When you simply get it wrong
Posted in Measurement, UsabilityIt’s always exciting to make a big change on your website – the people involved on the project always have an interest in making the site look “good” and “improving” it.
What happens so often though – we get it wrong.
The problem is these are very subjective changes. A lot of the time the good look changes harm functionality and results. Which in my mind, are more important.
I got it wrong
In the last few weeks I’ve been through this scenario. I’m confident I went about it the right way and know what I’m doing, but plain and simply I got it wrong.
I started off looking at the Analytics – seeing how people were using the homepage and understood the metrics that needed improving. Around these I creating a strategy to “improve” the stats and along the way make it “look better”.
In reality, bounce rate has risen from 40% to 55%. There has been some positives out of it, but 15% of your traffic now leaving the site instead of browsing is a huge amount of the audience lost.
My point is – what you think should be done on a website is often wrong.
Solution – Don’t think, TEST
Solution – don’t think, test. I don’t mean focus groups or asking user feedback. This particular homepage tested well in that regard. When the Analytics figures came in though, it failed.
The Amazon Test
Amazon are a perfect example for testing before implementing. When any change is to be made, they sample a small amount of their traffic and measure the impact.
For example before changing the location of the “add to cart” button on their product page, they would try 5 different options over 2% of their visitors and see which one increased conversion rate the most.
Unlike the real word though, they are fortunate enough to have the resources and the traffic to pull it off. If you’re only getting a couple of hundred visitors a day, this kind of test would take a long time. So do what you can within your means, but don’t assume anything.