- The video features a design review of companies funded by Y Combinator.
- The first company, Hokali, is critiqued for having a pop-up before providing information about their services.
- The layout and visual design of Hokali's website are praised, but some confusion arises with the videos and scrolling.
- It is suggested that Hokali create dedicated landing pages for each service and include testimonials and personal stories to build trust.
- The second company, Requestly, is reviewed and its use of jargon is discussed as potentially self-selecting its target users.
- It is recommended that Requestly gather feedback from existing users to better describe their product and its benefits.

- The way users think and describe a product is important in understanding its value and benefits.
- The website mentioned has a lot of information above the fold, including headlines, buttons, ratings, reviews, and a screenshot that is difficult to understand.
- It is important to prioritize the most important elements and focus on the main action you want users to take.
- The screenshot should either be removed or improved to provide a clear understanding of the product.
- Features should be presented as solutions to problems or benefits to users.
- Trust-building elements such as user numbers and reviews are important to include.
- The website has too many features listed and could benefit from organizing them on a separate page.
- The headline of the second product is confusing and should be clearer and more focused on the customer's perspective.

- The speaker suggests that integrating eco-friendly elements into a brand can be done with little to no code.
- The layout, typography, and colors of the page are well done and visually interesting.
- The inclusion of trusted brands builds trust with potential customers.
- The team section with faces and customer testimonials adds a personal touch.
- The messaging and headlines need improvement in order to clearly communicate what the product is and who it is for.
- The speaker suggests highlighting the problem being solved and adding an emotional pull to attract customers.
- The video is the first episode of a series called Design Review and feedback is requested from viewers.

- The video features a design review of companies funded by Y Combinator.
- Hokali's website layout and visual design are praised, but improvements are suggested for their pop-up, videos, and scrolling.
- Requestly's use of jargon is discussed, and it is recommended that they gather feedback to better describe their product.
- The website mentioned has too much information above the fold, and the screenshot needs improvement.
- Trust-building elements and organizing features on a separate page are suggested.
- The headline of the second product and messaging need improvement.
- Integrating eco-friendly elements can be done with little to no code.
- The layout, typography, colors, and trusted brands on the page are well done.
- The team section with faces and customer testimonials adds a personal touch.
- The messaging and headlines need improvement to clearly communicate the product and its target audience.
- The video is the first episode of a series called Design Review, and feedback is requested from viewers.

If you would like to have your startup's website critiqued in a future episode of Design Review, please submit your startup's info here: https://forms.gle/Yv7sCGpsi4PpAfRP9

In this first episode of Design Review, Y Combinator Group Partner, Aaron Epstein, is joined by Zain Ali, Instacart's first product designer and former Design Lead at Y Combinator. They review the websites of three Y Combinator funded companies from the most recent W22 batch.

Thank you to these companies for volunteering:
Hokali (https://www.hokali.co/)
Requestly (https://requestly.io/)
Verdn (https://verdn.com/)

Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DesignReview-apply
Work at a startup: https://yc.link/DesignReview-jobs

Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) -
00:00 - Introduction
00:19 - Guest: Zain Ali
00:47 - Hokali
08:38 - Requestly
16:10 - Verdn
22:44 - Wrap up

In this video, a special guest and I will be taking a look at companies funded by Y Combinator and giving our feedback on the design of their company's website.

He was the first product designer at Instacart and previously led design here at YC.

What are we going to be taking a look at today, Zain?

Today we have a small handful of companies from our recent Winter 22 batch who volunteered to have their landing pages critiqued.

We'll be giving them feedback on the layout, visual design, and user experience of their websites with the hopes that it'll help all of you improve your websites too.

Well, right out of the gate, we are hit with a pop up here.

And I don't know what they even do yet, but it's trying to hit me up for savings.

I'm curious, especially with Instacart on some of these, I think these tend to work a lot of times, but I think the user experience is not ideal because I'm going to close this so I can figure out what they do.

Yeah, I think a lot of consumer product websites use this sort of growth hack and it typically does work.

It typically does convert people, especially if they eventually consider purchasing, but it does fatigue users and typically people like click out of them.

But it's definitely something you can experiment with.

I think with this, it's, yeah, there's a little lack of information here to make a decision.

And so maybe adding some information about what you guys do or kind of create some like sort of FOMO with some messaging here might help.

And here we have, you know, a really strong headline.

It says learning new sports has never been easier.

And I guess now that I see some of the drop downs, some of the videos make sense that are kind of auto playing in the background.

Some of the videos are a little confusing like the tennis 1 makes sense to me and golf does but I see the 1 that I now understand is personal trainer, which I thought was just like a couple people working out And then the faraway shot of the ocean visually is really cool, but it didn't occur to me that was surfing.

