Inovelli.com 3.0 - Feedback Thread

[MorganM]

Is the pricing on this new site accurate? 10 packs are $400 on preorder but $450 after launch?

[Bry]

@MorganM

Is the pricing on this new site accurate? 10 packs are $400 on preorder but $450 after launch?

This is NOT a new production site. It’s a site under development exposed for suggestions. I’d refer to Inovelli.com for pricing and ordering.

[MorganM]

I understand that but wondering why they’d put different pricing on a site in progress, as the expectation is that they’re building this to go live eventually so if the pricing is going to be changing (either due to merger, supply chain cost increases, etc) then I’d like to know since I’ve already built my switch budget based on current pricing

[Eric_Inovelli]

I do plan on increasing the price, yes. Pre-order pricing is typically less than normal pricing as pre-orders are generally taking a risk.

I’m not entirely sure if $450 will be the final price and most of the pricing on the beta site is just me putting in random numbers (most of the products are actually $0.00).

I will make sure to let you guys know when the price increase goes into effect well before we actually do it to be conscious of budgeting.

My guess would be once production ends.

[harjms]

Oooo got to get that buy in before increase.

[malbs]

A couple general comments/observations and a recommendation.

FWIW, I’m a product manager with experience in B2B (or B2B2C) and B2C (DTC), specifically in ecommerce and marketplaces.

First general observation is that Inovelli has at least 3 different types of customers: novice/beginners, hobbyists and enthusiasts. Different customers have different needs (think “missions” or jobs to be done) and are willing to exert different levels of effort to satisfy those needs. For example, an enthusiast is willing to invest more time and energy to dig through the community to find niche content. A novice generally won’t. If you apply that to the type of feedback you’re going to get in this thread, it’s going to bias toward a particular type of customer (looking at you, 100mbps iOS 16 beta ).

Second general observation: similar to onboarding designs, if you need to explain the experience or justify the design, the design missed the mark. Look for patterns in feedback to identify problem areas.

IMHO, at the very least, develop 2-3 distinct personas, write a few big job stories for each (think of the user journey, eg research, buying, support) and then figure out your IA/content structure from there. If you can afford it, its hard to beat the impact of interviewing and observing customers interacting with the site.

[Eric_Inovelli]

@chack

Just for the sake of consistency, would it be possible for the Community menu link to also have a dropdown for Forums (could link to socials, etc if you wanted more items instead)?

Yeah, I can do that – I looked at a few sites I’ve been getting inspiration from (Skullcandy, Mercedes, Bose, Beats by Dre, and Wyze) and it seems most have the consistency experience so this is a great call-out! Even if there aren’t sub-menus on some of the headers, it still makes you click the ones that do to expose the drop-downs giving you the same consistent expereince.

I specifically like the Wyze example:

The, “Join Our Community” has links to their socials and Subreddit, which is smart.

@chack

Also is it possible for clicking on Store to actually display products directly instead of sending me to the categories? Can always filter from there?

Took me a while, but I figured out how to do it – should be good now – much better!

@Keliam

I like the minimal approach as well. The issue is that you have to click and drag to advance slides, which is unusual behavior for desktop. If you have a thin < and > on the sides, it will still give a minimalist look, while offering a simple click to advance behavior.

You should be able to click on the dots instead of dragging, but I changed it to arrows.

@kreene1987

Red and Blue were options there, but now they aren’t. So all good I think?

Nice, yeah I ended up fixing that later – good call!

@DataMeister

There doesn’t appear to be any text under the store items unless I hover over each item individually. Is that a bug or on purpose? It would be a lot better to read the page without needing to constantly move the mouse.

Yeah that was annoying, thanks for noticing that – there was a setting that was on that enabled that. I disabled it so I think we’re good.

@DataMeister

Next, the drop menu changes color to acknowledge the mouse only on sub menus. It doesn’t change color at all on individual items. After seeing a hover color change on the first two menu items my brain wants to pause the mouse and wait for the web page to catch up when it doesn’t continue following the mouse position.

