Have you ever relied on your professional judgment (or the personal preferences of an executive or designer) to make decisions about website design or content? I know I have.
I attended a really cool webinar about web testing. I learned something very powerful:
You will NEVER know what will spur your customers to take action–unless you test.
What may seem intuitive to a marketer, might not be intuitive to your customers. Here are some of the variables that were reviewed:
- Simplicity vs. complexity
- More text vs. less text
- Color choices
- Headlines
- Images
- Moving “stuff” around
- Button text and colors
- One page forms vs. multi-page forms
When we were shown two versions of a page and were asked to guess which was more successful, I usually felt that I knew the answer, without any doubt whatsoever. The result? I was wrong–not every time, but enough to make a significant impression on me.
Check out the gallery of winners from the webinar to see for yourself. For each test, go straight to “Click for Case Study” to see what I saw.
If you’re looking for a great book on this subject, read my favorite: Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. His site is fascinating.
Here’s another interesting post that could apply to color choice testing: The Emotional Use of Colors on Your Website.
Thanks for mentioning the color post, Marianne. I’m sure Brian would like to thank you too
Some cool testing related site are in Think – Test – Track, by the way. And yes, you’re right: unles you ask through testing you have no idea. It’s amazing sometimes how outright contrarily the results are vs. what we though.
Thanks for the link. I’ll be sure to check it out!
Great information Marianne, thanks!