Doing Words

Spellrus.com redesign feedback

// November 8th, 2008 // Reviews, Startup

Here’s a surprise: I hate spelling mistakes. But correct spelling is nothing without appropriate grammar, and good grammar won’t save you if you’re not writing or designing well. To see what I mean, let’s zoom in on some of the details of this redesign mockup for web spelling startup, Spellrus.com.

Kudos to the Spellrus team for putting an early stage redesign mockup up on their blog and asking for feedback from visitors. It takes courage and commitment to customer relationships and makes us users feel like part of the team.

But it’s a shame that a spelling startup has itself a prominent grammar problem – the two different meanings of “free.” In this case I’d recommend removing both instances of “free” from the homepage because neither is as good as it could be.

Instead of “Free trial” consider something like, “Find the spelling errors on your site free!” (since that is the benefit of the offer). Don’t say “Free your site from spelling errors” because nobody’s looking for ‘freedom from spelling errors’ (or if they are, I haven’t seen the bumper sticker.)

Over-using “free” on a homepage makes you look a little desperate and cheap. Making it all upper case and adding exclamation marks everywhere heightens that impression.

Finally, consider moving the video tutorial to a ‘learn more’ section of the site. Casual visitors can skim and glean what they need from 4-5 bullet points and a few screendumps more quickly than they can from a 2-3min video.

Remember you have <10 secs to attract and retain a new visitor’s interest. The right time to use a video walk-thru is when the visitor is looking for more detail, especially for more detail on how the interface works. When they’re still making up their mind about committing 2-3mins to your product, hit them with punchy, brief bullets.