Kickstarter.

Kickstarter is a new site for fundraising projects of any size. Project creators set a due date and dollar amount; pledgers offer their financial support to projects. Hit the dollar amount by the due date, and you get all your funding; don’t, and you get nothing. High stakes, of course – but project creators have nothing to lose.

I’m writing a book about interaction design these days, which abstracts and exemplifies many of the principles on I see what you did there’s entries. I'm funding it via Kickstarter, and have used it from the perspective of a project creator for a few months now. And so with this review, the snake eats its own proverbial tail.

Kickstarter’s administrators make money by taking a small cut of successfully funded projects, which means they’re directly invested in the success of project creators. There are many stakeholders, but they coalesce into only two groups (creators and pledgers). And the path is clear: they (being Kickstarter writ large) won’t receive many pledges if the project pages are designed poorly, projects won’t succeed if they don’t receive enough pledges, and Kickstarter won’t make any money if projects don’t succeed. So it’s pretty easy to demonstrate the need for a really usable site that encourages the conversion of potential donors.

Part of this, of course, falls to project creators. If the project is uninteresting or poorly executed or marketed, then it will receive few pledges. But much more is at stake for Kickstarter: frame every project poorly, and they will all suffer. Fortunately, Kickstarter’s design is beautiful and spare in turns, beautiful in its spareness, and its functions and behavior are remarkably tuned to the site’s attendant concerns.

Kickstarter is a novel system with many successes thus far, including one benefitting the site itself. It has tremendous promise. But its newness means that project creators and donors will, at first, have no idea how to use it well. To allay this, much of Kickstarter’s interface is built to help new users along, providing suggestions about how to build a project, contextual answers to frequent donor questions, and tips for becoming successfully funded on their blog.

Finding projects.

The front page of Kickstarter features many interesting projects, as well as administrators’ write-ups for them. It provides the means to browse for more, but it lacks a search form. In order to search for a specific project, you have to click Discover projects in the header nav, and scroll down on the left sidebar – far from discoverable. The front page would benefit from a search form, because users may come to Kickstarter wanting to find a find a specific project that they know about.

Examining projects.

Fortunately, the project pages more than make up for this foible. The project’s health is laid bare in the largest type, at the top of the page.

Then, the ultimatum of funding: Kickstarter’s core mission. Small type, but the high contrast and “banner” style set it apart from the rest of the page quite nicely.

After this is the most important function on the entire site, as bright as possible. The use of kelly green here and nowhere else sets it apart better than anything else on the site, and for good reason: there’s nothing else on Kickstarter that matters more than converting users to pledgers.

The right-hand column contains potential gifts for donors, should the project be funded. It also contains a little blurb about the project creator.

Project pages are divided into two columns. Donation functions, the list of gifts, and the author blurb are on the right column; a user-created header image and project summary are on the left. Many projects suffer a bit from the right column being drastically longer than the left, which pushes the author information too far down, with too much white space in the primary column. In context, then, important information is pushed to the side.

Project pages would benefit from having the option of placing author information in either the right or the left column, which would visually balance the page as needed.

Managing projects.

It’s possible to save projects before “launching” them publicly – essential for creators, because a project is a very large set of information, and it’s frequently revised and edited as a project progresses. And once projects are launched, you can edit the vast majority of parameters (you can’t edit gifts that pledgers have already selected, probably to protect them from a bait and switch).

As mentioned before, Kickstarter needs to teach all users how to work with it. Contextual help accompanies literally every form field, staying out of the way of users’ work but providing a wonderful way to guide them along.

Help text can be static or dynamic. Sometimes the field offers some form of validation, on fields that have character limits or data type constraints.

And help expands beyond just project editing. On the page to keep track of your pledgers, the right column handles some of the administrivia once you’ve become fully funded, and addresses the question (frequently asked by my friends) of pledging to yourself.

Back on the project editing page, rewards are laid out very well, adopting a unique architecture that’s nonetheless readily learnable. Creators can have zero rewards, or many rewards. So the page needs to scale well, to accommodate a wide array of uses.

Adding and modifying rewards is an extremely easy and simple quasimode: click “edit” and the following replaces the original frame.

But if I can’t edit this reward anymore, why is it apparently possible for me to remove it?

Final thoughts.

My bias is obvious: I’m a project creator on Kickstarter, and I believe fervently in its mission. Especially in today’s down economy, people still want to work, and many are trying to follow their own passions. People of a stunning array of interests – writers, filmographers, scientists, photographers, record labels, butchers – are finding ways to go it alone, and Kickstarter is as good a catalyst for these big ideas as I’ve ever seen.

While Kickstarter’s interfaces have their foibles, they’re tiny and easily correctable, and I had to dig hard to find them. Overall, the site is astoundingly well-designed, with a fairly singular aesthetic of generous white space, clean typography, a consistent baseline, and nearly pitch-perfect layout and information architecture. And in its own roundabout way, it’s quite an honor to see my own project framed so well.