Socialroots
This is primarily a reaction to the web site front page, as the software itself is still by approval only and there's not a lot of detail available about it. I'm posting this here because this comment I made – that the layout felt unpleasantly oriented towards impressing funders rather than providing useful information – led to several discussions, some of which were in DM, and I wanted to share my part of that publicly (and elaborate on it slightly).
Speaking just for myself, I'd have liked to see more text and less... mega-iconography?[1]
Also, phraseology like "the $X you've been waiting for!" makes me think of the handful of spambots that try to get accounts on TootCat every month, with phrases like "Looking for $thing in $place? Our $thing is the $superlative in $place!""
The fact that each of the major points (starting with "Understand & Navigate Your Network") aren't links to further explanation really makes me feel like they could have just been in a bulleted list, no graphics.
...and if this leads to a sparse-looking home page, that's okay! That would accurately convey that this is just a first draft, more details coming.
Maybe this is just me being neurodivergent again, and wanting exactly the opposite of what the majority apparently want, but I'd have found something like this much more digestible. It presents the main content in a single area I don't have to scroll, with little or no superfluous content, with a text style which signals that any links will be clearly marked as such -- so I'm not clicking around to see if any of the text is actually a link, which leaves me free to focus on what the text says.[2]
For the next iteration, I'd suggest that each point should be reinforced with links to pages about the particular features that support what the point says. Include screenshots that are marked as such, and describe what is being shown (e.g. "an example of SR's connection-management page" or whatever).
Where are the screenshots? Where are the feature lists and documentation? Wireframes? Code repo?[3] I still don't really understand what this thing is supposed to do, other than that it's some kind of social-collaboration platform, which is a niche that interests me greatly.
Footnotes
- ↑ ...by which I mean something like "the practice of illustrating every point with suggestive but not-actually-informative graphics"
- ↑ Some clarifications:
- This is only partly about the extra scrolling just to get a few tidbits of text; it's partly about what's implied by the layout. I interpret {small amount of text + large graphic} as "this is just a summary; click for actual information", so I spent a lot of time (relatively speaking) trying to figure out where the links were.
- Firefox doesn't offer "reader"-mode for that page, so that's not an option either.
- ↑ And why is it still on Twitter and not fedi? And LinkedIn?? LinkedIn is a capitalist hellscape; I thought everyone knew that by now.