revamp homepage (inc. community pages)

[chadwhitacre]

There's something about the way we present Gittip on the homepage that's off. It has to do with the fact that talking about money can lead to resentment. Here's where I think this first cropped up: #64.

Things:

• replace "top givers" with "patrons" (only includes explicit patrons, not just anyone)
• replace "top receivers" with "user spotlight"--random profile
• replace "new receivers" with "recent activity"--includes sign-ups but also other events (tip, toot, etc.)
• add "communities"--show active + in formation

Sketch:

[tshepang]

If you replace top receivers list, will it be available elsewhere visible?

[chadwhitacre]

@tshepang We could maybe keep it around somewhere. You think it's valuable to have?

[lyndsysimon]

I believe it's valuable to have - it shows that Gittip is an active service, and that users are currently getting substantial support from their respective communities.

It's also very nice to see people you know up there if you happen to share the same network.

[tshepang]

It's valuable to see who the top users are (hall of fame). I wonder how the issue of tired-of-seeing-the-same-faces can be fixed though.

One request: If you decide to replace top-user list with random users, please ensure that they are active users (tippers/tippees).

[cattsmall]

@tshepang, why not have a section for recent givers instead of/in addition top patrons? Then it's more likely there won't be the same faces all the time.

[tshepang]

@cattsmall what does recent givers mean? New givers?

[cattsmall]

@tshepang more along the line of people who recently gave money. If many people donate money in lower double-digit amounts, that might help to make the high amounts some people donate less scary to newcomers.

[tshepang]

@cattsmall I am a little lost... gittip is a weekly give-money thing, so people who recently gave money isn't clear to me. Maybe you are interested in people who give money for the first time?

[sigmavirus24]

I think @cattsmall means people who just started tipping someone else and what that tip amount is.

[cattsmall]

@sigmavirus24 yes, that's what I meant. That way, the listed people are more likely to be different from the top givers/patrons AND have definitely gifted someone money.

[tshepang]

kool idea

[cakey]

We need to make sure that everything on the home page has a purpose, and in some way leads to the new visitor becoming more involved in the website.
For me, this means that home page needs a combination of the following elements:

• Success stories - popular/top receivers/communities. Show that the site is active, and actually has an impact. A good example of this is Patreon
• The purpose of the website, what the point of it is and how it might apply to you.
• Where do I start? Show me people I might know from other social media that use the site. This is an obvious place to either explore a bit further, or give me an idea about who and why I might want to tip.

I don't see the benefit of random information. I have no interest in a profile chosen at random or the people that have signed up recently, and don't see what purpose it serves in increasing engagement.

[tshepang]

@cakey I also think it's not so useful showing people who recently joined.

[chadwhitacre]

Recently joined is helpful to me, because it shows me how active the site is right now. That's how I noticed that Korea was happening, e.g. In general, I don't really count, though. :) I like @cakey's analysis.

[chadwhitacre]

New users are one audience for the homepage. Two other audiences are current users, and people building Gittip (us). No-one visits the YouTube homepage. They land on video pages. For Gittip the parallel page is the user profile page. (Communities are basically mini-homepages.)

@cattsmall's idea of "recent givers" is part of what I was going for with the "Recent Activity" section. IIRC, I picked up that idea from the extensive conversation on #634. Reviewing that ticket now ...

[chadwhitacre]

Here's the "Happening Right Now" section on Avaaz:

If you go check it out you'll see that it's constantly updating. A section like this has value for us in a couple ways:

• shows liveliness - valuable for new users and also for me, gives a quick "pulse" as mentioned above
• shows the kinds of things that can be done on the site - sign up, tip, toot, join/leave communities

[chadwhitacre]

Yeah, okay, #634 is required reading for this ticket. @MikeFair's comment is especially helpful.

[chadwhitacre]

In baldest terms, here's the initial funnel:

• join Gittip
• set up a tip to someone
• back the tip with a credit card

Overall the goal is to incentivize people to live a life of generosity and gratitude.

That means:

• freely doing awesome stuff
• telling that story
• giving and receiving money as a side-effect of gratitude

Generosity is a side-effect of gratitude.

