The New Website Revealed!

[draw]

I’m personally not that much into (graphical) presentation, so keep that in mind.
But if I read the reasoning behind the new website in the dev update I’m wondering how much of this will the viewer of the site notice and care about? And how much of it is ‘pseudo’-science?
So in my opinion don’t overdo/waste too much time with these things and try to keep it practical.
About the blue colour I understand. I recently had to choose a (leased) company car: only choices of colour where metallic gray, black and (dark) blue. Boring and sometimes a bit difficult to spot the car at the parking, when leaving, between all the other ones with the same colour.

About the yellow and the (pornographic) meaning of it for the Chinese. Maybe that is an issue, but from the Yellow Wikipedia page:

In China and many Asian countries, it is seen as the color of happiness, glory, harmony and wisdom.

That doesn’t sound so bad to me. The more practical approach: a higher priority would be to translate the site to Chinese. And maybe at that version replace yellow with another colour.
What I learned about yellow: don’t overuse it (certainly if bright), like when painting a room, because very ‘vibrant’…

[Traktion]

@anon28980808

By which they probably mean you should not call any of your services or products “fabulously and exuberantly yellow” unless you wanna be considered naughty.

Sounds like blue in western cultures.

P.s. the Chinese flag has yellow on it

[anon28980808]

That’s spot on I guess. Can you imagine marketing experts advising Chinese businessmen to stay away from blue if they wanna market in the States because blue is the symbol of melancholy?

I mean, only a couple of hours have passed since this convo and I already thinks it’s one of the most surreal conversations I have ever had. Like… really?

[draw]

P.s. the Chinese flag has yellow on it

Indeed, → yellow stars to be exact…
Better to stop here and not go deeper into the subject

[Traktion]

Just looked at the site again with fresh eyes on my tablet this time. I thought I would give it time before commenting properly and I have to say I like it!

It definitely isn’t corporate and perhaps the branding is a little absent, but the look and feel of the site feels fresh and edgy. I love the transition so on scrolling, making each section feel like a different scene without having to click to another page. The way the content slots into the panes works really well, creating a montage of content.

Using the site actually reminded me on walking around an exhibition. Different rooms, sliding into one another, with items to interact with and their descriptions.

Great work team!

[piluso]

Anything is pseudoscience when systematization is confused with scientific method, and according to Karl Popper a claim that is not falsifiable (something that can’t be proven wrong) is pseudoscientific.
Scientific method requires testing hypotheses and iteration.

The best design practices are the human-centered designs which gave birth to the UX field, emphasize the iterative process of

observe → hypothesize → design prototype → testing → observe

until the user has the behavior that we wanted them to have, which is in its core scientific by nature.
This is what @antifragile and myself have been talking all along, the crucial aspect of testing is doing usability tests and focus groups.

Focus groups are easy to f-up if the researcher is not absolutely aware of the social dynamics that can bias the result such as groupthink, conformity, priming, leading questions, statistical biases, etc… So a really professional team should be hired instead of running it casually.

Usability tests are easier for programmers to track themselves the metrics of how the user is responding to a site.

Anyone who is interested in learning more about human-centered design, the father of HCD is Donald Norman and the book that kick started this entire field is called “The psychology of everyday things”.
Edit: it has been republished as “the design of everyday things”

[goindeep]

Not my cup of tea at all, sorry.

My eyes are darting all over the place, the colors are lacking any energy, nothing is aligned it seems, sorry to be the negative one.

I’ve also never been a fan of the logo, it looks unfinished to me personally, but that’s just me.

I’ve always liked the white and blue colors. White and blue signify purity and strength the new colors just make me confused, they just make me feel nothing from the onset and when you have a new visitor to a website you have one second to get his/her attention. If I stumbled across this site I would not be wanting to hand around to read much on it as nothing grabs at my attention.

I like the little sound bites of info too as someone else said but I’m not a fan of linking in the header. It seems very tacky linking in a header.

Have we had a copywriter look at this BTW?

What is the goal of the website?

The whole thing just seems too erratic for me.

