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Discussion on: I built a new website to help developers. It's small now but will have hundreds of tools, resources and more... Check it out!

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Jonathan Schneider

Sure, I've struggled a lot with my own projects explanations, but the way better instructions have an impact is actually measurable. So you could put some analytics on the site to measure where people are, hover and click. Some tools offer an over-the-shoulder view, I find that a bit intrusive though.

Having something pre-loaded and placeholders in input fields is also a simple way to save on implementing validations... ;) But on a more serious note, in a previous job I worked on a funnel where simply telling users they can re-do a step actually worked wonders on conversion.

So with the freelancer this was the end-result
Before that, I did a couple of sketches, but wasn't really happy with those. When you post on upwork for example, lots of designers can see it, so it forces you to write it in a non-technical way. If you don't, people already shy away from the project. By the responses you get, you can kind of tell how well you communicated non-technically, and I was also very clear about it being open-ended. There are lots of people who want to "sell" what they want you to have, but you want to "sell" through the image they produce. I found someone who had done graphics for technical blog posts and was interested in doing science-illustrations, and she could show me how she worked with pencil-drafts in previous projects. It fit with my project, because it's a proof of concept, and I needed to explain it in a simple medium. In your case, you already have the medium, so maybe trying that process with a UI designer might help. In the past, I've made the experience that it's sometimes good to have a single paper to print out so you can hand it to people. If you can communicate the whole idea like that it's really valuable (I think I'm slowly getting there, going through different print-outs). But I'm also just pinching my feet in the water of marketing :)