# Critiquing startup websites with Instacart's first designer, Zain Ali

**Author:** Aaron Epstein
**Type:** Video
**URL:** https://www.ycombinator.com/library/Ix-critiquing-startup-websites-with-instacart-s-first-designer-zain-ali
**YouTube ID:** gok9BZLMxDs

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In this first episode of Design Review, Y Combinator Group Partner, Aaron Epstein, is joined by Zain Ali, Instacart's
first product designer and former Design Lead at Y Combinator. They review the websites of three Y Combinator funded
companies from the most recent W22 batch.

## Transcript

in this video a special guest and i will be taking a look at companies funded by y combinator and giving our feedback on the design of their company's website welcome to design review my guest this week is zayn ali he was the first product designer at instacart and previously led design here at yc what are we going to be taking a look at today zayn today we have a small handful of

companies from our recent winter 22 batch who volunteered to have their landing pages critiqued we'll be giving them feedback on the layout visual design and user experience of their websites with the hopes that it'll help all of you improve your websites too let's get started first up is hokali well right out of the gate we are hit with a pop-up here save 35 off your first purchase and i don't know what they even do yet but it's trying to hit me up for savings

um i i don't know your experience saying i'm curious especially with instacart on some of these i think these tend to work a lot of times but i think the user experience is not ideal because i'm going to close this so i can figure out what they do and then i'm going to be like great now how do i get that 35 off yeah i think a lot of consumer product websites use this sort of growth hack and it typically does work it typically does convert people especially if they're you know eventually consider purchasing

but it does fatigue users and typically people like click out of them um but it's definitely something you can experiment with i think with this it's uh yeah there's a little lack of information here to make a decision and so maybe adding some information about what you guys do or kind of create some like sort of fomo with some messaging here might help yeah so just close that and here we have uh you know a really strong headline it says learning new sports has never been easier book online in three simple steps yeah i mean

it this is a really good headline it's super clear what they actually do and i guess now that i see some of the drop down some of the videos make sense that are kind of auto playing in the background i think visually they look really cool it gets my attention i totally get what you do some of the videos are a little confusing like the tennis one makes sense to me and golf does but i see the one that i now understand is personal trainer which i thought was just like a couple people working out and then the far away shot of the ocean visually is really cool

but it didn't occur to me that was surfing and so um i wasn't exactly sure what some of those were um but now that you do the drop down now it makes a lot more sense to me it seems like maybe you're trying to scroll down and it's not letting you is this the entirety of the site i was sort of waiting for that um you can totally scroll it doesn't seem obvious when you're up here you know at least on like this size of a macbook but yeah as you scroll it definitely exposes those types of services that they have right so they

have different types of lessons and personal training which also seem like really strong call to actions because you can like hover over them and the hovers are really strong they don't immediately look like they're selectable but uh i think that that hover makes it a little bit more obvious yeah and can you click on it does it do anything just give more info on surf lessons or something like that okay looks like it just takes you to the top and then yeah so this is cool that you have dedicated pages for each specific type of lesson

that you offer um if for no other reason then um when you're marketing if you go to like surf communities you may not want to send them just to the home page or they may see golf lessons or something and be like ah this isn't for me um but if you can send them directly to a page about surf lessons i imagine the conversion rate will go way up because one of the main things that um that visitors to your website are looking for the first is they're trying to figure out like what is this and i think you answered that pretty

clearly in the first line um up in the header of your site the next question that they want to know is is this for me and when you take them to a dedicated landing page that's all about surfing if they're like yeah i want to learn to surf then they're going to be like oh this is this is exactly for me and that's where you're going to get the really high conversion rates yeah i like that i think having dedicated pages for all your services is really important especially for seo to

acquire customers the one thing that just like kind of stands out for me though was when i did select surf lessons it felt like i went back to the top of the same page and so i didn't really notice that this entirely changed to be a whole surf page until i scrolled and so i wonder you know if there's a way to maybe like change this content and i think you know i really like video backgrounds but they also can be a little distracting and i think that's what might have happened to me some if you're really trying to get them to choose a location maybe there's

