Webtrends Optimization

A huge part of doing optimization well is knowing what to test (put garbage in, get garbage out), so keeping up with good design philosophy is extremely valuable.  While brushing up on web design, I came across a Smashing Magazine article on UI design trends by Janko Jovanovic.  He uses a lot of great examples of good design, some of which are perfect for illustrating some optimization options.

With that in mind, I’m going to examine one of the sites mentioned and discuss the good, the bad and the testing opportunities I see.  The (lucky?) site I picked was Picnik, which has done a commendable job on their registration strategy.  (Also, like Widemile, they are a Seattle start-up.)  I only wish the site wasn’t flash based, which is more difficult to optimize.  Despite that, my thoughts on test variations and best practices are still applicable to it and any other registration campaigns.

Quick summary: Picnik is an online photo editing application.  You can upload photos and do easy photo editing all within the browser.  You can try out the app, even exporting and saving photos, without registration.

Let’s get started by checking out their form:

Although a bit busy, I like the way the form assists users.  It has a green highlight to for the selected field and dynamically pops up error messages (see the username alert below).  Additionally, it hides and locks the “again” fields until there is valid input in the corresponding field.

One highlight is how this is a good example of when a lightbox/page overlay type form might be appropriate (note that behind the form is the page I was working on, which has been darkened).  Why is it appropriate?  Because this is the form that pops up after the user clicks “Register.”  It makes sense to be direct and reduce additional marketing if the user indicates they want to sign-up by clicking directly on the register button.

Is this right for your site/landing page/microsite?  It’s hard to say, but I would recommend testing it.  This would fall into the category of a funnel test because it eliminates a page in the registration funnel.  As long as your full page and lightbox form don’t have any glaring issues, you should quickly see the influence of whether a small and direct lightbox form works, or if a whole page with additional information is necessary.

In terms of testing this overlay form, there are a few big opportunities for improvement.

• Testing title and intro copy. Use “free” in the headline and as the first word, e.g. “Free registration”, then list a few benefits rather than saying “All we need is a username, password, and email address.”
• Eliminate typing passwords and emails twice. Test this to see if it has a negative impact on registrations and if it creates lot of nonstarters (people who register but never return to the app.)
• Change the color of alerts to red instead of green because green is the site’s hyperlink color and also used for highlighting the selected field.
• The button should stand out. Call to actions typically work better when they are a different color from the rest of the site.  The button copy should be amped up a bit to “Get Started Editing”, “Save your photos now” or something similar too.

So how does Picnik capture users that don’t click register directly?  They offer it after a photo is saved:

As you can see, this page has a lot more content than the lightbox form since its a full page.  It has the job of pushing someone into registering after having used the product.  This is a good technique (mentioned in Javanovic’s article), but there’s always the question of if you’re offering too much or too little.  Testing how much to offer would be a very interesting and fruitful optimization campaign.

Overall, I’m not a huge fan of this page, but I do like the approach.  It has continuity at the top, showing the actual photo edited, and the form and main registration benefit (”Want Picnik to keep a copy?”) are prominent.  Also, they have structured the page to prioritize their conversion goals, keeping the focus on registration but still advertising the opportunity for people to print their photos or sign up for premium service below.

Here are a few recommendations to improve this page:

• What’s the clock icon for? Make the headline bigger or put in an informative image that will help encourage registration.
• Make the bullet points more prominent. The bullets disappear once the form begins to be filled out, using the same alert and field revealing technique I described with the previous form.  I would make sure the bullets stay on the page.
• Test all the copy.  It’s hard to know what feature is most important to users without testing.  Uploading more photos might be more appealing or saving their connections to Flickr and Facebook.
• Change the buttons. “Close photo” and “Create my account” look the same, they should be differentiated to emphasize their individual actions.  With a primary call to action, it needs to stand out.  Also, I would make the “Close photo” and “Continue editing” buttons much smaller to discourage immediate attention and clicks on those buttons, the point being to drive people to read the registration benefit copy.