Yeah good call – I’ll have to do some digging on this one, but definitely something I want to fix.

@DataMeister

Third, the browser in the following screenshot here is snapped to half of a 1920 screen.

@DataMeister

The menu is wrapping the word Discover down under the top drop menus. I’m not really a fan of form over function, and in this case the function is suffering because of the centered logo. If you put the logo on the left you would have a lot more space for the menu before it wrapped or needed to collapse into a mobile menu.

Agree, appreciate you testing it on a smaller screen – I hadn’t noticed that (I even have a plug-in that allows me to quickly change layouts (mobile, tablet, laptop, desktop) but it didn’t have 1/2 of 1920 as an option.

I updated it so that the logo is completely to the left and the wording is to the right and there is no wrapping, so I think we’re good. Great catch!

@SViel

First of - Nice! I really like the new site.

Thanks

@SViel

The Discover - Our Story. Videos (Animated gifs?) take a long time to load. I was trying to see if I could turn on the sound on them, but that obviously won’t work if they are gifs… . The first video is nice (the one with the young family) but seems to showcase a bunch of products that are no longer available…?

Hmmm… those are embedded videos. I’ll have to look to see why they’re taking so long to load.

Regarding the first video, yeah the purpose of the page was to tell the story around how we got started to where we are today. That was actually the first video we released back when we had our first iteration of products. We’ve come a long way!

@SViel

On the iPad in landscape mode with the side pane open, one of the titles doesn’t display properly:

Weird, what page is that on?

@amdbuilder

The community is certainly a large part of what make Inovelli great. That said I’m not sure it deserves the prime real estate of being a top-level item. I would suggest placing it under Discover (as in discover our awesome community!)

I’ll do some additional digging to see what others are doing (it looks like Hubitat and Wyze both have it, however, Home Assistant and SmartThings both have it at the bottom). My thought process was that if we’re relying on the community for help and want to make it a large part of our identity, it made sense to put it there front and center. But I can also see the argument for Discover or Support.

@amdbuilder

I believe this was mentioned earlier, but I would remove Blue/Red series from the store menu. These may make sense for returning buyers, but new buyers may be confused.

Under the switches flyout instead of listing the specific switches I could see creating groups for the types of switches. So, Store > Switches > Dimmer or Store > Switches > Combo (2n1).

Yes, this would be my preferred method of tackling this too – the only problem is that the theme only allows for two sub-menus so I opted to put the Red/Blue at the bottom in case someone wanted easy access to everything.

But as you had the same sentiment as others, it seems like it could be confusing. Ultimately, it may come down to heat-mapping and analytics to see where people go and if it’s confusing. I definitely have it on my notes of things to look into and/or cut.

@amdbuilder

It’s likely not as important these days, but one thing to keep in mind with all the animations (gif/video) is the overall page size. It’s currently around ~13MB, which is nothing on most wired connections. The impacts may be more noticeable on mobile.

This is a great call-out – what size should we aim for?

@amdbuilder

“Animated Notifications” slider

I’m not sure who’s garage is featured, but it looks like they need to replace a light bulb . I’ll mirror what others have said, you should consider adding arrows or some other more noticeable indicator. I completely missed that was a slider on my first pass.

LOL, this bothered me so much in the original video too… this was taken from the first video we had produced and it was a local couple who volunteered to have their house used. You’ll also notice in the video that they used a, “dumb” lock to mimic a smart lock smh lol.

I added the arrows, hopefully it makes it more prevalent now it’s a slider

@amdbuilder

Garage - It looks like you reuse the same animation in multiple spots. It’s more work, but I could see doing some different animation examples. For example, flashing red for garage open (better showcase the awesome animation potential).

Agree – about to hit-up Adobe Stock videos haha.

@amdbuilder

Scene Control - I would suggest slowing down the “video”. The transitions are fast enough I could see users missing what’s happening and/or having an adverse reaction to the rapid flashing. It’s also hard to notice the switch compared with Smart Bulb Mode.

