What the first version did
The first homepage explained what Navital Labs is: a parent company that builds AI products, with a point of view about how software should be built. All true, and all written for someone who already knew why they were on the page.
The problem became obvious when we watched people read it. They understood the company and couldn't say what we make. That's a comprehension failure, and no amount of better wording of the same idea fixes it.
The change
The products moved up. The philosophy moved down. The headline stopped describing a category and started describing what the products do for the people who use them.
Stated that plainly it sounds like an obvious call. It wasn't, because the philosophy is the part we care most about, and moving it below the fold felt like demoting the reason the company exists. The resolution was accepting that the philosophy is more persuasive after someone knows what we build than before.
What we took from it
- The thing you most want to say is often not the thing a first-time reader needs first
- Watching two or three people read a page finds problems that reading it yourself never will
- "It's all true" and "it works" are different standards, and the first one is easy to hide behind
- Ordering is a bigger lever than wording, and it's cheaper to change