New Singularity.org

The content seems more useful and directs me towards specific actions. And I particularly like the media page. (Hiding and showing the pictures is sort of gimmicky but for some reason I like the gimmick. Having the picture show up felt like a "pleasant" surprise)

But the vibe of the website feels less professional to me than the old website. Part of the issue is the gratuitous use of clip-art, part of it is font choice and color scheme. (Your logo doesn't stand out very well against the dull blue background, and there are several different random fonts getting used, few of which seem to match the feel of either of the sleeker fonts used in "Singularity Institute" title.)

• The "What we do" page contains three short summarizing sentences, but no links to further information. A tiny bug: the second picture has alt text "photo_what_we_do_2".
• On the "Get involved" page, there are "read more" links, but the impulse is to click on the pictures. These should lead to the same places as "Read more". Ditto for pictures at the bottom of "Media" and on the "About" page, and the picture through the "Read our blog" link in the header of all pages. There is also a phrase "Another important way you can help is by reading these important papers". Too much "important" (I'd cut both).
• Of the first three buttons in the menu, two are "Donate" and "Get involved", with only mostly content-less "What we do" in between. This doesn't seem optimal for new visitors, who first need to be convinced that what SingInst does is worthwhile (and what it is, exactly).
• Is there a good reason for the auto-hiding of pictures on the "Media" page? (For example, it might really look worse if shown all at once...) It looks out-of-place, an unnecessary cog. Also, "no GD" at top-left corners of all pictures (what does this represent?) reads like "no good", which is no good.
• A lot of empty space on "Research" before the section "What to Read First", due to vertical arrangement of paper categories.
• The few-pages-long meaningful summary of SingInst's mission was hard to find. I eventually found it by googling; on the site it turns out to be linked from the top of the "Research" page in a list together with outgoing links to other sites, so in my mind it got categorized as extra-content and as a result I didn't notice it when looking for the introduction. Should probably be set apart somehow, with more words to draw attention to it.

In my opinion, you guys should try to project a somewhat academic vibe: no personal stories, cite established researchers, qualify outlandish seeming claims with words like could and might, etc. Focus on communicating with the smartest laypeople (young and old) who come across the website in a straightforward, credible, and intelligent way. For a quick example, on this page, I would suggest "proving the safety of artificial minds" over "foundations of Friendly AI theory".

A link on the homepage or tab in the navigation specifically targeted at academics would be cool. The research tab is a good start, but "Research" doesn't say "click here if you're an academic" the same way "For Academics" might. I'm suggesting that as soon as someone has clicked this hypothetical link, you start assuming they are a smart, skeptical CS professor who is trying to shoot you down and hasn't read any of your stuff yet.

Who are the most important people you are hoping to influence with your website and how are you hoping to influence them?

What's going on with this page? http://singularity.org/get-started/

I agree that you should cut down on the number of fonts.

Providing papers in HTML form in addition to PDF could cut down on friction associated with reading them.

Donate link should probably be on the far right, not the far left. Keep in mind people will probably be reading those links from left to right. So you should start with gentle introductory material, then technical stuff, then stuff related to how you can help.

More whitespace to the sides of main page text would look more professional I suspect. Something feels off about pages like this one (http://singularity.org/strategic-insight/) whose content is mainly text.

The site is slow on my not-so-new PC with win32/WinXP/Chrome. When I wheel-scroll, there is a 300ms-ish delay before the page moves. This almost never happens for any site, so it stands out. On another newer PC (win32/Win7/Chrome), the blue background loads slowly in jumps (it's a 1MB png file hosted on siai.helldesign.net).

"Donate" should not be the leftmost tab.

It should go

• About
• What We Do
• Research
• Media
• Get Involved
• Donate

It may just be me, but it seems a bit strange to have the donate tab be the first one. It feels like you're trying to push me to donate, which is off-putting. I'd at least put it behind the "what we do" tab, or maybe further down.

Unlike Raemon, I like the color scheme (Facebook made blue cool again). However, for me the site appears lacking in usability.

For example, I expected on the front page (or any other page) a number of terminal links you want people to click, say, in a column along the right side. By terminal I mean links to papers, ideas, examples, conclusions, not other collections of links. Each such terminal link should be a summary of what's inside. An extreme example of this approach (which works well in news media) is The Register.

There is also very little use of mouseover menu expansion ("what would happen if I clicked on...?" without actually clicking). While it can be distracting and annoying when done badly, it's practically expected from a modern site.

