Saturday, April 13, 2013

Why Screenshots pages are required on UI applications web sites

Here will be summary or draft thoughts about description pages for UI applications:

When somebody search for application he do it by textual search in google/bing/.... that approach direct him to your project/application page with description. And from that step investigation approach become different.

Your project will never be alone in goolge search results - but you have to persuade new user examine list of features and to download and try your application.

Both that targets could be done only if content that you provide on web site is easy to read (small chunks of text that describe key feature), and PICTURES for most cool features!

Pictures are vital and indispensable ! by means of good picture you can describe more that you can describe in big text paragraph. Nobody will read your description ! Text descriptions are for search engine bots only!
By means of cast of screenshot you can force user to fall in love with your application - from first sight!
Or by judging of screens user could understand that that this application is not for him - but he will not spend his time on testing your application so user's attitude will not be negative, it will stay neutral - IT IS BETTER THEN NEGATIVE.

Absence of Screeshots pages at your site - will make your project to be reviewed the last.

Even shell applications/scripts need screeshots !!  see example for zsh-git-prompt below.

Good example examples:
any Firefox or Thunderbirs addon description page, example1, example2.
Meld - http://meldmerge.org/features.html
Shutter - http://shutter-project.org/preview/screenshots/
Eclipse plugins - example
Xchat - http://xchat.org/
Git shell prompt - https://github.com/olivierverdier/zsh-git-prompt.

Bad example:
DSM library -  http://jdsm.sourceforge.net/index.html
Xchat-gnome - https://live.gnome.org/Xchat-Gnome
JMeter - http://jmeter.apache.org/index.html 
...
i will keep posting as smth come to my attention.

No comments:

Post a Comment