"Download" is literally the eighth word on the page, and fourth word on the navigation bar. If a person can't see that, they're destined for a Darwin award.
The text is too small and spans most of the screen. Difficult to read on big monitors. Reading that grey block on mobile is also really straining. I actually just gave up and came to read the comments instead.
The word 'download' is exactly the same font as everything else. So it's hard to find. Why not have a button that stands out? There are 2 links called 'click here'. So you have the read the surrounding text before knowing where you want to click. I can't think of a good reason not to have a clear call to action button that stands out from the rest of the page.
Compared to almost any modern site, this is really bad.
I think you’re overrating modern web design. For example recently I have been frustrated at the amount of web sites I have been on which “respond” to the geometry of the browser by completely removing essential navigational elements of the site and giving the user no indication that anything is missing. This makes for example using the site in a web browser tiled to half the screen width on a laptop impossible.
This site even works perfectly on mobile, because it doesn’t change to simplify itself to the point of being unusable, like many modern web sites do, often even refusing to stop doing so when choosing “request desktop site” in the mobile browser.
You cut out the important part of what you're replying to. They'll only download it if they know what it is. For that, the page is poorly designed. It wasn't until I got down to the very bottom that I understood the user value proposition, which is explained in the review quote: "[...] Sandboxie, which lets you run programs independent of the rest of your system. That way they can't infect, access, or otherwise interfere with your Windows installation [...]"
I don't get it. The people who made the website clearly decided that an announcement that primarily affects the existing user base was more important than explaining them what sandboxie is for the ten millionth time.
Sorry, are we ignoring the fact that the primary nav, which any person familiar with "web sites" since the 90's knows to look at, has both "help & faq" _and_ "how it works" as options?
Are we talking about people who don't understand that if you want the actual details rather than the summary, that's not going to be on the landing page, but on their own dedicated pages?
We're not "ignoring" that. It's just that some of us are familiar with how fickle users are. Anybody making a product they actually want people to use should have a home page that explains early on the user problem and how the product solves that problem, and then makes it easy for people to get the product.
As an example, take this Android tool I just downloaded:
Very early on, the copy says: "Lockito allows you to make your phone follow a fake itinerary, with total control over the speed, altitude and GPS signal accuracy. You can also simulate a static location. This is the must-have tool for any Android developers who needs to test geofencing-based apps or just test his app on different locations."
It's a clear, concise description of what the tool does, who needs it, and why.
If you don't have that, will some people still rummage around and download your thing regardless? Sure. But fewer of them. And here, for a product that people may not know they need, it could be a lot fewer.
Now, click on the eighth word and try to figure out how to actually download. I'll wait. (And compare it to a modern site, say, firefox.com or chrome.com.)
I guarantee you this design would confuse a lot of people. Imagine you're not the computer savviest person around, how you'd read this.
- The large, bolded "Click to download" text isn't clickable, like pretty much every other "Click to..." prompt you've seen.
- After a moment of confusion you think oh okay, there'll be a list of links to places I can download it from then. But there isn't. There's just the product logo. Download the product from itself, maybe? But why is it written like there's supposed to be a list? Hm.
- Oh wait, after "Download the latest version" there's a separate section called "Downloads", that's where the downloads must be.
- Okay, down there after a while there's bold text that says "Download", but that's not clickable, nor is the text next to it that says "Sandboxie Installer." Keep reading.
- Ah, okay, here's a table with a single row for some reason, with a nice link "Download from this site."
- Wait, why did "Download from this site" take me to a completely different site? The address in the bar is totally different, the design is totally different, I've never heard of this new site before and it wants me to give them my job title, full name, company name, and zip code. Is this a popup ad? Is this a scam? I thought I was downloading it from that site I was just on.
Incidentally it doesn't matter as the form doesn't understand my country's zip code system and won't accept it.
Reading through your comment and looking back at the Download page, I think you're right. The linkified image is especially poor design (although, I think the intention becomes more obvious when there are multiple linkified images to common software-download destinations, e.g. SourceForge or FileHippo, as (IIRC) was previously the case).
I suppose it may just boil down to a fundamental difference of opinion; I don't really think it's necessary for every website to try to accommodate entirely non-tech savvy users — especially a site offering software that already assumes existing technical ability (if you can't negotiate an antiquated download page, you're probably going to struggle to use a lot of software of that era, including Sandboxie).