And so I wasn't exactly sure what some of those were.

But now that you do the drop down now, it makes a lot more sense to me.

It seems like maybe you're trying to scroll down and it's not letting you.

It doesn't seem obvious when you're up here, at least on this size of a MacBook.

But yeah, as you scroll, it definitely exposes those types of services that they have, right?

So they have different types of lessons and personal training, which also seem like really strong call to actions because you can like hover over them and the hovers are really strong.

They don't immediately look like they're selectable, but I think that that hover makes it a little bit more obvious.

Does it give more info on surf lessons or something like that?

This is cool that you have dedicated pages for each specific type of lesson that you offer.

If for no other reason than when you're marketing, if you go to like surf communities, you may not want to send them just to the homepage, or they may see golf lessons or something and be like, ah, this isn't for me.

But if you can send them directly to a page about surf lessons, I imagine the conversion rate would go way up.

Because 1 of the main things that visitors to your website are looking for, the first is they're trying to figure out, like, what is this?

And I think you answered that pretty clearly in the first line up in the header of your site.

The next question that they wanna know is, Is this for me?

And when you take them to a dedicated landing page that's all about surfing, if they're like, yeah, I wanna learn to surf, then they're gonna be like, oh, this is exactly for me.

And that's where you're gonna get the really high conversion rates.

I think having dedicated pages for all your services is really important, especially for SEO to acquire customers.

The 1 thing that just kind of stands out for me though, is when I did select surf lessons, it felt like I went back to the top of the same page.

And so I didn't really notice that this entirely changed to be a whole surf page until I scrolled.

And so I wonder, you know, if there's a way to maybe like change this content.

And I think, you know, I really like video backgrounds, but they also can be a little distracting.

And I think that's what might've happened to me.

Some, if you're really trying to get them to choose a location, maybe there's another way to do that.

think the next section with this like animated, you know, this sort of like section of, I don't know, like quotes or it says surfing releases a cocktail of feel good chemicals into your brain and.

So it's kind of just promoting like the sport overall.

And I'm not sure like how important this is and it, and it, it, it animating is actually a little distracting as well.

When I was looking at like this content here, you know, backed by Y Combinator might not resonate with like everyone who might be trying to take a surf lesson.

And then, you know, They have the Google reviews here, which is great.

I would love to just even see like some of those Google reviews here.

And just seeing like real people who like might've reviewed the service or, you know, just like have some sort of feedback just to make it feel even more real, putting that somewhere higher up on the page can really just like increase my confidence to want to actually like book.

Yeah, it really helps with the trust factor.

As a startup founder, you have lots of disadvantages versus, you know, lots of other big companies.

1 of the main advantages that you have is that you are small and you can move quickly and you can give a lot of personalized attention to your customers.

And so by telling your story and connecting with them on that personal level, Like, hey, I was 1 of you.

People will connect with you, the founders, on the personal level.

And especially in the early days, that's so much of what you're selling to your customers.

It's not trying to look like some big fancy company.

It's the fact that there's like real people behind this, that if anything were to go wrong or if I were to have a bad experience with my surf lessons, that I could reach out to you and you'd probably wanna help me.

Like you would care a lot about that and helping me and making sure that I have a great experience because you want me to tell everybody else.

So having an about page or more info about your own story can be a really great way to build trust too.

I would really love just to see a video of someone like giving a testimonial, like as if they just took the lesson.

I feel like that would just get me really excited.

And I think, you know, this video at the top of the page is, you know, it's, you're trying to get, you're trying to immerse me into the experience of surfing and showing the lesson, someone like, you know, popping up on the board and stuff.

I think that's really important, but the, I think 1 of the biggest things that you can almost do on this page is really have 1 of these people just have a video of themselves really almost like casual talking to the camera and sharing their experience firsthand.

So, you know, I think maybe a lot of people might not read all of these, but they might be willing to watch a quick, you know, 10, 15 second video of someone talking about their experience.

Overall, I think this is really well done.

I think a lot of our feedback is kind of nibbling around the edges.

I think there's a lot of great stuff here.

They're checking a lot of the boxes of things that you'd want to see on a well done website.

And my hunch is it's probably converting decently well.

Just a quick break to tell you that in a future episode, we'll review the website of 1 of your startups.

If you'd like to be featured, there's a Google form in the description down below where you can submit your startup's website.

Okay, cool that they're putting that all the way up at the top.

I don't know if that's the main thing their users want to see.

Modify headers, redirect URLs, switch hosts, mock API response, delay network requests, insert custom scripts, and much more.

