the interior design. In a nutshell: The average HN reader might be this kind of visitor.

    The usual -non HN reader- visitor cares about functionality too, but he does´t want to enter a construction work. And as he does´t want to challenge his imagination, he might expect good impressions, giving him the incentive to visit this place again.

  • by cs702 on 4/9/12, 3:11 PM

    All that yellow and black reminds me of Hertz...
  • by Tyrannosaurs on 4/9/12, 3:14 PM

    Your place holder text is a bit random and it takes a few seconds to work out that that's what it is. You might not want to use lorem ipsum but what you've got right now is a bit confusing.

    I like the yellow but I agree that there could be a little less of it.

  • by Tichy on 4/10/12, 11:13 AM

    I don't like the gold/VIP association. The thing is, RGB gold is not real gold. So the message is really that you are a sucker if you fall for it.

    Also, if a company plates it's offices with real gold, it means that they are taking too much money from me.

  • by dimarco on 4/9/12, 4:44 PM

    It's a good first shot, although a lot of the feedback provided by HNers seems to be on point.

    It's funny that it only took a few months to get sick of the Twitter Bootstrap look, felt like it took a year to get sick of the 37Signals/Basecamp rip offs.

  • by davidu on 4/9/12, 3:13 PM

    The best part of seeing these is that the company can find out what at least one talented designer see's as their value prop and message and then map it to what they want people to see and understand. Design then supports that vision.
  • by massarog on 4/9/12, 3:02 PM

    Well done, I dig this style much more than their current design.
  • by dkrich on 4/9/12, 8:24 PM

    Two problems: any serious redesign should involve several templates that are thoroughly tested to ensure that users are interacting with the correct parts so that as many sales are squeezed out of the site as possible. Also, nobody reads reverse typeset. Just sayin'.
  • by thechut on 4/9/12, 5:39 PM

    I think tptacek might have designed their current website.
  • by dskang on 4/9/12, 4:45 PM

    In case anyone didn't notice the link in the post, here's EXEC's current website: https://iamexec.com/
  • by badalyan on 4/9/12, 3:02 PM

    Great idea. Great design.
  • by zanst on 4/9/12, 5:24 PM

    Awful.
  • by brendanobrien on 4/9/12, 4:25 PM

    Spec work for startups? ... Spec work in general?