Some of you may know that I work as a Product Manager for this company. I’m also involved in revamping its marketing.
I’d like to ask you all a favor, if you please. Please visit our website. Check out a bit of our product information as well, like this brochure. Don’t spend too much time on this, maybe about 5 minutes max. Then, answer the following question:
BE HONEST. You can’t hurt my feelings. If you have more comments, please leave them on this posting.
When I go to the product page, I see Icons but no description of what the product(s) are. Icon’s aren’t that great of a description, espically when selling a product, although one could make the mouse over text (I forget the real name for it) help with the description if keeping screen real estate small is a must.
I was trying to figure out how to phrase my thoughts into 3 words, and I’m having problems. For me, the words that leap to mind are “start up documentation” and “pastel” in that doctors office, calming, soothing pastel as opposed to the colouring.
By start up documentation I mean it confers the idea and gives information but lacks the polish? of a larger corporation. This is not a good or bad thing, just an observation.
I find the site quite confusing. I had to read 3 times before realizing that what the company does is software, at first I thought it was a clinic of some sort.
I know now is not a clinic, and because of that is not suppoused to give you a “warm feeling inside”, but with all those flash animations, colors, and things moving all over the place the site looks more like a multimedia company.
Not everyone has Flash and Javascript enabled. I make it a habit to not visit sites that require such things. The “Online Applications” link won’t work without JScript. And in my particular browser (Opera 6) the Flash animations don’t load unless JScript is enabled. I get a very blank, unhelpful, dull, hard to read page when I load the site.
The color scheme isn’t to my liking either. It reminds me of the most lifeless corporate office I’ve ever been in, all done in dull grey and pallid blue, with sharp edges everywhere. I also think the sidebar text should be the main text, and vice versa.
In best Charlie Brown style, I give it a D-. ;]
-Ben
My first thought is confusing.
Secondly there are some nice features but a person shouldn’t need to know how to navigate the site to find them
Thirdly there are some places where pop up occur. Get rid of them.
Customer shouldn’t have to know what they are looking for before they go to your website. Hit them over the head in the product page. Give product names and short description in one big page. People prefer to scroll down then to navigate through each product page. The product page should expand on the short description. Give them reasons to buy the product when at that point since they were obviously interested enough to go that far.
On the product page, I should never have to use the back button. A link going up to product summary should be prominant on every product page.
Publications: have a html version on the link. The pdf should be link available to be downloaded but when I’m browsing and are interested in reading white papers, I don’t want to open other applications, or download a plugin to view it. This is a distraction. The customer may never read what they downloaded.
The demos go to another site. Is this the same company? If so don’t change sites. And there is no way to get to the original site. Once I jumped to http://www.healthdesk.ca, I had no way to return to http://www.aim.on.ca.
Contact info is complete. If you have a specific sales department phone number add that as sales.
Success stories. Give names as well as logos. Most people won’t know the logos of companies.
Anyway that’s about it.
I’ll look at you H323 problem. I know I got this running about 2 years ago.
Bill
When I looked at this page, the thoughts that immediately crossed my mind were:
“AI in medicine? Is that actually serious?”
“feels like you’re in a hospital surrounded by medical mumbo jumbo that nobody understands”
“Joan’s sure got her work cut out for her..”
I’m sure a lot of it stems from the fact that the target audience is very specific. Granted, the site isn’t trying to promote and market the next action blockbuster of the summer.
However, even imagining oneself as a potential customer, the site invokes a very vague sense of genericness. It looks no different from every other biotech company out there. Beyond that, it blends in with other industries that are non-related but carrying a similar theme, mood, and feel like pharmaceuticals, life insurance. And it feels just as exciting and provocative.
Focus
I feel the delivery of relevant information could be better paced. The brochure and the site in general have a tendency to seem… overeager to give information.
For instance, the longwinded paragraph description on the main page that explains in excessive detail what the company does could be moved to the Profile section. Then the front page’s design, structure, and graphics could be redone to visually convey, “We do IT for medical institutions,” more effectively. The products could be part of the central visual structure. Since the names don’t seem very self-explanatory (at least to a non-med person), an assisting blurb, 5-8 words, could accompany each icon perhaps on mouseover.
Engineering types have a tendency to attempt to communicate by inundating with information and detail (like I’m doing in this comment), and the site takes a lot of the same approach.
Uniqueness
In what area is this company better than all the other bioinformatics companies?
Brochure
Something about the “Fast, Reliable, Accurate, Cost Effective” in diff colors doesn’t seem very compelling or convincing. It’s like someone just walking up and telling you that they’re reliable.
What are the downtimes like amongst clients who are already using these products and systems? What are their error rates? Can those existing clients vouch for an increase in productivity or smoother workflow? How much have their costs decreased? Are these existing clients big names that potential new customers would recognize? If potential customers are using older systems in place, why should they switch? How easy is it to contact those existing clients to find out their reactions?
Hopefully, this hasn’t sounded too pretentious and that there’s some info that’s actually useful to you here.. ^^ Good luck!
Yeah, one thing I wanted to mention was the site seems like it’s trying to sedate you and then afterwards, you’ll be made to feel happy and dreamily pleased to become a customer.
Almost like the software company is trying to demonstrate that they understand the clients by acting like them. But the clients are medical institutions, not hospital patients (I think).
I’d think it’s safe for the overall design to stick with promoting the traditional tech principles: efficiency, reliability, systematic organization, versatility, and useability. And it can move away from the flowery “everything’s going to be alright” feel. =)
I was gonna do this for you girl, but I stopped when I was forced to read SMALL ASS PRINT ON THE WEBPAGE.
My attention span is just fading, man. Big ups on bigger fonts.
Oh yeah. One thing I thought was
“WTF, they have AI for medicine?”
And I was interested in learning more, but said ‘fuck this’ at the fonts.
Ok, I guess most people are not that used to seeing clinical informatics websites. I think this one is pretty user friendly from a researchers point of view. Suggestions… let me see… maybe make the intros a bit more layman friendly, I can see how someone who doesn’t know anything about affimetrix and microarrays would get a bit lost. I don’t know… maybe the color scheme and the font size suggestions might have some value. Oh, and when you get into each of the products description I would probably add a little diagram of how it works… drawings, drawings, drawings, that’s what my PI always says keeps someone interested even if they are not listening (in this case would be too lazy to read).
J – the good thing about being the product manager – technically speaking, Marketing should own the website, not y ou =)))
We don’t have a marketing department. This is part of the case I’m making, and trying to identify the correct people to be in charge of the marketing effort.