The use of PDFs as the only document format, to me, greatly detracts from usability, because it is harder to navigate than HTML, slower to download and in some cases (e.g. mobile) requires a separate application. PDF should be an option for those who like pretty formatting for printing and reading offline.

We’ve made hundreds of minor corrections to our past papers, and ported them to a new PDF template that is easy to read and unusually functional.

I presume that it is only "unusually functional" for those who use Adobe Reader.

I hope you are doing some A/B testing with this page. If not, you ought to.

I like it. It's an attractive site with good calls to action and up-front display of content such as papers and articles, along with a much better domain name.

The minor changes mentioned in other comments (double use of the word 'important', the text 'no GD' on images, and I also get slow scrolling on my 2011 Macbook Air with Chrome) should be easy to make to sand off the rough edges.

Thanks for putting it together and finally getting it out.

Ugly as HELL [1]. I have not actually read any of the text, I will simply list elements I dislike, in the order I saw them. My opinion matters little, I suggest you get some critique from Hacker News [2].

• logo does not stand out

• grey buttons have a weird volume, I think the white border causes this

• RSS logo stands out more than SI logo, I have not seen RSS logos used to denote a blog in years

• text in search box has a weird white glow, glass effect is ugly, magnifying glass icon is aliased, it changing to orange on hover makes it look like you just learned about complementary colors.

• text in slideshow is aliased (Win7, Chrome latest)

• grey android thing in second slideshow panel is creepy

• big light blue clipart-thingies look childish

• font on http://singularity.org/what-we-do/ is weird, the letter c looks like e

• meaningless math symbols in the background make me cringe

My impressions the moment I saw the main page: old, cheap, childish, scammy. I would prefer clean, if not minimalist.

[1] http://helldesign.net/ everything they do is ugly, their own website included

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/ they won't like it

Assuming you're soliciting comments on the design...

A few things on the front page: What's the "Go to next page" for? There are links all over the page, what could "next" page possibly mean?

What's the text box on the left? If I type random text into it and hit return, I get two error messages to the effect that I'm STOOPID because I did something WRONG. It appears that what was expected was an email address, but the text around it doesn't suggest that very well. And second most prominent thing on the front page is not the place to put a sign-up for a mailing list.

"Singularity Institute produces breakthrough research on emerging technologies." That (a) needs a "the", and (b) communicates nothing. The mission statement on the "next" page says only "the Singularity Institute exists to ensure that the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence benefits society" and a bunch more links. This is making a lot of work for the reader trying to find out what you actually do. The "research summary" link goes to a paper that is not a research summary.

"Other publications" link shouldn't be as prominent on Research page as it currently is: it's more like "Obsolete publications", which I think should also be noted on the page itself. Translations of papers should go to their own page.

I like the shade of blue. The site has a lot of the information I want, and reasonable information I wouldn't have thought of including.

Now for the complaints....

"Read our blog" is too similar to the background. If you're going to have an RSS icon, clicking on it should give access to an RSS feed. Just plain "Blog" is probably better. I'd sooner see it on the top bar.

These days, top bar topics tend to have drop down menus, and I think they make finding out what's on a site more convenient.

Media page: Do not put text across people's faces.

It would be nice to have all the singularity summit videos available, with listings for speakers and topics.

I don't know whether I'm typical in this, but I'm not fond of images that change automaically (like at the top of the videos page). I find that they offer a lot of distraction for little information.

"Logistics" is a vague name for a conference announcement. How about "Calendar"?

Should "research in human rationality" include something about using rationality to improve one's life?

I'm uncertain about the big icons on the get-involved and about pages. For me they have a slight vibe of "we don't trust people to pay attention to the text", but for all I know, that's reasonable. What's your line of thought?

"Reviewing and Proof-reading SI publications" should have a link to the publications. "Assist wuth publicly listed challenge grants" should have a link to where they're listed.

I prefer black text on white background (instead of #4A535D text on #F6F8FC background), because it is easier to read. Especially when the text is long (Singularity FAQ), lower contrast makes eyes more tired.

on the about page "Meet the Team" links to http://singularity.org/visiting-fellows/ instead of http://singularity.org/team/

The link "applications for new Visiting Fellows" on http://singularity.org/visiting-fellows/ just redirects back to the same page. Also, Thomas Colthurst's entry has overflowing italics.

