To:

Head First

From:

New Army experiment designers

Re:

We don’t know why Home Page #3 is stronger

We’re delighted to hear that #3 is the best, but we really don’t know why. Who knows what people are thinking? But that is actually OK: as long as we’re showing improvement on the business fundamentals, we don’t need to understand people in a deep way. Still, it’s interesting to learn as much as we can.

The stylesheets are really different from each other in many ways. So when it comes to isolating individual features that might account for the performance differential, it’s hard. In the future, we’d like to take Home Page #3 and test a bunch of subtle permutations. That way, we might learn things like how button shape or font choice affect user behavior.

But we conjecture that there are two factors. First, Home Page #3 is really readable. We use fonts and a layout that are easy on the eyes. Second, the page hierarchy is flatter. You can find pretty much everything in three clicks, when for Home Page #1 it takes you more like seven clicks to find what you want. Both could be affecting our revenue, but we need more testing to say for sure.