Meetup's New, Unclickable Homepage

Meetup recently launched their new 3.0 release, with many changes across the entire site. One set of changes I noticed right away: the home page, as depicted above.

Things I Didn't Expect To Find on Meetup's New Home Page:

• The Meetup Logo isn't clickable. Name a web company whose logo isn't clickable. They're supposed to be. They ought to take you somewhere.

• The call to action to join Meetup isn't clickable. "Join over a million people who:" it says. Click it. You can't join.

• Four pictures and their captions, none of which are clickable. Four calls to action: "Learn something", "Do something", "Change something", "Share something". Verbs. Imperative verbs. On the homepage. But not clickable. Hmm.

• Four diagonal lines of text lead the eye right to the "Find a Group" button. Very nice. Too bad none of the four lines is clickable... :-)

Don't get me wrong, I love Meetup. But I think this homepage does the company a great disservice. The message from this page design seems to be, "WE WANT YOU TO TYPE IN SOMETHING AND FIND A GROUP, OK? IN FACT WE'RE GONNA MAKE IT REALLY HARD TO DO ANYTHING ELSE FROM THIS PAGE." What happens if you don't want to find a group? What happens if you have no idea what Meetup is, and want to browse the site? Well, they do have a "Browse all interests" link, in a small font.

I would love to know what some usability / discoverability tests would reveal about this new page. Particularly from brand-new users who've never heard of Meetup before, or who just heard about it perhaps through the media reports or from a family member or friend. Are they going to be successful learning about Meetup from this home page?

I talk about Meetup all the time. I bring it up in conversations and almost every time, the person I'm speaking with hasn't heard of it. Even people in the technology industry. So I tell them to go check it out. Will they be successful? I don't know.

Posted by brian at September 10, 2004 03:43 PM | TrackBack