OK, so it seems like a dev tool that helps with that.

Seems like a lot of debugging kind of stuff would be my guess based on the feedback here.

Now, obviously, there's a lot of jargon in the header here and also in that kind of initial paragraph of text that says what they do.

I'm not sure that's usually jargon is a bad thing.

I'm not sure that's a bad thing here, because I think what it does is it kind of self selects for the type of people that are most likely to be their users to begin with.

So, you know, 1 way to test if this is the right thing is to go to talk to your existing users and ask them, how would you describe our product?

And when you do that, take the exact words or phrases that they say and just put that right in the headline of your website, right at the top.

Because chances are the way that your users think about and describe your product is actually the way that many other people that would be your target users would also think about the benefits and the value of your product.

So, for example, like if you would go ask your users, would they say like, oh yeah, requestly, that's like the best way to intercept and modify HTTP requests.

And like, I don't know, maybe that's what they would say, but maybe they would say something else instead.

So like that's just kind of a good way to pressure test some of the headlines that you might have on your site.

It also strikes me there's just a lot going on here above the fold.

You've got a lot of different things, kind of like a comma-separated list in the sub headline there.

You've got 2 buttons, download for Chrome, download for Mac OS.

You've got also available for all these other browsers.

You've got ask a question pop-up thing down there.

You've got a screenshot where I can't really tell what's going on.

And I think the main thing for you to figure out is what are the most important things to put up here?

And what is the main action that you want to drive all of your users towards?

And then kind of get rid of all the other stuff.

Maybe it can sit below the fold or as the user scrolls down and focus really on driving people to the main action that you want them to take, which I assume is either download for Chrome or download for macOS.

I also agree with just like the noise here, there's just a lot of colors, like the blue and the yellow, as much as you know, like you, that seems like your brand colors, this like big yellow circle in the background is definitely like pulling your attention to this screenshot.

But The screenshot is so small that it's really difficult to see what it even does, that it's almost not really providing any value now.

So unless you want to zoom in on the screenshot and show me really the meat of your product, because that's what might actually convince me that your product is solving a problem that I have, I would almost either get rid of that or just get a really good macro screenshot.

Screenshots are often problematic because you as the founder, you're used to looking at your product and you know how everything works, and you know everything has a purpose and what that purpose is.

And it's hard if you're just seeing a screenshot for the first time, especially when you don't really have much context on the product overall, and even what you do.

And then to look at this and like orient your head around it is really challenging.

And then the other thing is it seems like you're calling out a lot of kind of like features of things that you can do rather than like benefits or problems that this solves, which are generally more attractive to people.

So it's like, you generate custom API responses.

And I think that's the question that you want to answer.

And to Zane's point, try to decouple it from the screenshot that you have here so that you can give it more space to breathe and you can explain a little bit more how it works.

And I think that'll help people better understand what you actually do and why it's really useful.

You know, some of these features that you call out can totally be turned into a problem that people already have.

So it's extremely painful to generate custom API responses right now.

And people have to go through multiple pieces of software or services just to go and do that or do it through terminal.

And it's really, you know, it's just a painstaking way of doing things.

They can actually call out, you know, that pain and then draw me in about how you actually solved that problem.

And you can tell me that I'll never have to do that again.

And that actually makes me really feel that problem myself even more so, and it can really resonate.

And So just kind of thinking about features like that can help you sort of turn them into really great sort of call to actions.

When it seems like down below, we're starting to get into some of the trust building, like, all right, we've got this many rules created, we've got a lot of current users, a lot of rules shared.

So these are all things, these are good that you put these in here because it starts to give me confidence that like, ah, real people are using this and there's a lot of people using it.

And if it works for them, then maybe it'll work for me.

So this is also a really big feature section, right?

So you have 12345 features that we're going over again.

And you have collaborate with teammates again, right?

So we're just kind of like creating a lot of like redundant info.

And then you also have like this sort of visual diagram of sharing with colleagues and I guess like if anyone really like uses Google docs, it's almost like, you know, this should probably be very, you know, intuitive to someone when you're talking about sharing this stuff with other developers.

So I'm not sure you even really need this type of visual treatment.

That diagram hurts my head trying to figure out what's happening there.

And then we have another feature section with 6 more features.

So I wonder if you can kind of put maybe some of these sections within, you know, a different type of feature page instead of just all on like the homepage, because like Aaron was saying, this is like an extremely long page.

And I probably would have been fatigued by now and just either tried to figure out how do I sign up?

You should probably have your main call to action in the footer again, too, rather than just like join our mailing list or something like that.