Yeah, agree here too. I’m actually really not happy with how that GIF turned out from both a speed and quality. I have to do some thinking on that one. I may just do a quick scene of lights turning off.

@amdbuilder

Regarding the image quality. It should be possible to leverage javascript to replace the gif with a video if desired (only on desktop for example to keep page load down). That said, I think the gif quality is fine for this purpose. I would only look at these for a few second and then want to click for more information.

Nice, ok, I’ll take a look at javascript (or I should say I will have Maycock look at it bc I have no clue haha).

@amdbuilder

“Teaser Video” under Favorites. This seems out of place to me. I would have the actual video on the product page, but leave it off the home page. I would move the Crafted by Us section up to take it’s place.

Yeah, I guess what I was going for was as you work your way down the page, you get more and more info about the, “Hero” (in this case the Blue Series) and that was the climax that tied it all together. But, yeah, it is a bit out of place – I changed it

@amdbuilder

Adjusting theme.css - line 9707, which will look something like this (with more lines in the brackets). You would just need to change the transparent part to adjust. (Granted shopify likely has you do this differently)

Is there a way to do this with only the collection icons?

There’s a setting in my theme to add a transparency overlay, but the issue is that it overlays all my images and I don’t necessarily want that.

@matt1131

I liked the filtering option for the switches. Easy way to compare without needing to click what items you want to compare.

I love it – so smooth.

@matt1131

Not sure if it’s in your control, but a confirmation after tapping the minus button on a qty 1 item in the shopping cart would be nice for those who accidentally hit it.

Let me take a look!

@matt1131

Also, are the red series 2 in 1 really (pre)order-able? If the answer is no then obviously not a serious question

Ha, I wish. We are kicking off the project in the next couple weeks (just waiting on a PO) and depending on how many switches we can order will determine when they will be open for pre-orders. Until then, it will just be a big tease lol jk (I’ll likely remove it from the site as to not get ppl too excited).

[SViel]

@Eric_Inovelli

Weird, what page is that on?

Lol Can’t find it anymore… Like the latest changes! Menu works much better now for me on my iPad with the side bar open.

[UngluedChalice]

@amdbuilder

Scene Control - I would suggest slowing down the “video”. The transitions are fast enough I could see users missing what’s happening and/or having an adverse reaction to the rapid flashing. It’s also hard to notice the switch compared with Smart Bulb Mode.

Or even showing the other rooms as little boxes within the larger video frame so you can see “oh, when I hit this switch, this happened in other places in the house at the same time.”

[jdm12989]

The site is down at the moment, getting a 502 Bad Gateway error.

[Eric_Inovelli]

Weird, what browser were you using? I’ve been working on it all day and haven’t noticed anything. That would be just my luck though (it going down).

[jdm12989]

I was using Brave (Chromium). It appears to be working now.

One note for feedback. On Android (Brave/Chromium) when you navigate to the Store / { category} / { product } and press the back button it takes you to the home page. I would have expected/preferred I stay on the category page I selected.

[deadsquid]

[Eric_Inovelli]

LOL, I had to bc people were ordering from the site and I can’t figure out a good way to pause the site w/out losing my ability to edit the pages. Figured the $10k would be a deterrent!

[deadsquid]

Success!!! I laughed, then cried a little.

[kreene1987]

No testing vs production for the site? Dang…

[harjms]

I’d be willing to let a NIB LZW36 go for $9,000. A $1,000 savings. Free shipping.

[Eric_Inovelli]

There probably is, I just can’t find it

[deadsquid]

almost tempted. almost.

[deadsquid]

You can duplicate the theme and apply changes to it vs. the active theme, which lets you test. There’s also products like rewind which let you back up your entire store and restore it to another account for use as a staging site you can put behind a password. Some folks who run multiple stores go so far as to set up as a shopify partner so they can stage and deploy stores (but that’s a little extreme). Staging changes can be a pita, but the duplicate theme approach works for most lightweight changes.