another way to do that i think the next section with this like animated uh you know this sort of like section of i don't know like quotes or says surfing releases a cocktail feel good chemicals into your brain and relaxes your brain calms the mind so it's kind of just promoting like the sport overall and i'm not sure like how important this is and it and it it animating is actually a little distracting as well when i was looking at like this content here you know backed by y commoner might not resonate with like everyone who might be trying

to take a surf lesson but decathlon is a pretty big brand and then you know they have the google reviews here which is great i would love to just even see like some of those google reviews here and just seeing like real people who like might have reviewed the service or you know just like have some sort of feedback just to make it feel even more real putting that somewhere higher up on the page can really just like increase my confidence to want to actually like book yeah it really helps with the trust factor

as a startup founder you have lots of disadvantages versus uh you know lots of other big companies one of the main advantages that you have is that you are small and you can move quickly and you can give a lot of personalized attention to your customers and so by telling your story and connecting with them on that personal level like hey i was one of you i wanted to learn how to surf here's what i did it was all terrible so that's why i created this product like people will connect with you the founders on the personal

level and especially in the early days that's so much of what you're selling to your customers it's not you know trying to look like some big fancy company it's the fact that there's like real people behind this that if anything were to go wrong or if i were to have a bad experience with my surf lessons that i could reach out to you and you'd probably want to help me like you would care a lot about that and helping me and making sure that i have a great experience because you want me to tell everybody else so um having an about page or more info about your own story can be a really

great way to build trust too i would really love just to see a video of someone like giving a testimonial like as if they just took the lesson i feel like that would just get me really excited and i think you know this video at the top of the page is you know you're trying to get you're trying to immerse me into the experience of surfing and showing the lessons someone like you know popping up on the board and stuff i think that's really important but the i think one of the biggest things that you can almost do on this page is really have one of these people just have a video of themselves

really almost like casual talking to the camera and sharing their experience firsthand you know this is a lot of text so you know i think maybe a lot of people might not read all of these but they might be willing to watch a quick you know 10 15 second video of someone talking about their experience yep overall i think this is really well done um you know i think a lot of our feedback is kind of nibbling around the edges i think there's a lot of great stuff here they're checking a lot of the boxes of things that you'd want to see on a well

well done website um and my hunches it's probably converting decently well just a quick break to tell you that in a future episode we'll review the website of one of your startups if you'd like to be featured there's a google form in the description down below where you can submit your startups website now back to the reviews alright requestly now so let's see here backed by y combinator okay cool that they're putting that all the way up at the top i don't know if that's the main thing their users want to see let's find

out um intercept and modify http requests let's see modify headers redirect urls switch hosts mock api response delay network requests insert custom scripts and much more okay so it seems like um a dev tool um that helps with um seems like a lot of debugging kind of stuff would be my guess based on the feedback here now obviously there's a lot of jargon in the header here and also in

that kind of initial paragraph of text that says what they do i'm not sure that's usually jargon's a bad thing i'm not sure that's a bad thing here because i think what it does is it kind of self selects for the type of people that are most likely to be their users to begin with so you know one way to test if this is the right thing is to go to talk to your existing users and ask them how would you describe our product and when you do that take the exact

words or phrases that they say and just put that right in the the headline of your website right at the top because chances are the way that your users think about and describe your product is actually the way that many other uh people that that would be your target users would also think about the benefits and the value of your product so for example like if you would go ask your users would they say like oh yeah requestly that's like the best way to intercept and modify http requests and

like i don't know maybe that's what they would say but maybe they would say something else instead so like that's just kind of a good way to pressure test some of the headlines that you might have on your site it also strikes me there's just a lot going on here above the fold you've got the headline you've got a lot of different things kind of like a comma separated list in the sub sub headline there you've got two buttons download for chrome download for mac os you've got also available for all these other browsers you've got five star ratings

