Along with the new features and new pricing, Webflow comes with a totally redesigned web site. I am certain all these changes are tons of excitement for the Webflow team. But I personally, as a paying customer, do not feel that much excited.
Here’s why: it’s been a long wait. No doubt - innovative features and quality do take time. That’s fine. Problem is quality is not that much great, after that much wait.
Why is quality not that much great - well, take the new placement of symbols and the new way of moving elements in the Navigator. Symbols are not displayed on a list and do not have that even as an option. Moving elements the new way is difficult for me personally and I cannot even get what is the specific problem Webflow have tried to address with changing the way of moving them.
Both of those are not such a big deal on their own. But I’d expect top-notch UI from Webflow. Not such obvious flaws.
Then we have the pricing: https://webflow.com/pricing. Graphic design is beautiful. Usability is ugly. Webflow’s pricing page has always been over-complicated. This time is not an exception, either
“I just need one web site” vs “I regularly design sites” vs “I am part of a team” !?!? These are neither gradated, nor mutually exlusive, so as to set them as three distinct categories. I could be both regularly designing sites and a part of a team. I could even be regularly designing one single web site, in a team.
Each of those three categories opens three more choices. Ouch guys, what is this? Things are so mixed now, it’s even worse than before! As a regular Webflow user I can hardly calculate what an account with two team members would cost me if I want to have all other features on. I have to click here and there, go back and forward, it’s a mess.
Just think what a prospective user would get out of this. Has anyone done any usabilty testing on this? Or was it the all-in-one designer/ usability/ front-end who decided this was clean and smart enough?
This pricing page is a disaster. Don’t get me wrong, it hurts me to say it. If you do not believe me, just do some testing with users.
And then, the whole redesign of the site - it’s beautiful, great, but is it worth the time spent? You could have invested those man-hours into improving the Webflow system itself. People do not subscribe to Webflow because Webflow’s main site is beautiful and modern. They (we) subscribe because of the capabilities of the tool. And what was wrong with the initial site design, anyway?
On top of that, your main page is a usability disaster, as well. One cannot get the idea what Webflow is about in the first five seconds. Yet, one is prompted to sign up. This is so simplistic and not smart.
Give the user a temptation to sign up and s/he will do it. Do not push the sign-up form up his/ her face. In the initial version of the Webflow site, the temptation was there - a list of top-features and that animation effect of showing the code. Now we have some blah-blah text: “Visually develop dynamic, responsive websites, then launch them with a click. Or export your clean, semantic code to hand off to your developers.” What the hell…
Is this going to be the future of Webflow - prolonged feature development, increasing pricing (requiring a university degree to figure out), UI losing its finesse… ?