The topic of this thread is whether the website at question is “fast-loading, simple, information-dense and distinctively-styled yet still very readable” compared to today’s mainstream/recommended designs. My take is that information sprinkled in walls of text of dubious value instead of elements that naturally stand out is not readable or actionable at all. If your argument is tech-savvy people should be made to jump through hurdles to download this specific tool, then (1) I don’t agree with this pointless gatekeeping, time wasted is time wasted; (2) you’re not refuting my point.
Also, I can find the download link in maybe 5 seconds, but I bet my father who happens to be an aging software engineer, savvy enough to use this but getting slower, definitely can’t.
You're making the wrong assumption that getting as many users on board for an aging non-profitable non-core project is actually a goal.
I personally have a project that is in it's early stages and the worst thing that could happen right now is that it goes viral and then I won't be able to work on it at my own pace anymore. Having a user base of 3 people is already tiring enough as it is.
It feels like you're ignoring the fact that the people who will actually download sandboxie are quite a bit smarter, and quite a bit more familiar with "finding a download link" than the people you're describing?
A giant "download" button is perfect if your general audience is "everyone". Sandboxie is _nowhere near that level of popular_ nor could it be. Heck, that's literally why it's going open source right now: it's so niche, with such a narrow demographic, that there's isn't even any appreciable amount of money to be made from the people that DO use it.
I could get behind not calling users stupid just because they don't fit our assumptions.
And I hope you never lose half of your family to cancer within a 2 year period, like I dod. But, should that happen, you might appreciate what that word means. But I wouldn't call you "stupid" just because you don't get it. I'd say that we have different life experiences and assumptions.
I like this webpage. There are no ads, no popups, did not ask for my email, did not try to send me notifications, did not ask me to register, did not autoplay a video, did not hijack my scroll behavior, on parallax BS, no images of an open office in the background. In short NO NON-SENSE. It loaded in under 1s (for me), has all the important stuff right there at the top.
I do not want any product page to do anything more than this. Please.
From the same (only) page that asks for email, company, etc.
> Due to requirements of the U.S. government, export compliance is now mandatory when downloading our software. Complete the form to proceed with your download.
Not great. But I haven't seen a better page designed in 2019.
It is not hard to figure out what it is, apart from the news announcement and a download link it says it right there with one sentence.
Want to know how it works. Press "How it works". Want do download it? Press "Download".
Contrast that with today where you have to figure out which filter bubble the author of the page is in. Such niche questions such as: Which OS does this work on? Which language is this library for? Can be quite tiresome to find out...
Does the average person really want to download a tool that helps them sandbox windows applications? I mean, maybe they should want to, but do they want to?
Fun fact: you can have pages of useless text and it'll still load faster than a single jpeg. This page might look like it's from another era, but it also has the benefits of that era:
- it actually loads fast
- it works without scripts.
- it has no ads.
- it has no tracking beyond page analytics.
If those are the benefits, then please, give me more shitty looking websites like this for all the other essential software that should be found on any sane professional's machine, and any "taking personal responsibility" home user's machine.
Half of the content on the page is literally titled "What We Do" with a download link above it.
You're clearly disliking the design to the point that your criticism doesn't even make sense, if that's your complaint then say it outright instead of hiding it behind a lie.
how were they fast on 56kbps modem connections? i clearly remember having to leave my pc on all night to download a single mp3. for websites i would usually grab a book and read a few pages while the site loaded.
I have begrudgingly been pulled into SPAs as a developer, and at first I was very skeptical.
Now that I see what things like Angular can do, with lazy-loaded components, and only downloading JSON data and letting the client render the DOM, my pages are actually much faster and the UX is vastly better.
Yes, you need to download the Angular libs, but so many pages use them now they are likely cached, and are negligible in size for a fast connection.
After that, it's client-side routing and downloading mostly just downloading JSON from a REST API. You don't need to server to push a 5,000 row table with all the mark-up, you just grab that data and have the browser construct your table.
And yes, you can still copy/paste the URL. And save the page as HTML. And everything else you can do with a "non-SPA" page.
The times have changed. This website now needs pinch to zoom to be readable on smaller screens. Also the text is centered across the entire page, reducing legibility.
What I remember from that era is Flash, living through the shit show that was browser quirks and dealing with a front-end stack with no foundation in computer science.