Optimizing for registration involves many steps, beyond just improving the registration pages.  You can delve into when to ask for registration, test the ROI of emphasizing different products and then executing  segmentation focused pages as well.  However the easiest returns will come from some simple fixes like I’ve discussed above.

I hope this was helfpul talking over a real example, let me know if you’d like me to do more of these and if there’s any great sites out there I should look at.

Note: This is the second post of a 3 part series, each focusing on one type of test result that is tough to deal with. Read the first article on highly mixed data.

As an optimization analyst, this is probably the hardest result to bring to a client. Oddly enough, it actually is favorable to part 1’s highly mixed data and part 3. I am talking about optimization that determines that the original page is better than the tested variations.

How does this happen?
Sometimes a page just gets it right. How would you change Google? I looked for a few variations and came across one by Andy Rutledge and another by Valacar. They both are beautiful designs and a lot of thought were put into them, but at the same time, would they really make Google more profitable? It’s definitely a tough sell and there is a big challenge in improving this type of page.

The goal is for users to search. Yes, they want users to click on ads eventually, but there’s not a whole lot they can do for ad clicks on the homepage. The best they can do is get users to search as fast as possible. So would a redesign make it more usable and readable? Maybe. To a level that it would increase their revenues? That’s tough to say.

The more simple the goals of the page, the less information and messaging the users needs, the more likely that the page will be difficult to optimize.

What can you do to prevent this?
Be careful when choosing a page to test. Find a page where the user will take some time to look at what is going on. This is another reason why most landing pages are great places to optimize, because users naturally need to be introduced to the product and sold on why to convert.

The logical thing to do would be to simply refrain from testing pages that seem to be performing well, but this is rarely a good rule. Unless it is performing well because of a lot of testing, then you don’t really know if a page is performing well or not (see my post on conversion rates.) Testing always brings surprises and personal judgment is no replacement for a test; a good looking page can perform poorly and a page with subpar creative can perform great.

What can you do if this happens?

Because of the above reasons, you may actually plan for this scenario to occur. Many people believe redesigning an old page will provide improvement, but what if it is old and performing well? In that case, you may plan to try to improve but not expect to beat the old version.

In any case, if your original page wins, then you have confirmation of your page’s success. It is unlikely that all possible improvements were tested in one test run though, so it may take a few more runs to really confirm its solidarity, but the page has won against the initial best ideas and that is an achievement.

This lesson tells you that you can move on and that is progress in itself.

Moving forward, I would try drastically different approaches, either in layout or design and testing around offers. Otherwise, I would apply the successful original page to tests for other areas of your site.

I have to be honest when I say that this rarely ever happens. Almost every page has room for improvement at every step of the conversion funnel.

Whew, I will try to get the third and toughest optimization result next week.

CC photo credit: philosophygeek

I was going over my testing plans with my boss, Frans Keylard, today and he reminded me of a very powerful rule.

Test if something works before you try variations of it.

In this case, I was testing out two testimonials. They were quite different in the messaging, however, do I even know if testimonials are read or impact visitors at all? If I test a testimonial and no testimonial, I will immediately know if I should continue trying testimonials. If testimonials win or compare favorably against having no testimonial, then I know to test additional testimonials.

Not that I have never tested factors on/off or tried totally different factors, e.g. a testimonial against a product shot. I had a strong feeling testimonials were going to work, so I assumed they would, although I know I shouldn’t assume anything. An honest mistake, but a good reminder.

Ideally I would be testing variations, along with showing nothing, or “off”, as a variation, however in this case the page didn’t get much traffic so I was limiting my testing to the most important variations and factors.

There might be some fringe cases where this isn’t necessarily true, but in most cases you should just save extra variations for future runs and first find out if your factor has any impact on the page. Maybe I need to read some of my old posts more often.