There appears to be a 404 at http://singularity.org/techsummaries/brain-computer-interfaces/

The website left me a positive impression. From my cursory exploration, the only thing that stood out negatively was the existence of the subsection of Life Stories inside Media; I think this subsection will need to be handled with care.

Web of Trust, a browser app designed to build a website security rating and trustworthiness oriented community, is warning me that singularity.org has untrustworthy attributes. I don't find it particularly likely that singularity.org is trying something malicious, but whatever the circumstances have been, I would like to know why this has occurred, or at least to point it out. Could be a false positive on WoT's part, or something else (I know almost nothing about web security).

If it is simply a case of WoT failing to be thorough enough in how it weighs ratings and avoiding false positives, then perhaps someone could recommend something else? I like the idea of WoT and would like to either help improve it or find a better service. EDIT: It has more ratings now and WoT no longer warns about it.

I am not fond of the blue, nor of the (what looks like) clip art on the Donate page, Get Involved page, Media page...etc. To me, personally, the site lights up the part of my brain that screams "SCAM! SCAM!" Probably because it looks like it was made by one of those pre-made websites where the owner fills in the content (I'm not actually sure what they're called.)

I suggest developing an idea of what you want people to feel when they see the site, then base your design around that.

There's a spelling error on the first section of the Research page:

"If you’re new to the entire topic, see the 5-page Reducing Long-Term Catastrohpic Risks from Artificial Intelligence."

It should be Catastrophic.

This link on the research page: Complex Value Systems are Required to Realize Valuable Futures.

Is broken.

I like the new site; looks very good, and seems to guide me to interesting places nicely.

A few nitpicks though:

• Many of the reference sections have URLs that aren't links.
• The summary is fairly hidden: it's 2 clicks from the front page (Get Started -> research summary). If this is meant to be a bit of an introduction, it might be nice to be more obvious. The "Recommend readings" section could be better formatted, so that the text is more obviously separated from the references. (And, the in-text citations aren't hyperlinks.)
• The keep up with the latest developments here box on the front page should be have some indication that it is an email field.
• Having an "Up" link, or some sort of breadcrumbs would be nice: gives the user a sense of position, which is especially important for someone entering via a search engine, or external link to a deep page. (Especially from each tech summary up to the tech summary intro, since these are pages that people are relatively likely to link to/find via a search engine.)
• The Media and updates looks a little bit like a blog archive with some external coverage mixed in: it might be nice if internal and external links were more distinct. (Not sure the best way to do this: maybe entirely separate sections, or just within each month. Maybe even just have the external links bolded, or marked by a little icon.) (And also, not a big problem at all, but the blog links are inconsistent: some point to singinst.org/blog/..., some to singularity.org/....)

And some broken links/HTML:

• "What is the Singularity?" link on Our Mission has eaten extra HTML and so 404's (it's actually completely hiding the link to the FAQ.)
• "Complex Value Systems are Required to Realize Valuable Futures" link on the Research page
• The summary appears to have had some encoding issues (or something): ?? throughout the page.
• The whole of Get Involved is a link to Opportunities.

(Some of these might be browser specific bugs: I'm using Firefox nightly on linux.)

I see a lot of mistakes pointed out here, but also a lot of claims about preferences, many contradictory. Are there any plans to A/B test stuff or at least something more rigorous than 'I agree with X, that blue is too dark'?

Broken link at http://singularity.org/transparency/ Additional Reports Strategic Plan (August 2011)

Is the site down now? Is there a separate site to monitor its uptime status?

I agree completely with this comment from David Pearce (crossposted from facebook so LWers can see it):

An excellent (and IMO also stylish) website update. My only real worry is the relaxation of the definition of "The Singularity” so the term "will just refer to greater-than-human intelligence." The IJ Good/SIAI conjecture on the advent of posthuman superintelligence, combining Moore's law with the idea of recursively self-improving artificial minds, may - or may not - prove viable. But IMO it's this restrictive definition that makes the Singularity into a well-defined and falsifiable hypothesis with strong empirical content. (cf. http://singularityhypothesis.blogspot.com.br/2012/06/table-of-contents.html ) By contrast, all sorts of people (of whom I'm one) can count as "singularitarians" if the definition is diluted so it also embraces the creation of genetically enhanced and computer-aided biological minds over an indefinite timescale.

There's an error in one of the homepage messages: under "Our Mission" it reads "smarter-then-human" instead of "smarter-than-human".

Like the direction it's going, well done! Also agree with some of the improvements suggested on this thread.