If People Can't Tell What Your Site Does in Five Seconds, It Doesn't Matter What It Does

A friend of mine opened DRAWMYFACE on her phone while we were waiting for coffee. I hadn't told her anything about it. She scrolled for maybe three seconds, stopped on an empty face, tapped it, and said "oh, I draw on this one?"

That sentence is the whole product. Not the editor, not the replays, not the rooms. The fact that a person who'd never heard of it could tell what it was for before I finished my sentence.

I didn't get there on purpose. I got there after watching a lot of people not get it.

The version nobody understood

The first build had a landing page. A headline, three bullet points, a big button that said Get started. It looked like every other site, which I thought was the point.

People read the headline, read the bullets, and left. The ones who clicked the button landed on an empty canvas and sat there. One person drew a house. Nobody drew a face, because nothing on the screen said face except the name, and names are easy to skim past.

What I'd built was a service that needed explaining. And the honest thing about explanations is that nobody reads them. Not because people are lazy, but because every other site is also asking them to read something, and they've learned the only way through the day is to skip.

Show the thing, with a hole in it

The fix was embarrassingly simple. I deleted the landing page and put the wall on the front.

The wall is a grid of faces other people have drawn. Between them are blank faces: a plain head with no features yet. That's it. No instructions anywhere.

It works because of two things your brain does without asking you. First, it reads a pattern. A grid of drawn faces and a few undrawn ones tells you what the undrawn ones are supposed to become. Second, it hates a gap. An empty space inside a pattern feels unfinished in a way that's almost physical. People tap the blank face because it's the only thing on the screen that looks like it's waiting for them.

I didn't have to write "draw a face here." The blank face says it. A friend called it a nudge, and I'd been avoiding that word because it sounds manipulative. But a nudge is just an arrangement that makes the next step obvious. The alternative is a paragraph, and the paragraph loses.

There's one more line of text, at the very bottom of the main wall, for the person who scrolled all the way down wondering what this is. If they got that far, they've already seen the answer. The text is a courtesy, not the pitch.

No door

The other half of this is that there's nothing between you and the blank face. No account, no email, no app to install. You tap, you draw, you tap Done, and your face is on the wall with everyone else's.

I know why sites ask you to sign up first. It's the thing you'll eventually want: a way to come back, a way to count people. But it moves the cost to the wrong end. You're asking someone to pay with an email address for something they haven't seen work yet. Most people decline, and they're right to.

So the order here is backwards from the usual. Try it, then decide if you care. If you drew something you like, the wall is the reason to come back, and your browser remembers which faces are yours so you can edit or delete them. That's enough of an account for a thing like this.

The rooms work the same way. One person makes a wall for a birthday or a send-off and sends the link. The twenty people who open it don't sign up either. They see the same thing my friend saw: faces, a gap, a hint of who they're meant to draw. Nobody has to be onboarded.

What I'd tell someone building their own thing

Put the real thing on the first screen, not a description of it. If the real thing is a wall, show the wall. If it's a list, show a list with something already in it.

Leave a gap that's clearly meant for the visitor. A blank, a slot, an empty line with a cursor in it. Make the gap look like it belongs to them.

Delay every door. Sign-up, payment, permissions. Let people do the thing once before you ask for anything. If the thing is good, they'll come back and the door will be there.

And then watch one person who's never seen it. Not a user test with a form, just someone with a phone and no context. If they can say what it's for before you explain, you're done. If they ask "so what is this?", you aren't, no matter how good the explanation you were about to give.

I still catch myself wanting to add a sentence here and there. A tip, a label, a little arrow. Most of the time the right move is to delete something instead, until the blank face is the loudest thing on the page.