Just showed the homepage to a non-technical family member and they are interested in using the service before I even got to scrolling. They said "ooh that looks nice" when they read
Safe home for your photos".
...I was not at all confused about what it was when I looked at it.
When I saw "safe home for your photos" I assumed it was a platform for uploading photos via an app or on the web. "Cross platform" is even a sub-heading. Do you use iCloud or Google Photos?
Sometimes I see this complaint for products here and I am just... confounded. Are people unable to use context clues to infer meaning? I really don't mean to be rude here. It feels like there is some grander disconnect like if someone younger looked at a floppy disk and didn't know that it was a save icon.
Is it an app or a web service? What does the app look like? What does the web service look like?
>Sometimes I see this complaint for products here and I am just... confounded.
I think you probably don't have as much experience with the depth and breadth of peoples comprehension of online design language as you might think you do.
"Safe home for your photos" - even this is ambiguous. Photos, as in hard copy? Or digital images? Or digital photos?
You might have the grok to understand this is a digital service, but there is a wide variety of users out there who won't get this, at all.
And I think that is limiting the reach of this service. In the rush to be design leaders, the details about what the product is and how it works are not being communicated properly.
I took another look. It's still not clear to me - do I need to use their special app? Can I use a web page? Do I give it access to my iCloud Photos and it does it all for me? What does the app look like? Why can't I use Photos.app, and what differentiates Ente from iCloud Photos - at first (assumptive) glance, it appears redundant.
I am not convinced by the marketing. I stand by my original observation that it appears the designers are not at all interested in the product they are pimping and seem instead to just want to do cool, distracting design language.
Usability fail at the marketing level doesn't help reach critical mass. I predict Ente will fail.
> what differentiates Ente from iCloud Photos - at first (assumptive) glance, it appears redundant.
I think the point is that it's an alternative clone of iCloud or Google Photos that's not from Apple or Google. For some people, it's really obvious why you would want that, but if it's not to you, I can see why it might be more confusing why it exists.