you've got reviews you've got active users you've got um ask a question pop-up thing down there you've got a screenshot where i can't really tell what's going on so anyway there's like a lot going on and i think the main thing for you to figure out is what are the most important things to put up here and what is the main action that you want to drive all of your users towards and then kind of get rid of all the other stuff maybe it can sit below the fold or as the user scrolls down and focus really on driving people to the main action that you want them to take

which i assume is either download for chrome or download for mac os i also agree with just like the noise here there's just a lot of colors like the blue and the yellow as much as you know like you that seems like your brand colors this like big yellow circle in the background is definitely like pulling your attention to this screenshot but the screenshot is so small that it's really difficult to see like what it even does that it's almost like not really providing any value now um so like unless you want to like zoom in on the screenshot and show me really like the meat of your product and you

know because that's what might actually convince me that your product is solving a problem that i have um i would almost like you know either get rid of that or or just like get a really good macro screenshot screenshots are often problematic because you as the founder you're used to looking at your product and you know how everything works and you know everything has a purpose and what that purpose is and it's hard if you're just seeing a screenshot for the first time especially when you don't really have much context

on the product overall and even what you do and then to look at this and like orient your head around it is really challenging and then the other thing is it seems like you're calling out a lot of um kind of like features of things that you can do rather than like benefits or problems that this solves which are generally more attractive to people so it's like you generate custom api responses like cool that's a feature why does somebody care about that and i think that's the question that you want to answer and to

zane's point try to decouple it from the screenshot that you have here so that you can give it more like space to breathe and you can explain a little bit more how it works and i think um that'll help people better understand what you actually do and why it's really useful i totally agree you know some of these um these features that you call out can totally be turned into you know a problem that people already have so if it's extremely painful to you know generate custom api responses

right now and like people have to go through like you know multiple pieces of software or services just to go and do that or do it through terminal and it's really you know it's just a painstaking way of do doing things then actually call out you know that pain and then draw me in about how you actually solve that problem and you know you can tell me that like i'll never have to do that again and that actually um makes me really feel that problem myself even more so and it can like really resonate and so

just kind of thinking about features like that can help you sort of turn them into really great sort of call to actions when it sees like down below we're starting to get into um some of the the trust building like all right we've got this many rules created we've got a lot of current users a lot of rules shared so these are all things these are good that you put these in here because it starts to give me confidence that like ah real people are using this and there's a lot of people using it and if it works for them then maybe it'll work for me so this is a this is also a really big

feature section right so you have one two three four five features that we're going over again um and you know you have collaborate with teammates again right so we're just kind of like creating a lot of like redundant info and then you also have like this sort of visual diagram of sharing with colleagues and i guess like if anyone really like uses google docs it's almost like you know this should probably be very um you know intuitive to someone when you're talking about sharing this stuff

with other developers so i'm not sure you even really need this type of visual treatment yeah that diagram hurts my head trying to figure out what's happening there and then we have another feature section with six more features so i wonder if you can kind of um put maybe some of these sections within you know a different type of feature page uh instead of just all along like the home page because like aaron was saying this is like extremely long page and i probably would have been fatigued by

now and just either tried to figure out how do i sign up you should probably have your main call to action in the footer again too rather than just like join our mailing list or something like that um that's probably not the main thing that you want to drive people towards it's probably like downloading and actually starting to use the product so i would cut away all the noise focus everybody just on ideally a single download link that you want to optimize for

cool all right well thank you requestly and let's move on now to verdin instant sustainability with automated storytelling it's that's a little vague it feels like i am not sure what that says yeah increase customer engagement 10x by attaching environmental pledges to any of your products and services let your customers track their own impact automatically after purchase with

updates from world leading providers awesome so that's very clear it seems like and i think this uh you know this screenshot actually does um kind of make that a little more obvious and i think this is actually a really good example of a screenshot working but maybe not necessarily the headline working but but when it comes to attaching environmental pledges to any of your products or services and then showing this screenshot where you know this is a very typical you know

