The landing page definitely isn't obvious enough. I got the idea eventually, but I had to work for it, and it wasn’t in the big print.
Part of the problem is unclear copy upfront. Here’s the first sentence:
> Today We Learned is a website and app that guides teachers through a 60-second update, which empowers parents to start learning conversations at home with their children.
How can guiding teachers empower parents? It doesn’t provide enough information to make sense. Being guided through an update is a passive thing to have happen to you; there’s no reason for us to assume that the teacher is taking action here, or that the update goes not to them but to the parents alone. Presumably the writer wanted to avoid any forthright statements that the teachers will have to work for the app to be useful, but in doing so they buried the purpose of the program. And the only other sentence above the fold, rather than clarifying, is boilerplate: and this is a good thing.
Looks like an interesting app, though. I’d be curious to know what percentage of users actually go in for the paid mobile app—email and web access being the universal here.
Thanks for the advice, I really appreciate the detail you've given. I'll take some time to more carefully test the copy with people not already familiar with the product.
For the use case of prose, this is a great alternative to the time investment needed to take up a heavyweight editor (e.g. Emacs or Vim) that can be made to operate on a clause-by-clause, sentence-by-sentence basis, and I recommend it to anyone not interested in taking the plunge into "customization culture" or using the other features those programs provide. My writing, when I don't need to use Word for work (thanks to co-workers who use it for everything), tends to be done in something unobtrusive like nano or sandy[0] and looks much like the source from your second link, minus the HTML.
"Easy to edit," to take a phrase from your first link, is key.
It sounds like you probably have too tight a grip and write more from than the wrist and fingers than the shoulder and forearm. This was a solved problem more than a hundred years ago, when it had to be; in the U.S. it's famously associated with the Palmer Method[0], although Palmer didn't originate it by a long shot.
(While these books, of course, are written for use with dip pens, and frequently taken up by users of fountain pens today, the methods described do work with ballpoints, rollerballs, gel pens, pencils of not too hard a lead, nearly whatever you have lying about.)
Of course, retooling is almost certainly not worth it for you, unless you're dying for a break from computer screens (the only reason I ever write by hand anymore). But I'll leave the link in case anyone is curious, either for their own work or just to know what people used to do with a pen, and why writer's cramp was not as serious a problem before typewriters and computers as we might suppose it was, by how frequently we tend to induce cramp on ourselves.
It's true, I have no reason to learn a different method as I have no reason to write anything by hand, but thank you for sharing the information. I suppose I had just assumed it was something people got used to, or that regular practice would build up hand strength in such a way that it would no longer hurt.
Part of the problem is unclear copy upfront. Here’s the first sentence:
> Today We Learned is a website and app that guides teachers through a 60-second update, which empowers parents to start learning conversations at home with their children.
How can guiding teachers empower parents? It doesn’t provide enough information to make sense. Being guided through an update is a passive thing to have happen to you; there’s no reason for us to assume that the teacher is taking action here, or that the update goes not to them but to the parents alone. Presumably the writer wanted to avoid any forthright statements that the teachers will have to work for the app to be useful, but in doing so they buried the purpose of the program. And the only other sentence above the fold, rather than clarifying, is boilerplate: and this is a good thing.
Looks like an interesting app, though. I’d be curious to know what percentage of users actually go in for the paid mobile app—email and web access being the universal here.