Have no idea what Treehouse is, clicked the site, took 300ms to look at the 3 giant buttons.
Clicked "web design" (the site looks very nice BTW)
... and started learning about web design.
Watched the first video, hit the only button "Let's Go" and found a collection of other videos to get me further down the path of web design, letting me skip directly to my problems areas instead of grinding through things I know.
Conclusion: Without ever knowing what you guys do, what the site is or how to use it "correctly" I was able to start learning in what was less than probably 3 seconds of thinking.
I still don't know what you guys do or what the plan here is (heading back to read more) but your flow is perfect.
Like abnormally simple and wonderful... really nice job.
I didn't have such a flawless experience. I was first baffled because I didn't understand what kind of website that is. I thought, well doesn't matter, it looks nice, let's try iOS. Then I watched that intro video that promised a first look at Objective C. I clicked "Lets go" and ended up at an XCode tutorial. Huh? So I clicked the breadcrumb navigation, and thought "App Life Cycle" sounds interesting. I clicked that. I started watching the video, but after 30 seconds the video suddenly stopped. Underneath it says the video takes 7 minutes. Well, obviously somethings wrong. I looked around, and saw something about signing up and unlocking badges, and I thought, hmm, I just want to watch the rest of this video, I don't want to bother unlocking any badges, so I gave up, went back to hacker news, and wrote this rant.
I also had a similar unfortunate fate with the iOS tutorials. I was excited clicking "Let's Go", and I spent 8 minutes familiarizing myself with Xcode. Then, I didn't get anything to further me - just something about a quiz, which honestly I don't care to take right now this early, and then a video on Interface Builder and Editor and Utilities Area.
I know what IB is, but for a lot of other people, they probably won't even want to click it, and Editor and Utilities Area sounds kind of boring. Clicking around more, it seems like there are specific categories now - Xcode is just one of them. I thought I was going to learn how to build an iPhone app, but now I have to figure out the right subtopic.
Overall, not a good experience. I think it's a great design in terms of colors and such (and even the video page I watched was nice and simple), but the flow was terrible. To top it all off, iOS 4 Foundations is the name of the iOS page. This barely sounds relevant to a newcomer, I would rather see that say 'iOS Development'. Foundations sounds like it'll go through boring stuff, I really just wanted to start hacking away at apps.
There is this shallow navigation depth to everything interesting; I don't have to hunt. Very clearly demarcated signs everywhere indicating where you can go and what you'll get.
Topping all of that off is that the actual design/typography of the site is calm, easy on the eyes and attractive.
The UX is great, I agree, but I can't stand how you put emphasis on every other word in the web design intro video.
It reminded me of an Ira Glass segment where he talked about his early radio career (See http://transom.org/?p=6978 and scroll down to "1. Learning Curve"). He also made this mistake, to the detriment of the story.
Please fix this when you have time. Maybe consider hiring a professional actor to read the script in a more natural way.
I totally agree with your point. However, unlike you, I didn't click on anything because (a) my time is valuable and I can't waste it on a site which may not provide value to me and (b) I don't trust web sites which don't explicitly tell me what they do or have an obvious "About" link on the home page.
Please add a sentence or two at the top of the page to tell me your target audience and why I should use the site.
It distinctly asks at the top "What do you want to learn today?" and then gives you three options: Web Design, Web Development, or iOS (btw, it should say iOS Development not just iOS). That's enough to make any user realize they're a site that helps you learn these things.
I did click on "learn web design" and was taken to a video with no description. I turned it off after a few seconds of pleasantries (eg. "Don't worry if you're totally new to web design"). I really think you guys should consider putting a course outline up front so users can know the scope of what they're getting into in a few seconds of skimming text instead of having to watch the whole first video. I don't even know how long that first video was, it didn't have a 'play bar' at the bottom. There's a big difference between a 30 second intro and an hour long 'first lecture'.
+1 I was also confused in the same way. The homepage is good at getting you started using the stuff quickly, but I wanted an overview of exactly what it was first
We added the About page on the top nav (last second) but it broke the responsive layout. It's now at the bottom and we'll put it back up top when we can.
Aha, thanks for pointing this out–I was curious if there was such a thing too.
On the about page (http://teamtreehouse.com/about), why are the boxes so big for each person? I see picture, name, title, Twitter handle, and then a fair amount of whitespace that makes me think there'd be a short bio for each person.
Have no idea what Treehouse is, clicked the site, took 300ms to look at the 3 giant buttons.
Clicked "web design" (the site looks very nice BTW)
... and started learning about web design.
Watched the first video, hit the only button "Let's Go" and found a collection of other videos to get me further down the path of web design, letting me skip directly to my problems areas instead of grinding through things I know.
Conclusion: Without ever knowing what you guys do, what the site is or how to use it "correctly" I was able to start learning in what was less than probably 3 seconds of thinking.
I still don't know what you guys do or what the plan here is (heading back to read more) but your flow is perfect.
Like abnormally simple and wonderful... really nice job.