Wording "Sign in" on landing page

[schoettl]

jakob:

To be honest, I agree that "sign in" is not 100% intuitive. My first reaction was "sign in, sign up? why would i need to create an organice account?". "Connect cloud storage" would maybe more clear, or just "Open organice app".

EDIT: "Open organice" would be better than "Sign in", I think. "Sign in" might be an inhibition threshold for people coming new to organice.

munen:

@schoettl I’m on the fence regarding wording.

I can appreciate that “Sign in” can lead to the question regarding having to create an account for organice. However, what’s the issue with that?

Imo, if “Sign in” is creating trouble, which is quite a normal action to do for many apps, then the CTA “Open organice app” after having opened the actual organice app will blow some heads. This kind of recursion might just be too much on some^^

And “Connect Cloud storage” does not sound like a very catchy primary CTA on a landing page.

If you don’t like “Sign In”, I propose we start a separate discussion and go over options.

Originally posted by @munen in https://github.com/200ok-ch/organice/issues/815#issuecomment-1146634937

[schoettl]

So, "sign in" always sounds to me like the need to sign up to some proprietary product – where often there is actually no need to have an account beside the ad and marketing e-mails that you get after sign up. In organice this isn't the case and therefore I'd prefer that this is not suggested to new users.

I suggested "Open organice" because the landing page totally looks like a product page to me (like https://200ok.ch/organice.html ). It doesn't look like a PWA, right? For me, the real app starts at https://organice.200ok.ch/sign_in (with the familiar organice app design). I was actually surprised to see the landing page at the app's URL. E.g. the web apps of Spotify, WhatsApp, and Threema don't have such landing pages – they open the app directly. EDIT: That does not mean that I think a landing page is a bad idea. It's just not the app, therefore "open app" instead of "sign in".

[munen]

Hi @schoettl

Thank you for creating the new issue so we can discuss this properly. Apologies for not getting back to you earlier :pray: The last week was pretty full, but let's take this one on now!

So, "sign in" always sounds to me like the need to sign up to some proprietary product – where often there is actually no need to have an account beside the ad and marketing e-mails that you get after sign up. In organice this isn't the case and therefore I'd prefer that this is not suggested to new users.

Ok, I understand where you're coming from now. However, I personally cannot relate, yet. "Signing in" is a technical term and has nothing to do with the application/product being proprietary. For example, both GitLab and Feedbin are open source and both have a "Login" on their landing page.

I suggested "Open organice" because the landing page totally looks like a product page to me (like https://200ok.ch/organice.html ). It doesn't look like a PWA, right?

Correct, the "landing page" is a landing page and should not look like an app. A landing page has the task of succinctly explaining what the application is doing and who it is for. It serves a singular and focused purpose – to lead visitors to a product, service or offer, and encourage them to take the desired action. In our case that is to "sign up" and use organice.

Before, we didn't really have a landing page explaining what organice is. In today's world that's just unprofessional and leads to really bad conversions. In private tests, I have seen interested users just give up, because they didn't understand what it is for. Of course, we don't have big numbers on that, because we do not have any tracking.

However, even if interested users would have understood the prior page, it would not have worked at all for lead generation. The new one has the core functionality for that.

I'm open to discussing the wording of the CTA, of course. Choosing the right CTA is a major decision for optimizing conversions and not losing users. So, if we come up with something better than "Sign up", I'm all for it.

I was actually surprised to see the landing page at the app's URL. E.g. the web apps of Spotify, WhatsApp, and Threema don't have such landing pages – they open the app directly.

I don't understand why you were surprised. I basically do not know any professional products (Free software or proprietary) that do not have a landing page without a "sign in" or "register" CTA. Some that are not free as in free beer say "Free trial", of course.

Let's just take your first example: The landing page of Spotify also wants the visitor to login:

As for "Open app": This will technically not be correct, so I'm not in favour. Let's do what a new user does:

1. Find out about organice on any channel (HN, Reddit, Github, whatever).
2. Go to https://organice.200ok.ch
3. Log in to the favored sync back-end
4. Navigate to the favored Org file
5. Save bookmark to Home Screen

When the user now opens the app from the Home Screen, she will not be logged in anymore. I do not know how it is on Android, but on iOS the PWA and the browser do not share state. So she will she the landing page, again. And then "open app" will not make sense. She just opened the app. The same would happen if instead of 3 she just saved the app to the homescreen instead of logging in to the sync back-end first.

The same is true for other FOSS software that I use daily and even pay for every month. https://github.com/feedbin/ is an example.

Having said all that, and having thought about your point, this is what I have come up with: We could write code to make a distinction if organice runs in the browser or as a PWA and show a different first page. In the browser the current landing page, as a PWA directly to the login screen. If there is a way to do that reliably, that would make sense to me, as well!