If I had my way, id define the goal of the website and do everything possible with the written content and images and colors to get the user/reader to complete said task, currently its all a bit like 'hey yeah you we’re all about freedom and privacy, and look how arty and trendy we are, check this out dude, and we have cool technology, and and and passwords and birds and stuff" nothing makes sense. And I know this is hard to describe on a website essentially what is really a new Internet, but that’s why i think less is more.

The images make no sense, comes across like some kind of 90’s magazine about furniture or a Scottish holiday or something or some weird drama movie about a depressed person. Very low energy.

I’ve also always said we should have a network visualizer.

My 2 cents.

EDIT

Designs I do like: If you want arty https://www.inventosdigitais.com.br/ , trendy, colorful, cool, clean but powerful https://www.foreveragency.com/ and from our space I really like IOTA https://www.iota.org/ tether is kind of simple and shows you instantly this is what we do https://tether.to/ not sure im a "fan"as such but still… ripple is OK https://ripple.com/ ethereum feels like they are telling a story https://www.ethereum.org/ and the simplest of all Bitcoin - Open source P2P money

Page I dislike the most Safe Network

Page I like the most Safe Network

There is only one way to tell which design produces better results and that is to split test. Has any of that been done? I know its not directly relevant but the biggest direct sales companies split test forever, they never settle on one design or copy, they just constantly split test if there is opportunity to and will keep the best copy/design until another beats it out, they’ll run that for a while until its proven another can beat it.

Biggest take away for me, is LESS IS MORE

[David_MacGregor]

You can’t split test a website like this. Split testing requires a call to action, a way of measuring response - like subscribing to a newsletter.

[Zoki]

@David_MacGregor

subscribing to a newsletter.

Could do… Could turn the Thursday updates in to a weekly newsletter, or part of one?

Put a subscribe button at top of page.

[goindeep]

@David_MacGregor

You can’t split test a website like this. Split testing requires a call to action, a way of measuring response - like subscribing to a newsletter.

That’s kind of the point of what I am saying, what is the goal of the website? It seems waaaaay to scattered at the moment. Understandably hard, no doubt, but still. And yes you can split test any website. It depends what you are looking at. e.g. clicks on a certain page, link, bounce rate etc.

[Cryptoskeptic]

I don’t get it. Why doesn’t the website have Pink Floyd music in the background. It would be sooooo much better

[jlpell]

First, I really liked the description of the website design goals in this week’s dev update. I now get/understand the style the dev’s were going after.

Second, regarding my earlier comment, these were the “MaidSafe Blues” tones I was craving in the next two example images. They don’t really look “better”… but they feel familiar. There is A Lot of orange that might be better balanced by the familiar blues in some places, but not all (orange does add some really nice effect in other places). Blue is a human color too, we’re 70% to 80% water and a lot of hot air after all.

Regardless, I like the site content, structure, and flow, the more I look at it. The text/font rendering is very nice. Nice work.

[luyandjo1]

Nice flow and bright colors. Pretty Cool!

[Astroman]

Thanks, you just sent me down the rabbit hole of trying to find out the colour of air.

[jlpell]

Sorry, a subtle play on words with blue and blew.

[Future]

This is the original style guide
https://maidsafe.net/img/style_guide/SAFE-Network-style-guide.pdf

[JBishop]

You Have to be in Silicon Valley, Maidsafe is at the Decentralised Web Summit there.

They took it with them to San Francisco, it’s now at the venue’s location, Internet Archive:

SAFE-Network-style-guide.pdf

[Future]

Mmm seems that someone deleted the page

[piluso]

Wow, so they used to have a style guide.
I am now even more baffled.

[JimCollinson]

As I explained in the dev update, we are taking a deliberate step forward with a new style and identity for the project

@maidsafe

It’s also worth noting we’ve taken a deliberate step away from the MaidSafe brand colours of old, in order to make the project more distinct from the company, and also to move away from what was quite a corporate and dare I say accountancy-blue.

This will, in time, be formalised into a style guide and other documentation I’m sure, but it has to prove itself in the wild a little longer before we do that.