[chadwhitacre]

That makes me think that toots are important. Or story-telling, somehow. Toots is the current feature intended to enable story-telling.

[cakey]

+1 Everyone go read @MikeFair's comment

I feel that our main focus should be community growth. Toots help people find new people, but we are no where near maximising giving within relationships that are already established. Social media integration is a priority. When I log in, I want to see the status of the people I follow on twitter, the channels I subscribe on youtube, the projects and contributors I've starred on github and the streamers I have favourited on twitch.
We then use @MikeFair's metrics to use these connections to boost community growth - "number of people you were the first tipper for", using 25c as essentially an invite mechanism to all the people they already care about.

Imagine you could give a smaller amount (e.g 5c/wk) ONLY if you are the first person to tip that person. That would make it feasible to invite ALL the people you follow on a given social media. It's a powerful pull to see that SOMEONE wants to donate to you, even if it is so little. We can set the minimum for withdrawal if transaction fees are an issue.

[cakey]

Forgive the awful mockup. Here's the idea:
The homepage needs to fulfil two parts of the funnel, selling the user on the gittip vision, and then finding them actual people they want to tip.
The gittip page outlines concrete use cases, and a demonstration of how the site works. There is then a solid next step action which leads the user to the 'discover' page. This is the default homepage for users that are logged in. The discover page includes your communities, friends from social networks, and metrics and leaderboards for all of gittip. This acts as your dashboard and way of discovering new people in gittip.
The search bar would be moved to the top bar, to allow you to access it from anywhere on the site, and emphasising the community feel, similar to facebook or twitter.

[heidigardner]

If we do go with a landing page, can the logo be prominent? i.e:

[chadwhitacre]

https://cottonbureau.com/

[chadwhitacre]

https://coderwall.com/welcome

[chadwhitacre]

I've assigned this ticket to myself.

• The above two sites are my exemplars.
• The sentence I want to use is "Give money every week to inspiring people & teams."
• I paid for Typekit so we can use real typography.
• I've started sketching out a banner image on the new-banner branch (no PR yet).
• We need to land Pipeline css #1245 so I can use the dynamic gittip.css.spt.
• We should address actually, don't use /for/, use /about/ #1296 to clarify where we're sending people from the homepage.

[hephail]

I feel the focus needs to be on receivers, and givers should be made anonymous, because most of the time, we focus too much on who the donor is, when the work done by the receiver is so much more important.

[ahdinosaur]

it should be possible to browse all members of a community, not just those who are being highlighted.

[seanlinsley]

@ahdinosaur that's currently ticketed as #970

[ahdinosaur]

thanks @seanlinsley! :)

[chadwhitacre]

+1 on HN:

Ok, now I'm suppose to enter a Twitter username? This is to donate money to Twitter users? Still confused, so I click a random profile of someone receiving money. It starts to make more sense, so these are just people marketing themselves, and asking for weekly donations. The about page confirms this...

https://www.gittip.com/about/

Far too much work to figure out what's happening here. I still have no idea what I can donate money towards. I mean, how do I browse causes? If I want to support musicians, or people cleaning up garbage on their beaches, where do I go? I can't find any type of listings, or categories here. Is this just for programmers? I need to know their Twitter/Github username, or randomly click profiles on the site?

I give up, I've spent 20 minutes reading, and browsing this site, and my only conclusion is that it's a place to sponsor your favorite programmers, by giving them a weekly donation. I've been programming and freelancing for over a decade, and I can't think of anyone by name that I'd donate towards. This site gives me zero help in finding people to donate towards, aside from aimlessly browsing hundreds of profiles, hoping for someone to catch my attention. I don't have that kind of time.

This entire thing is too frustrating.

[chadwhitacre]

+2 on HN:

I've never heard of Gittip nor Patreon before reading this article. Looking at both websites the website for Patreon is much more engaging and less cluttered. Gittip looks intimidating with all those small pictures and numbers going around. A good redesign for the index would propel the business more than all those commits. Love both ideas though :)

reply:

I have not heard of Gittip either before this post came on HN. So I visited it, and upon seeing the front page, I immediately thought that this is like a competition where the rankings of the highest givers and highers receivers were showcased.

