This is a perfect example of what's wrong with the shallow approach to design. Sure, it looks nice, but it functions awfully.
Compare its homepage with the Hacker News homepage: HN won't be featured on any galleries any time soon, but what makes it successful is that it is really well designed. It has a clear brand identity, and the homepage is incredibly functional; you can easily scan the top news, and see what's new. Visited links are grayed out, and the only text that pops is the new headlines. Everything else is secondary, and therefore scaled down and/or grayed out.
Inbound, on the other hand, gets it all wrong. You'd think it's a well designed site—it has pretty colors, pretty fonts, pretty patterns. But that just makes it a pretty site, not a well-designed one. You can only see 10 headlines on a page above the fold, and even so it feels more cluttered than HN's 30 article homepage. Extra attention is called on irrelevant information like the rank number, or the author and his mugshot. The end result is a homepage that feels cluttered and has no clear sense of hierarchy.
This is what gives designers a bad name. This is also why, if you're building a product, you want to hire a real designer with an education and an understanding for the basics, not just somebody who got good at making shiny things by following photoshop tutorials.
That's pretty hypercritical. Personally, I'd like HN to have more reasonable typography like a fixed width column for comments—somewhere in between Inbound and HN as it exists currently.
It's also not functionally awful. My wife, an interior designer, has often commented that she doesn't know how I can stand to read comments from this site because of how garish the colors and how poor the type is. We've had time to adapt to the use of HN because the content is great and the software has been evolved to function well.
Inbound also has an entirely different target market, one that is, by definition, more superficial and shallow in regard to design. Nothing that looked like HN would get traction in the marketing community, at least from the people I know.
@randfish and I were very inspired by HN. We understand the tradeoffs in terms of design (we're big reddit fans too).
Your observation that marketers (our audience) are different from hackers is dead-on.
With inbound.org we had some early debate around design. Candidly, I was more on the "lets make it like HN" (I write code every day) and he was more on the "lets do something creative and solve for our audience" (he has a much better aesthetic sense). We're still debating it.
We're also both entrepreneurs, so understand the importance of launching and just getting it out there.
Now, back to dealing with the technical issues we've run into tonight...
The measure (line-length) on HN comments is pretty damn bad, I agree. I'm purely comparing the homepages here.
And I do agree that HN could definitely improve. HN isn't perfect, nor is it beautiful. I think it functions extremely well, but there's still plenty of room for improvement.
I really do enjoy HN's design. But the fact that read stories become grayed out hurts in one circumstance: when you've started participating in a discussion on that thread. It would be nice (though admittedly it would break caching) if at least the 'comments' link changed color or were 'called-out' for the threads in which you have commented.
I'm not sure if you're aware of the [threads] link at the in the HN navigation, but it shows you all your comments and threaded replies. I use that feature to check back on discussions I've participated in.
Even so, I as a user who comments quite infrequently will often times want to, after reading an article, look at the discussion about it. On an almost daily basis I have difficulty finding that link because it has been so heavily obscured.
On long threads it usually becomes difficult to determine who a particular response was directed to.
There is no way to differentiate quoted text in your response.
The size of navigational elements are particularly small and hard to use on mobile devices.
You make the point that HN has clear brand identity, but that isn't much of an accomplishment. HN sticks to a four color palette ( Orange, Tan/Bright Desaturated Orange, White, and Black ), and places the YCombinator logo at the top left.
As someone else said, I think you are being far to critical. While I personally don't like the design of the site either, I wouldn't begin calling HN a good example. Sure HN is functional, but that is only one aspect of good design. Functionality in and of itself really isn't that difficult to achieve. It is when you are able to strike a balance between expressiveness, beauty, and functionality does a design become good.
Love the concept and I'm hopeful that it gets the traction deserved.
A couple of UI comments from a brain that spends all day on conversion / UI:
a) HN at 1280x1024 gives you nearly 30 items without scrolling vs. ~10 on Inbound which feels like a UI problem.
b) The header is unnecessarily large, the "Hot Articles" title is redundant to the point of the site. In conversion testing I've never seen a larger header improve sticky/conversion and less is always more.
c) On hover you activate the color change of the story table but I still have to navigate to the actual link for the click through which is non-intuitive.
d) Categorizing is an interesting idea but I think that appeal of HN and many specific community sites (or subreddits for that matter) is that sub-categorizations aren't necessary. EG the community picks the content that's interesting to the community, and category sorting is a "power user" desire, but just confuses the 95%.
Big fan of the work you guys do elsewhere, hope this sticks!
