I recently had to design a couple of teaser pages for a client and a personal project, and this led me to think about what exactly makes for a good teaser page — or to be more precise a “coming soon” page that companies often put up before they’re ready to launch their product. After careful research and many scientific tests in the brand new field of teaserology, I’ve developed a patented Teaser Effectiveness Analysis Matrix™, consisting of four elements.The perfect teaser page must score high on all four axis of the following: memorability, virality, desirability and data collection-ability. I know that “data collection-ability” is not proper English, but inventing new words is one of the perks of being a scientist. As we’ll see, most teaser pages focus strongly on two or three of these elements but rarely hit all four.

They also offer two different options for ties - they can either be counted as winners, or the number of teams in the teaser can be reduced by one. The reduce option pays a little better than the. Riddles - tons of the best riddles with answers for kids and adults to tell, share, rate, comment and submit: hard, easy, brain teasers, riddle of the day +. Teasers Trailers Other About. All Teasers Click on an image to view it in full resolution! Special thanks to KamGames and Magicraftcat for providing teaser images! A man is on a game show. He is presented with two doors, one on the left, and one on the right. Behind one is 2 million dollars, and behind the other is a donkey. Choose the correct door to win the prize. There are also two men in front of the doors, and they know which door leads to the millions.

Memorability,
Virality,
Desirability,
Data collection-ability.

I know that “data collection-ability” is not proper English, but inventing new words is one of the perks of being a scientist. As we’ll see, most teaser pages focus strongly on two or three of these elements but rarely hit all four.

Why Do I Need A Teaser?

Even though people seem to put out a teaser website for anything these days, let’s step back and think about why one would need a teaser. After all, putting one together takes time and energy, and you could argue that the effort would be better spent on the product itself.

But a teaser can go a long way to ensuring a successful launch. Raising awareness of your product long before it ships makes sense: people are more likely to interact with your app if they’re somewhat familiar with it, so letting them hear about it as soon (and as much) as possible helps. Ideally, you would create a climate of anticipation, and make people look forward to the release date. People love to know in advance about the next big thing, and you can use it to your advantage.

A Powerful Motivating Tool

Another factor that is not as obvious but perhaps even more important is motivation. When you’re working hard on something, without any guarantee of success, doubting yourself and losing motivation is easy, and this circumstance often leads people to abandon otherwise promising projects.

Raising awareness and collecting email addresses long before launch does two things to combat this lack of motivation. First, by putting the project out there, you make it much harder for yourself to quit, because we all hate to let people down. Secondly, pre-registering users shows you that there’s actual demand for what you’re building, which goes a long way to silencing those gnawing doubts. In this context, the teaser is a vital part of any product’s Web strategy.

Now that we know the why, let’s look at the how, and analyze a few strategies.

Teaser Page Strategies

Create a Strong Identity

As stated, the first dimension of a good teaser is memorability. One way to achieve this is with a strong brand. By “brand,” I mean all of the visual attributes that people associate with your product: logo, colors, style, etc. Once you launch, the website could end up looking very different than the teaser page, so having a strong brand is a great way to maintain continuity.

Many websites combine an attractive logo and strong color scheme to establish the brand’s identity, without even telling you what they do. It doesn’t have to be just color or a logo, though.

As for Piictu, nothing in its teaser stands out at first glance, but the care given to the overall design (from the subtle background pattern to the combination of typefaces and colors) is memorable in itself, putting the application in a class of its own.

Talkbee (see the screenshot below) is a personal project of mine. I decided that I wanted a strong design with bright colors and a memorable logo to differentiate it from the competition.

The logo is prominent on Talkbee, and the whole page is designed around it.

Use a Gimmick

One design detail trumps even great branding: a gimmick, something special that people haven’t seen before. One of the most famous examples of this was the teaser page for Silverback, which included a CSS parallax effect (you can still see the effect on the current website if you resize your browser window). The website went viral in social circles and became hugely popular on the strength of that little CSS trick alone.

The Kickoff’s teaser page features a subtle yet nice illustration and a small email subscription box..

One popular technique that you could use to achieve a “gimmick” is animations, today usually created with CSS transitions and CSS animations. Animations could quickly get overwhelming and frustrating on “real” websites, but they’re appropriate in small doses in teasers. Recent examples of teasers with animation are Cloudring and Kickoff.

Ben the Bodyguard draws you in with storytelling.

Another interesting techniques is to use vertical scrolling to tell a story. The poster child for this is certainly Ben the Bodyguard which doesn’t provide all information right away but rather unfolds a story using animations and scrolling.

A very similar idea was used by Dayri and the beautiful Youzee. The technique is successful because storytelling helps people make sense of their environment in a logical and linear way. A linear story hooks us much more effectively than disjointed facts.

Leverage the Power of Social Circles

A more interesting recent development in design of “coming sooon” pages is to include viral mechanisms in the pre-registration process itself. The simplest form of this is a simple “Tweet this page” button on the page.

LaunchRock, a service that lets you quickly generate a teaser page of your own, takes this a step further. After registering for a LaunchRock-powered website, the user gets a personalized link to the teaser. The more people register through this link, the sooner the user gets access to the website. In fact, LaunchRock itself uses this technique: in order to create your own teaser website through LaunchRock, you need to get three other people to sign up to the service… Confused yet?

The teaser for Cowritable, powered by LaunchRock.

Another interesting idea is used by the “king of viral sign-ups” Dabble.in. Sharing Dabble.in’s link won’t get you early access. Instead, if multiple people request the same user name when signing up (say, “John”), then whoever gets more people to sign up wins the user name, while the others have to settle for less desirable alternatives (like, say, “John1986”).

Dabble.in lets you win your preferred user name.

If you’d rather not go to these extremes, then simple “Tweet” and “Like” buttons are still a good way to encourage people to spread the word. Of course, the easier it is for visitors to share your link, the more they’ll do it.

Give Something Back

Probably the most effective way to make people share

Two Teasers In One Post?!