For those of you who haven’t seen, there’s a new version of effectivealtruism.org up. The previous version was good as a first pass but we hadn't invested a lot of time in it so there wasn't much content. This is the first thing that comes up when people google ‘effective altruism’ so we think it’s pretty important for it to provide a more comprehensive overview of EA and represent the community well.
We’ll be launching the new site at EA Global this evening so if you’re reading this you’re ahead of the curve.
At the moment, the new website's primarily targeted at people relatively new to EA, so most of the content is introductory. We’re planning to iterate on the design and include more advanced material in future.
But there are some pretty cool things you might want to check out:
1) An interactive cause prioritization tool. It’s based off the GPP flowchart with some tweaks. The tool is in Beta at the moment so we’d welcome any feedback. If you want to sign up as a Beta tester you can here. Or just leave feedback in the integrated form.
2) A long read introducing effective altruism.
3) Brief responses to some of the most common questions / objection with links to more reading.
4) Links to the best introductory material on EA.
We plan to invest substantially more time in this site, to make it a real hub for the community. It'd be great to hear what people think, either in the comments here or in the feedback section on the website.
On my laptop using Windows 10 and the latest version of Firefox on full screen, the cause prioritization tool has some obvious formatting issues. The text stating "OK, got it. Tell me how to help" extends past the right edge of the button, the text in the modal window seems intended to fit on one screen but just exceeds the space allocation, requiring a scrollbar, and when you do scroll down the flowchart does not scroll with the text.
Links should open in a new window so that you can easily get back to the flowchart after getting more information.
I think the ability to follow along with the flowchart as you're making your choices is cool, but I would suggest that until a professionally-designed version of the flowchart can be created, it would be more effective to omit it if the site is primarily aimed at audiences new to EA. Right now the visual effect is sloppy, with text colliding with lines, etc., and it creates a bad contrast with the relatively more polished quiz next to it. I doubt that most new-to-EA folks will get that much out of having the flowchart there if they already have the quiz to work with.
Let me know if you need me to email screenshots of any of this - I couldn't figure out a way to upload them in the interface here.
Thanks Ian - agreed it doesn't look fantastic at the moment. We embedded it on the website at the last moment and it screwed with the formatting. We'll be working to improve how it looks over the next couple of weeks.
My guess is that the common objections are so non-obvious to find that few people with objections will take the trouble to go to the page. Just a guess, you have the page view stats...
I'm not quite sure how to fix it, you could have an FAQ tab at the top that leads there. A dropdown on the 'About' link (like on the 80k page) could be very effective.
Did you change the wordmark and the color of the logo? I'm curious as to the thought process behind that.
We wanted to differentiate the website slightly from the eaglobal site while maintaining brand coherency so went for a slightly different shade of blue which feels a bit 'calmer'.
Not wedded to it though and may change back. Which do you prefer?
The link to the beta tester form currently leads to docs.google.com/forms/ [...] qilM/prefill (which says you need permission), but it should instead lead to docs.google.com/forms/ [...] qilM.
Thanks Michael - fixed now