I think that the site should show something that tipping the projects is a good idea. (Shooting from my hip here) maybe they should pick out a couple of projects and show how the tipping has benefitted the project?

reply:

I agree with you about the competition bit. [...] [F]ocusing more on how they make a difference instead of a silly selfie would be a good first step indeed.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 on HN:

I love Gittip. I don't love the homepage.

When I visit the homepage, I see "Sustainable crowdfunding: inspiring generosity", followed by a call to action input asking me to enter someone's username, and finally three groups of lists of people. None of these things mean anything to me if I'm new to Gittip.

The headline at the top describes your company mission statement, not what the product does. Instead of telling me the abstract of what Gittip is about, it should tell me the benefit of using your product. For instance, "Support your favourite people by automatically donating to them weekly." Skip the generosity, sustainability, and crowdfunding mentions for now. Put them behind the About link, which I might click if I'm interested in learning more about how and why you're doing this (I'm probably not).

The call to action input doesn't help me much. It's asking me to enter someone's name off the top of my head, and it's using a very vague label ("who inspires you?") to do so. I would scrap this approach and instead provide a way to sign up to Gittip with a call to action that ties back in to the headline. So you want to donate to people you like? Step 1: sign up for an account. Step 2: add people from your Twitter, Github, Facebook, etc. Step 3: Look through the list of people (Gittip should use some magic to prioritise the people by likelihood of my wanting to support them, such as looking at how close they are to me on Facebook, or how many followers/stars they have on Github and how many of their projects I've starred) and select up to 3 that I like. Done! Step 4: Decide to give someone something minimal (say, $0.25) per week by entering my credit card details. If I choose not to do that, at leat I made a profile on the site, got familiar with how it works, taught you a bit about who I am and where I came from, and you can maybe email me later and remind me if someone I have in my friends list did something interesting (like published a new project, blog post, insightful tweet, etc)

The list of people at the bottom of the homepage is boring. It's not contextual to the goals of the homepage, which are converting users to understanding Gittip and wanting to join in. Right now you show me static lists of new users, top givers, and top receivers. I don't really care about new users other than as proof that this site isn't dead, so you can reduce their importance right off the bat. Top givers and receivers aren't relevant to me unless you tell me what they're giving or receiving. So I would reformat these lists: andyet gives x per week to a, b, c, and more. ashedryden receives x per week from a, b, c and more. I need to understand that Gittip is about creating a direct personal relationship between people giving money and receiving money. Right now, these lists don't imply any kind of relationship.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 on HN:

Took me some looking around to find a link on bottom of the (gittip.com) page to actually find out what gittip does.

First thought was - is it a way to get paid by submitting patches through GitHub? No, actually thats a site where you give/receive donations to people on Twitter/GitHub/Bitbucket)

[chadwhitacre]

+1 on HN:

marketing guy's opinion

I would have the front page tell a story. Something like. OpenSSL Heartbleed bug affected millions of users because millions of software developers use this free software. The team behind it only received $2,000 a year in donations prior to the bug being found. There are 10,000s of software projects that you use every day building your tech stack. You should be investing in the development of those tools by helping to sponsor those projects and "tipping" the developers directly for their work.

I might then put a table that lists server projects, language based projects, database projects - that dives people into the next layer. For instance Lua -> Lua page with some of the big Lua projects listed.

Tell a story. You don't have to pay "enterprise licenses" for free software, but the tools you use need constant development. Anything you give helps those tools get better.

[ckluis]

FWIW - the HN comment was from me. That is some atrocious copy designed to make you think about your story. Stories resonate.

Homepage basic layout use big clean sections (think startup framework style).

• title/message
• story
• weekly spotlight project - (write a blog every week on a project worth donating too, push to homepage, email to all email list who accepts - this also gives you a chance to reach out to companies that use the weekly spotlight project and announce a big donation from compan(yes) who use it and a call to action weekly - need 1 time payments)
• columns for active communities (ruby, javascript, etc) which show both givers/receivers and projects

To some degree I think part of the problem is a hierarchy problem.

