It used to be that running two separate home page designs (called A/B testing) was expensive and time consuming, but thanks to sites such as ABtests.com, Optimizely.com, and others, you can submit your site designs almost automatically and inexpensively. Why do this? Because it works. Those who do A/B tests have found ways to simplify their designs, increase click-through and conversions rates, and get more business and satisfied customers.
While it's a simple concept, the execution isn't. According to the folks at A/B testing service Maxymiser:
This is often because any form of testing is wrongly assumed to be very technical, time consuming and difficult to implement; however this is just not the case. When you consider what a key part of the sales equation conversion rate is and how valuable customer insight can be it is surprising that so many people ignore such a simple form of testing.
Some A/B tests show the best way to improve response rates is to just reduce clutter. User experience expert Danielle Cooley has plenty of examples on her blog about how less content is actually a better strategy. She points to many successful examples, such as a redesign of the Norwegian telecommunications company Telenor where it took its site from 4,000 pages to 500 pages and doubled conversions.
At another site for an Irish wine shop, by using Google Analytics and some savvy moves, the store was able to more than double its checkout completions with a simple page design that cut down the number of steps, didn't ask for account creation, and removed other distractions from the shopping experience.
Sometimes A/B testing will reveal radical ideas. In a test for Vendio, ABtests found that including a sign-up form on the home page was actually a bad idea. Once they moved the signups to a button, Vendio saw an increase of 60 percent (see image below).
Before and After
In these pictures, you can see the results of A/B testing done for Vendio.
So let's get started. You first need a clear picture of what is wrong and what you want to change on your site. Is your home page too cluttered? Does it take your online visitors too many clicks and menu choices to get to your most popular content or products? Are too many purchases being abandoned before people pay for them?
Once you figure this out, you then need to properly test your A/B to ensure you can understand the effect of your changes. You also have to change just one aspect of your site at a time; otherwise you can't really track the causes of the resulting page view numbers. You'll find a good explanation of the steps involved at SearchEngineWatch.
And while we have just looked at Website design, there are lots of other areas of opportunity for A/B testing, including testing email campaigns. A good place to start learning about this concept is a tutorial from MailChimp.
ABtests.com is free, but you must agree to share your results in public. Optimizely.com has a basic monthly plan for less than $20. Good luck with your tests.
David Strom is a world-known expert on networking and communications technologies. He has worked extensively in the IT end-user computing industry and has managed editorial operations for trade publications in the network computing, electronics components, computer enthusiast, reseller channel, and security markets.
Very true Usman and that is why it is always been asked to keep design simple as much as possible. Most of us try to load heaps of data to make things more visible in a single page but that is wrong.
I wonder how many businesses conduct tests, percentage-wise. When I ask IT execs this question, many say their company didn't do it before they came on board, leading me to believe that it's a large number that don't invest in this technology and time. When I interviewed Michael Hart of Bonobos about testing, he said it added about a week to the process and that was for a major redesign. Think about the time you'd lose if the site kept crashing or users couldn't find the shopping cart, couldn't complete their order, the credit card information wasn't secure, or some other nightmare scenario. In addition to losing time, you could -- far worse -- lose customers forever. And when Bonobos' site crashed on Cyber Monday 2011, ask the former CTO (not Hart) whether testing might have been worthwhile! I'm sure he'd say, "Yes!" Hart implemented testing. The result: Cyber Monday 2012 had zero downtime.
Very interesting! I always wondered how websites did that, but it now appears not to be secret! However, with that being said I do agree with Alison on the simple fact that websites do that way too often. If it ain't broke, why fix it then?
I agree that simple is good, but don't forget to focus on testing! Testing is fantastic, and with intelligent use of analytics and event tracking one can really ensure users have a great web experience while generating the most conversions possible.
One problem I've found is the tendency by some companies to almost weekly change their Websites. Now, that might be a slight exaggeration--but it's not much of one. That's something commonsense, not any amount of testing, can restrain.
It's not whether the site should be more complex or more simple or whatever, but that you should be testing it with *your* users to see what works for *them*.
I had the opportunity to interview Greg Linden, who was involved in some major sites such as Amazon, and he swears by A/B testing -- and not just that, but giving everyone in the company the opportunity to set up quick and dirty A/B tests and doing them all the time.
I first ran A/B tests on a fairly high traffic (60 million unique a year) website in the last century and it was hard and it was expensive in terms of development hours.
It has certainly changes in the last 15 years. Today I am using Optimizely and I continue to be amazed by the ease of use. Omniture has some expensive and hard to implement tools that pale by comparison to Optimizely.
Today you truly have affordable, easy to use and powerful A/B testing options - there is no excuse not to run A/B tests!
The interface should be designed to allow users to do the routine tasks from the home screen while advanced functions should be available on the next screens.
Giving users the options of personalizing (in terms of menu's and options) is great. It will help them manifolds. Though I think that only the option of changing colors and layout would not help that much.
But often it is not complex design, but too simple design.
Again, look at the best used portal websites...the ones that host millions of users per day. Craigs List. Yahoo. Google News. Facebook. Twitter. They are both clean, clear, and yet intricate and chock full of clickable links, database sorting.
What is it they don't have? A huge block image that fills the screen! Or else, a few paultry links that a user soon grows tired of!
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