Critiquing Startup Websites With Instacart's First Designer

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. Welcome to Design Review! My guest this week is Zayn Ali. 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, Zayn?

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. Let's get started!

First up is Hokali. Well, right out of the gate, we are hit with a pop-up here: "Save 35% off your first purchase!" I don't know what they even do yet, but it's trying to hit me up for savings. Um, I don't know your experience, Zayn. 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. Then I'm going to be like, "Great! Now how do I get that 35% off?"

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're, you know, eventually considering purchasing. But it does fatigue users, and typically people click out of them. But it's definitely something you can experiment with.

I think with this, there’s a little lack of information here to make a decision, so maybe adding some information about what you guys do or kind of creating some sort of FOMO with some messaging here might help.

Yeah, so just close that, and here we have, you know, a really strong headline. It says, "Learning new sports has never been easier. Book online in three simple steps."

Yeah, I mean, this is a really good headline. It's super clear what they actually do, and I guess now that I see some of the drop-downs, some of the videos make sense that are kind of autoplaying in the background. I think visually they look really cool; it gets my attention. I totally get what you do.

Some of the videos are a little confusing, like the tennis one makes sense to me, and golf does, but I see the one that I now understand is personal trainer, which I thought was just like a couple of people working out. The far-away shot of the ocean is visually really cool, but it didn't occur to me that was surfing. So, I wasn't exactly sure what some of those were.

But now that you do the drop-down, it makes a lot more sense to me. It seems like maybe you're trying to scroll down, and it's not letting you; is this the entirety of the site? I was sort of waiting for that.

You can totally scroll; it doesn't seem obvious when you're up here, you know, at least on like 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.

Yeah, and can you click on it? Does it do anything? Just give more info on surf lessons or something like that?

Okay, looks like it just takes you to the top. And then, yeah, so this is cool that you have dedicated pages for each specific type of lesson that you offer. If for no other reason, then when you're marketing, if you go to like surf communities, you may not want to send them just to the home page, 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 will go way up because one of the main things that visitors to your website are looking for first is they're trying to figure out, like, "What is this?" I think you answered that pretty clearly in the first line, up in the header of...