The sourcehut landing page has ~300 words on it. Those words could be literally arranged in a giant spiral and still not require 3-4 genuine attempts to learn what sourcehut does. This comment is a total caricature of the actual and tangible benefits of a well-thought-out UI.
Sourcehut is an engineering tool and its landing page is not designed to harvest registrations and clicks. The lack of design is not a failure of design, it’s just that design is not that important on this particular website.
You misunderstand the problem here. I haven't done 3-4 genuine attempts. I've opened and closed the site multiple times while reading this thread back-and-forth and only afterwards realized I still don't know what the service does. It fails to convey the message in an immediate way.
And I'm not even talking about the brutalist design here. As many others have pointed out there are good minimalist non-designed landing pages (pinboard, tarsnap).
You misunderstand my point, which is that only “genuine attempts” matter in this particular case. Sourcehut is clearly working to stay away from the lightspeed, attention-shaping, zillions of fundamentally distracted users zeitgeist. You’re critiquing it from within a paradigm that it’s somewhat explicitly separating itself from. This is the whole reason sourcehut looks the way it does and that we’re even having this conversation. What you’re saying is 100% correct in terms of design but also missing the forest for the trees.
> You misunderstand my point, which is that only “genuine attempts” matter in this particular case.
I'm sorry but you don't get to decide what matters.
Users will decide that for you. And the truth is nobody gives a fuck about sourcehut or whatever other project enough to honor it with a "genuine attempt".
Nobody is going to slow down to wade through the unreadable, mess of information splattered on the page just because it's there and available.
So if that's the assumption you're building with, you'll be hosed.
It's important to design for how people actually use things, and how people actually behave, and the information customers are actually looking for.
It's the principle of "if Muhammad won't come to the mountain, bring the mountain to Muhammad". Or whatever other name you prefer, same principle.
The hubris of the technologically competent, one so often spied on this website, is to believe that those unwilling to join them on the top of the mountain don't deserve the mountain, rather than that a ski lift should be installed.
It's as though the democratisation of technology over the past thirty years has completely escaped their attention.
In this case the mountain is web-hosted git repos? This particular mountain already has at least 3 ski lifts you might have heard of called GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket.
When I say “matter” I’m not being normative, I’m saying that this particular tool’s value add has nothing to do with its discoverability on the World Wide Web. Sourcehut’s website is a signpost not an advertisement. The set of users who are put off by the design but would have otherwise used the tool is negligible. Comparing sourcehut’s design to Stripe is like comparing a Camry to a dune buggy.