I know that's probably not the main thing that you want to drive people towards.

It's probably like downloading and actually starting to use the product.

So I would cut away all the noise, focus everybody just on ideally a single download link that you want to optimize for.

Instant sustainability with automated storytelling.

Yeah, increase customer engagement 10x by attaching environmental pledges to any of your products and services.

Let your customers track their own impact automatically after purchase with updates from world leading providers." Awesome.

And I think this screenshot actually does kind of make that a little more obvious.

And I think this is actually a really good example of a screenshot working, but maybe not necessarily the headline working.

But when it comes to attaching environmental pledges to any of your products or services, and then showing this screenshot where, this is a very typical e-commerce layout, I see sunglasses and then add to bag, but you're graying out that screenshot and allowing this environmental pledge to really stand out.

I think that's a really great way to get to show a screenshot and show what your product is.

And it says powered by Verdin, which is really neat.

The animation is moving a little quickly, so it's a little bit hard for me to kind of like, you know, I have to actually watch it maybe a couple times to see how all of this works.

And even with this screenshot on the right, I'm not exactly sure where maybe this is occurring, if this would be happening on my website, or if this is happening on Burdin's website.

Yeah, I think the biggest room for improvement here is that headline.

My hunch is if you were to actually go to your users who have your widget integrated on their site right now, and you ask them to describe your product, I doubt that they would say, ah, Verdon is like instant sustainability with automated storytelling.

And I think sometimes as founders, we do this, where we know all the edge cases of our product and we want to make sure that we come up with, you know, 5 words that cover all those edge cases.

And realistically, like it may mean something to you because you have a lot of familiarity with it.

But people without the context of your product and how it works, it doesn't mean anything to them.

And so now, after reading the paragraph underneath it and seeing the graphic on the side, I have a better sense of how the product works.

And so now I go back and I read that first sentence and I'm like, okay, I kind of get, you know, what they were going for here, but it's just not clear, like being able to stand on its own.

And then another trick here with headlines is a lot of times the way that people will read your page is they're gonna scroll down really quickly just kind of skimming and they're just gonna read the headlines and so you want to try this yourself for your own product and decide if somebody just read the headlines here would they actually get the information that we would want them to get, or is the main information that you want people to take away, is it buried in these like small text paragraphs and, and bullets and screenshots and things like that?

I, again, I think this all really comes back to this like headline that really starts this confusion.

And I'm not sure if like automated storytelling is necessarily like the thing that me as a brand like I might, you know, I'm trying to solve for.

I think this might be like sort of like a vision that you have about your product and like what it does for people.

But what me like as a brand, I might be just trying to, you know, like, make my brand a little bit more eco friendly.

And I might not be able to do that with my products and services right now, but this is a really great way to integrate something like that with either like no code or, you know, a really small amount of code, it seems like.

And So it would be really interesting just to have sort of like that come through just in this like headline.

And there's a lot of good things that I think you have going for you on this page too.

Like 1, layout, typography, colors, like all this stuff is like, seems well done and has good hierarchy to it.

It's visually interesting without becoming overwhelming, I think.

I think we saw trusted by up near the top.

So that's a good way you're trying to build that trust right off the bat.

So unfortunately, I don't know that I've heard of these, but it's cool that you have some.

So it tells me like, I'm not gonna be your first customer.

And then I saw near the bottom, we had more on the team.

I get to see the faces, there's real people behind this.

There were some customer testimonials there.

So you've got a lot of like the core elements here.

I think it's just cleaning up some of the messaging and the headlines that's gonna make it a lot more clear because right now you don't do a great job through the headlines, at least of answering the question, what is this and who is it for?

And you just want anybody who's your potential customer to hit your page and instantly just go like, Oh, cool.

This is exactly the kind of thing that I could use on my website.

When you sort of like want to talk about the problem that you're solving, it's so important, you know, because it's, it's about like climate change.

How do you sort of bring that to the forefront?

I think, you know, this to me, this section here, makes me feel like I can choose from some of these really great partners to implement on my website.

And I think that kind of has this emotional pull that you almost might be able to like, add here.

And it's something really simple, like as if it's just like, no code solution for instant eco-friendly brand or whatever it is.

I think just like making me feel like I can implement this really quickly And even almost showing me some of those causes a little bit more front and center might really lure me in and again, bring that sort of emotional attachment to what you guys are solving for.

If you liked this first episode of Design Review, help us out by letting us know in the comments if there were any tips or reviews that you found useful.

It'll help us shape future episodes of this new series.

See all Y Combinator transcripts on Youtube

Critiquing Startup Websites With Instacart's First Designer