The three questions your MVP landing page must answer
This article is part of a series of short notes around Product Design, hope you’ll find them inspiring and useful!
As a long time mentor for early stage startups, I find that most ventures have some difficulty figuring out what should be the message and content in their first landing page. This usually leads to clunky or relatively childish landing pages that are full of text or irrelevant images, and mostly just reveal the venture’s lack of maturity.
But this doesn’t need to be the case! It’s OK if you don’t have fancy graphics of your product, or clear features to showcase. Your MVP page can and should be in the air way before your product is ready. It is the best way for you to validate the need of your product in the market — the so called “product-market fit”. Dropbox did exactly this, with a very simple landing page, even before the product existed.
What are the three things that your MVP page should answer in the fastest and clearest way possible?
Where am I?
This is pretty obvious, but many startups forget to state clearly their name or logo. I need to understand who is talking to me, where did I land, what’s the name of the service I just arrived to. In the same way any customer support representative or front desk employee would present herself or have a name tag, I need to know who am I talking to.
Glass has an elegant, neat landing page, where the name of the service is shown upfront.
What does it do? Why is it good for me?
There are many ways to explain this — the shorter the better. However, don’t be afraid to include some more text if needed. Leaving this ambiguous could cost a lot later. People are not eager to explore shady things, and they have short time and patience to figure out whatever is not crystal clear.
Sunday not only manages to explain what they do in a single sentence, but also added bullet points to strengthen the benefits of the product for restaurants owners.
What can I do here?
This comes down to a simple CTA. It can be an entering the app, signing up for updates, getting more info, or whatever you can lead the user to do in order to make use of your product and create a fruitful relationship.
Lovebug makes this quick and easy, with zero doubts for the user about what can be done here.
Preferentially, these three questions should be answered in what we call “above the fold”. These days users are used to scrolling further to get more information, but you should aim to provide the basics at first sight.
Answering these three simple questions upfront will improve your website’s usability and credibility, hence leading to higher conversion.
Need more landing page inspiration? Check out lapa.ninja
Hello! I’m Nati Asher. I’ve spent the last 10 years in product design & technology, designing and leading teams at startups, design agencies, and large tech companies. I am a UX lecturer and public speaker as well. At times, I facilitate design thinking workshops and mentor young designers. Thank you for reading!
