TL;DR I spent more time looking over the website (particularly on mobile) and I think I’m mostly wrong/bad in my comment above. There might still be some value in a redo, and I guess it is 30% likely to be valuable.
I am not a web designer, but I’ve interacted with several in the past. I guess my comments below are about “50% true”.
Why I changed my mind from my message above:
I was in the mindset of my initial impression and Habryka’s comment, which seemed quite negative. I tried the website again, on mobile. The website “just works”.
The website seems much much faster than I remember, it seems like someone tuned or put some effort to fixing this
Your message that the key stakeholders like it, is a big update.
Why I think there could be a redo:
For redoing the grants page, I think that redesign or work can be deceptively large and might involve touching many other places on the site (a similar filter menu appears on other pages).
I think in some situations in similar seeming project, it seems like an entire redo ultimately occurs, even when the original changes seemed small originally. This is because of the dependencies or costs of trying to accommodate existing content.
I think the changes might be minor in some sense, but I think this still needs a very experienced designer to go over the details.
There is some chance (30%) this assistance can be expensive or difficult to arrange, compared to just getting a new website from scratch.
There’s patterns of design being used that are different than ones I see (see comments below)
In some sense, Open Phil is a major expression of the heart and machinery of EA. So having a highly polished page that is highly professional is valuable.
I think some viewers of the site, will be really picky, especially newcomers and some kinds of talent (experienced professors). They might be judgmental and take on impressions, even if they can’t consciously articulate it.
These comment on the intro page, and the about page, as they seem like natural places where a newcomer would try to come to “gauge credibility based on a website”.
I think this comment is lower value and I sort of don’t expect many people to read it, I’ll just put it here for completeness.
I emphasize I’m not a designer. But it’s easy enough to just present these ideas to an actual designer and see what they say, so it’s low cost to be wrong and just have people read this.
No header bar, front page content up against top of screen
For the front page, there’s no header bar and that seems unusual.
As below, the image and content is right up against the top of the screen, with hamburger bar sharing the space space.
So the image with the scientist on a microscope, is in place of what often is the header image.
(By the way, the bright color in the image is slightly obscuring the logo and title.)
For contrast, see Oxford’s site on mobile:
Room for scrolling seems like a desirable pattern
Many modern websites “give space” for scrolling on mobile. So a user loading a page, who often instinctively scrolls down, has a lot of content to see.
In contrast, the mobile site right now is pretty dense and there’s not much room to scroll down to find more content. For example, “cause selection” is right below the first section of content.
So I claim this is sort of fighting the “modern” tendency for people to scroll down a mobile website.
If you go on Square’s site and scroll down, you’ll see a long narrative with many pictures breaking up the text. This room seems desirable.
It’s true that the target audience isn’t the same as the average TikToker, but I still think many people are familiar with mobile sites like this, and expect a roomy scroll.
TL;DR I spent more time looking over the website (particularly on mobile) and I think I’m mostly wrong/bad in my comment above. There might still be some value in a redo, and I guess it is 30% likely to be valuable.
I am not a web designer, but I’ve interacted with several in the past. I guess my comments below are about “50% true”.
Why I changed my mind from my message above:
I was in the mindset of my initial impression and Habryka’s comment, which seemed quite negative. I tried the website again, on mobile. The website “just works”.
The website seems much much faster than I remember, it seems like someone tuned or put some effort to fixing this
Your message that the key stakeholders like it, is a big update.
Why I think there could be a redo:
For redoing the grants page, I think that redesign or work can be deceptively large and might involve touching many other places on the site (a similar filter menu appears on other pages).
I think in some situations in similar seeming project, it seems like an entire redo ultimately occurs, even when the original changes seemed small originally. This is because of the dependencies or costs of trying to accommodate existing content.
I think the changes might be minor in some sense, but I think this still needs a very experienced designer to go over the details.
There is some chance (30%) this assistance can be expensive or difficult to arrange, compared to just getting a new website from scratch.
There’s patterns of design being used that are different than ones I see (see comments below)
In some sense, Open Phil is a major expression of the heart and machinery of EA. So having a highly polished page that is highly professional is valuable.
I think some viewers of the site, will be really picky, especially newcomers and some kinds of talent (experienced professors). They might be judgmental and take on impressions, even if they can’t consciously articulate it.
So, uh, I have comments below:
These comment on the intro page, and the about page, as they seem like natural places where a newcomer would try to come to “gauge credibility based on a website”.
I think this comment is lower value and I sort of don’t expect many people to read it, I’ll just put it here for completeness.
I emphasize I’m not a designer. But it’s easy enough to just present these ideas to an actual designer and see what they say, so it’s low cost to be wrong and just have people read this.
No header bar, front page content up against top of screen
For the front page, there’s no header bar and that seems unusual.
As below, the image and content is right up against the top of the screen, with hamburger bar sharing the space space.
So the image with the scientist on a microscope, is in place of what often is the header image.
(By the way, the bright color in the image is slightly obscuring the logo and title.)
For contrast, see Oxford’s site on mobile:
Room for scrolling seems like a desirable pattern
Many modern websites “give space” for scrolling on mobile. So a user loading a page, who often instinctively scrolls down, has a lot of content to see.
In contrast, the mobile site right now is pretty dense and there’s not much room to scroll down to find more content. For example, “cause selection” is right below the first section of content.
So I claim this is sort of fighting the “modern” tendency for people to scroll down a mobile website.
If you go on Square’s site and scroll down, you’ll see a long narrative with many pictures breaking up the text. This room seems desirable.
https://squareup.com/
You can also see this with the Gate’s foundation:
https://www.gatesfoundation.org/
It’s true that the target audience isn’t the same as the average TikToker, but I still think many people are familiar with mobile sites like this, and expect a roomy scroll.
There’s other things that make this look different than a 100% polished page.
The about page on Open Phil is pretty dense with text.
In contrast, if you go to the above sites, for example, the Gates site, there’s a lot more visuals and “roominess”:
Our Story | Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
(I don’t have any prior interest or affinity to the Gates foundation, it just seems like a good reference).
In contrast, Open Phil’s about page is text heavy without pictures, and also the text doesn’t flow as naturally.
Each of these changes individually seem small, but I think there’s many details like this.
I think they might add up and justify getting a designer to spend a lot of time doing revisions.
As mentioned in the top comment, a full redo might be valuable.
I think I’m 20-50% certain about what I said in these comments.