Hoodie Homepage Messaging

[bnb]

Overall Hoodie messaging overhaul

I looked into Hoodie a good while ago, and was confused as to what the product actually does. The homepage didn't really give a descriptor of that.

Fast forward to today, and the website has gotten better, but there's still not a succinct point of what Hoodie is.

The first real, non-rhetorical copy on the page says it's first a tool for front-end developers who want to build their own applications, and it's second a platform that developers can build on.

There are two problems here: the way in which Hoodie creates applications isn't defined, and developers are put as second-class citizens.

With the first problem, there needs to be a defining element that conveys what the product does in terms the reader knows and can understand. Is it a static site generator? A back-end API for content hosting? A fast 0-60 CMS? There needs to be definition from the very beginning so people can know what they're getting into.

With the second problem, I would say all users should be first-class - we shouldn't alienate developers by saying "this playground is for east side kids, but you west side kids can play here too, I guess." It doesn't create a super welcoming environment for developers.

Finally, I know this is a bit outside the scope of the editorial team. However, I think that since this team will be handling social media and content that's put out other than blog posts, we need to be able to audit the website as well - if you disagree with this or feel president needs to be set/discussed, we should open another issue.

[gr2m]

❤️ 💯

You really hit a nerve there. We have discussions about "what is Hoodie" and "who is the target group" a lot lately. At out Meet the Hoodies Event all people new to Hoodie were puzzled by its landing page. One think that stuck with me was that we want to do different Hoodie releases with different target groups. I bring that up because if we do that, we could reflect the state of Hoodie and it’s current target group on the hoodie homepage?

Out of my mind, I think we have more or less these releases planned so far

1. Hoodie 1 – the contributors release
   Hoodie is running on it’s new architecture, with good documentation and low barrier for new contributors. Hoodie can be used in apps, but without plugins at this point
2. Hoodie 2 – the developer release
   Hoodie Plugins! We invite a broader developer community to grow the Hoodie world by creating and sharing Hoodie plugins for all the things, like sending emails, payments, sharing, you name it
3. Hoodie 3 – the front-end release
   Hoodie is ready for people who don’t know or don’t like to do back-end. It's as simple as using jQuery. We have hosting figured out, and ideally no need to touch the terminal anymore.

That’s as far as I think right now. Sorry for dumping my thoughts here, happy to move the discussion on release plan somewhere else. I just tried to give some context for my suggestion, to tailor the Hoodie website towards new potential contributors at this point (not limited to coders, of course)

[summerspirit]

Maybe we can look to other people writing about hood.ie for some word choice ideas?

http://www.toptal.com/front-end/introducing-hoodie-full-stack-app-development-for-front-end-developers

[NickColley]

👍 this is definitely in the scope of editorial in my opinion.

If you were to take a UXy approach you could define personas (Similar to what @gr2m has commented with) and then define user journeys based on that. Then with those you could do user testing with new users to see if they can fulfil those journeys.

Just a few thoughts on how this could be done in a measured way, great work regardless thanks 👍