jhardernet

Wow. Quite an exciting week for me as yet another test that I designed has gone live. This one redesigns the Women’s Interest category pages. Two weeks ago a redesign of the Men’s Interest category was tested. Although I put that test together, it was in protest as I did not have any control over the design decisions being made.

Here’s the old control page, and the ugly Men’s Interest redesign (I could go on for hours about how bad of a page this is). Now, here’s my Women’s Interest redesign. This one was pretty easy, as I just tried to follow best-practice genre conventions of category pages: Easy sorting options, paginated views with product photos, and a list view without covers.

The biggest change may be removing the “Buy” buttons. On the one hand that means a user has an additional click to get through to a detail page where they can order. My theory was that someone on a category page is more interested in browsing and is still in the decision-making process, so the added clicks aren’t an interference.

Time will tell – this test has only been up for a couple hours. So far it is converting at 28% vs. 0% Go test, go!

As for the new homepage design, after 24 hours the conversion rate is slightly higher on the test page but average sale is substantially higher on the control. Also, bounce rate is up on the redesign which is a real disappointment as that will be our main indicator of success for this test. My plan is to tweak the redesigned page a bit to make the product layout a bit less overwhelming. As long as the conversion rate isn’t falling off then there’s hope.

More updates to follow.