Thanks for the feedback. You make some really good points.
a) You're right. Though we're not going to get to the same density as HN (we've deliberately chosen to show more information per article), we should be able to get more items in there.
b) You're right. It's too large.
c) Right again. We should allow clicking through the article on any area that triggers the hover.
d) This was a deliberate choice. We debated it, and categories won out. Though the right thing to do is to test it (and see what down-side impact the categories are having -- and whether that's worth the additional categorization).
For now, we're working on getting the site back up. The issue is not traffic (directly), but some strange wonkiness with the twitter oauth process.
You should also take a look at the site using IE8 (one of the largest browser segments for general traffic). The articles area is grey-ed out (you can hardly see it).
I also think you guys should re-think the categorization (I'm finding it incredibly distracting). If you remove the category name and give the link title more width (so that it's not truncated in many cases) - the title can speak for itself regarding the nature of the link.
Another +1 for removing categories. I find myself subconsciously ignoring headlines based on the category even though when I force myself to read it, it's actually something I'm interested in. Super dumb! But for me seems to be my human nature.
For what it's worth.
But love what I see and my social marketer has been forwarded the link and we'll keep checking it out.
Why did they schedule maintenance for the middle of the day on which they launch? That seems like the worst time to take down your site for scheduled maintenance.
inbound.org is a reference to Inbound Marketing, which Hubspot coined entirely.
HubSpot snapped the term "Inbound Marketing" (which really means "permission marketing") so they could differentiate more easily from other marketing software competitors.
The strategy is really smart. If you look for "inbound marketing" on Google, Hubspot has completely pushed down the older term by flooding the page with results they more or less created: conferences, groups, books, even a Wikipedia page defined by the company.
For old time marketers, "Inbound Marketing" meant "marketing research", as opposed to "Outbound Marketing" which meant "reaching out to users".
In a sense, it shows those guys are great at what they are doing, marketing.
And HN is written/run by a developer who made his fortune building web apps, yet it still manages to average a 5+ second page load time. What's your point?
Not to troll, but I think a segregation of the crowd here would be great. I know pg has made a few comments lately along the lines of "where did all these non-hackers come from?"
I feel like sub-HN's would be helpful, as I find myself generally reading programming tips and things much more than I read "how to get your conversions up".
Having a good community to submit that to and discuss would cut down on the signal to noise ratio for readers like me.
I love this concept, but I'm hoping they can manage to get a community that can keep the level of content high instead of the mostly link bait and spam articles the SEO community is known for.
A quick look at the home page for Inbound.org which has 25 articles shows:
* 9 articles that are "X Number of Things"
* 4 "The Guide to" articles
* 2 "How to" articles
That's 15 out of 25 articles that are mostly filled with shallow link bait type articles. Granted I didn't read all of them so I'm sure some are good and deserve to be high on the page but the ratio is way off.
By comparison the HN home page has zero of the same type of articles.
Now maybe that's what they are going for, but personally I'd love to see less lists and more high quality content around marketing.
You have way too many articles on the front page. It feels a little ridiculous that I have to scroll down on a 24" monitor at 1920x1080 to read everything.
I've also been a part of the beta testing and think it will be a great tool. I love HN for the technical and startup material and have found some amazing material here. I hope Inbound.org is the start of other awesome crowdsourced communities in the HN-style model.
Design suggestion: I am more interested in seeing the score given by the community rather than the rank awarded by an algorithm. I think you should replace the large position text (#1, #2, etc) and with the # of upvotes.
Great initiative. This has been lacking in marketing industry. Although as others have pointed, I think UI could be polished a bit. It doesn't yet feel as fluid as HN.
Really looking forward to checking this out once it's back online - a marketing site with a community even half as strong as HNs would be absolutely great.
Compare its homepage with the Hacker News homepage: HN won't be featured on any galleries any time soon, but what makes it successful is that it is really well designed. It has a clear brand identity, and the homepage is incredibly functional; you can easily scan the top news, and see what's new. Visited links are grayed out, and the only text that pops is the new headlines. Everything else is secondary, and therefore scaled down and/or grayed out.
Inbound, on the other hand, gets it all wrong. You'd think it's a well designed site—it has pretty colors, pretty fonts, pretty patterns. But that just makes it a pretty site, not a well-designed one. You can only see 10 headlines on a page above the fold, and even so it feels more cluttered than HN's 30 article homepage. Extra attention is called on irrelevant information like the rank number, or the author and his mugshot. The end result is a homepage that feels cluttered and has no clear sense of hierarchy.
This is what gives designers a bad name. This is also why, if you're building a product, you want to hire a real designer with an education and an understanding for the basics, not just somebody who got good at making shiny things by following photoshop tutorials.