e-commerce layout you know i see sunglasses and then add to bag but you're graying out that screenshot and allowing this environmental pledge to really stand out i think that's a really great way to again to show a screenshot and show what your product is um and it says power by verdin which is really neat the animation is moving a little quickly so it's a little bit hard for me to kind of like you know i have to actually watch it maybe a couple times to see how all of this works and even with this screenshot on the

right i'm not exactly sure where maybe this is occurring if this would be happening on my website or if this is happening on verdin's website yeah i think the biggest room for improvement here is that headline my hunch is if if you were to actually go to your users who have your widget integrated on their site right now and you ask them to describe your product i doubt that they would say ah vernon is like instant sustainability with automated storytelling

um i think that's that's a little a little confusing and i think sometimes as founders we do this where we know all the edge cases of our product and we want to make sure that we come up with you know five words that cover all those edge cases and realistically like it may mean something to you because you have a lot of familiarity with it but people without the context of your product and how it works it doesn't mean anything to them and so now you know after reading the paragraph underneath it and seeing

um the graphic on the side i have a better sense of how the product works and so now i go back and i read that first sentence and i'm like okay i kind of get you know what they were going for here um but it's just not clear like being able to stand on its own and then another trick here with headlines is a lot of times the way that people will read your page is they're going to scroll down really quickly just kind of skimming and they're just going to read the headlines

and so you want to try this yourself for your own product and decide if somebody just read the headlines here would they actually get the information that we would want them to get or is the main information that you want people to take away is it buried in these like small text paragraphs and and bullets and screenshots and things like that yeah i think again i think this all really comes back to this like headline that really starts this confusion and i'm not sure if like automated

storytelling is necessarily like the thing that me as a brand like i might you know i'm trying to solve for i think this might be like sort of like a vision that you have about your product and like what it does for people but what me like as a as a brand i might be just trying to you know like make my brand a little bit more eco-friendly and i might not be able to do that with my products and services right now but this is a really great way to integrate something like that with

either like no code or you know a really small amount of code it seems like and so it would be really interesting just to have sort of like that um come through just in this like headline and there's a lot of good things that i think you have going for you on this page too like one layout typography colors like all the stuff is like seems well done and has good hierarchy to it it's easy to follow it's visually interesting

without becoming overwhelming i think um so there's some good stuff here um i think we saw trusted buy up near the top so that's a good way you're trying to build that trust right off the bat um yeah here's the trusted brands um so unfortunately i don't know that i've heard of these um but it's cool that you have some so it tells me like i'm not going to be your first customer so that's good um and then i saw near the bottom we had

more on the team and so i think that's cool too i get to see the faces there's real people behind this there are some customer testimonials there so you've got a lot of like the core elements here i think it's just cleaning up um some of the messaging and the headlines that's going to make it a lot more clear because right now you don't do a great job through the headlines at least of answering the question what is this and who is it for like is it for me and you just want anybody who's your potential customer to hit your page and

instantly just go like oh cool this is exactly the kind of thing that i could use on my website when you sort of like want to talk about the problem that you're solving it's so important you know because it's it's about like climate change how do you sort of bring that to uh the forefront i think you know this to me this section here you know makes me feel like you know i can choose from like some of these really great uh you know partners to implement on my on my website and i think that like

that kind of has this emotional pull that you almost might be able to like add here and it's you know something really simple like as if it's just like you know no code solution for you know like instant eco-friendly you know brand or whatever it is i think just like making me feel like i can implement this really really quickly and even almost showing me some of those like causes a little bit more front and center might you know really like lure me in and again like bring that sort of emotional attachment to what you guys

are solving for awesome it's a nice job hey thanks for joining zane if you like this first episode of design review help us out by letting us know in the comments if there are any tips or reviews that you found useful it'll help us shape future episodes of this new series thanks for watching you