• Where do I see the projects people participate in.
• How do I give to the products I use?
• Can I pick a product - see a list of contributors and auto-distribute based on some criteria to all participants?
• Where is the curated pages of important software that is underfunded?
• Where is the list of language/frameworks that I can comb through to understand who to give to?

Tip producers is one thing, but getting to the users via products should be easy. I have to know who is important to me right now. I think people understand jQuery, OpenSSL, etc easier than John Ressig. I would try to partner with some of the bigger initiatives in each language/framework and create pages like: jQuery currently receives funding from these corporate partners. They fund the core team seen here, but here is a list of unpaid volunteers. I think that is the biggest problem. I have to actively know the people behind a project. Beside the massive projects... how many people know this information?

EDIT:

I forgot to mention the most important part. The weekly spotlight part can be easily generated from a form that projects users could fill out about a project they are passionate about. I think projects/people both need a way for curated content. If a producer doesn't visit gittip, they don't know their profile isn't very complete.

Important - you should attempt to wire in tweets with tips (with permission) - to the tune of "I just tipped @whit537 via @gittip $2.00 for his on {project}. Help support {project} {link}." - with a few hundred of those going out from prominent developers per month... you usage numbers will increase or your money back.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from @d0ugal in #2456.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 on HN:

I never liked Gittip because of how it advertises its top earners and givers... it stops being about rewarding good work and starts to become a game of who can score the most validation points and use them for political gain.

P.S. This first surfaced on #64.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 on HN:

And maybe a story for homepage? ;)

It's surely more engaging than a list of new users (which, honestly, I don't care and don't think anyone cares outside 'getting on HN front page got him X sign ups').

[chadwhitacre]

+1 on HN:

it would be a lot more meaningful to see a list of groups on the homepage rather than people that I have mostly never heard of.

[chadwhitacre]

Re: stories:

I have resisted telling stories when writing about the sharing economy, even though almost every media report leads with one and even though I’ve been asked to use them. I’ll continue to avoid them, in general, even though it probably limits the audience I’ll reach. Why? Because selective storytelling is manipulative and I don’t want to be a manipulator and I don’t want my readers to be manipulated.

http://tomslee.net/2014/01/airbnb-stories.html

[justinfriebel]

You might not want to here this but a keyword search reveals that "crowdfunding" is a very popular search term, with over 5x the volume of "donate".

I would suggest the homepage h1, meta title, meta description, and sentence contain something to the likes of "Automatic weekly long term crowdfunding for people".

It has SEO, laymen's terms, and describes exactly what gittip is. As I write this I see you updated the homepage to include crowdfunding already, but it's an h2.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 on HN. Homepage is confusing because it presents Gittip as if it were a site for a single community rather than for multiple communities.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 for stories, on HN:

I'd love to see actual stories of donors/receivers there, too.

[jonah-williams]

I think improving user comprehension of gittip on the home page would be a valuable change to make. I think I experienced some of the same confusion described above when I first signed up to make a donation.

I am however troubled by treating #1074 (comment) as a "+1". As I read them, comments about "validation points" or "hijacking" are an expression of dissatisfaction with who appears at the top of the leaderboard and not about why they appear there. The subtext is that these people do not deserve the donations they receive, that gittip isn't for them.
It would be great if everyone who visits the site feels like gittip is a tool for them and the communities they are interested in but please consider if the feedback you see is actually about improving the site or if it is just asking for you to stop displaying the "wrong" people as successful. How you decide which users are promoted or not says a lot about who gittip is for and what behavior it considers valuable.

[patcon]

@johnedgar via Twitter

if you discontinued the names of companies on the front of the site with the amounts next to them, we [Digital Ocean] would not discontinue giving.

[lyndsysimon]

@carols10cents, above:

I would love to see more emphasis on the first gift on the homepage

I saw this referenced elsewhere, and I think it's awesome. A stream of "here's who just pledged their first tip" and "here's who just got their first pledge" would make the homepage dynamic and inclusive. I would support at least pushing down the current leaderboards if not displacing them from the page entirely, in favor of such a stream.

[chadwhitacre]

Blog posted: http://blog.gittip.com/post/92534876471/farewell-homepage-leaderboards

Let's pick up with community pages over on #967.