jhardernet

After spending more hours than I care to admit writing CSS overrides for IE 8 it seems safe to declare: Miscrosoft has lost another battle in the browser war.   Sure, IE8 is slightly more standards compliant than its predecessor, but it still requires tweaks and hacks to make everything look and work correctly. Further inconsistencies are created depending on the security settings of the user. For instance, a “High” setting blocks some dynamic HTML effects but does not alert the user, thus leading to some “broken” looking websites.

Microsoft has built in a “compatability view” button which basically re-renders the page through an IE7 emulator and makes use of the CSS overrides you had to put in place for IE7… That’s right, Microsoft has hacked IE to go back in time to be hacked by your previous hacks – it’s a METAHACK. I know, it’s confusing. And annoying.

Plus as it stands right now only about 14% of IE users are on the latest version, the rest are on IE 7 or even IE 6. It’s time Microsoft belly up to the Internet standards bar for real, and stop releasing half-hearted efforts in the meantime that will become legacy headaches for programmers.

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.

An excerpt from the homepage test

Today at work I was given the green light to start testing my “radically different” homepage design.  I’d like to say this design is based on a bunch of user research, or some sort of participatory design methodology but … it’s not. It’s pretty much just me making some guesses.  At this point I’ve stared at it and tweaked bits and pieces for so long that I don’t even know what to think of it anymore. This is the point where I wish there were other designers here, or a culture of usability testing to get more feedback.

Here’s the test page and the control.  If they look the same you’ll have to clear your cookies and reload the page because it will have pulled you into the test. Check them out and then I’ll break it down.

What (I think) it gets right:

1. Fluid layout accommodates different resolutions while maximizing use of screen space. A much bigger improvement over the former table based layout.
2. Text wherever possible and graphics only when necessary make improvements in accessibility.
3. Graphics and colors have been updated and white space increased for a more modern look, while still in keeping with the brand image. My goal was to make it look current and friendly.
4. Pared down the navigation, getting rid of little-used buttons at the top of the old site, and decluttering the left nav bar.
5. Inclusion of Twitter stream to show that there are real people here working hard and to generate some social networking mojo.
6. Took two small search boxes and replaced them with one big, centrally located box; also, focus is on the search box so you don’t have to click into it before your start typing.

What (I think) could be better:

1. Not sure on the scrolling feature box.  Could be clunky to use and create alignment issues when re-sized to an extremely narrow width.
2. The Mags by category, combined with the scroll box, create a big wall of  products that may be a bit overwhelming.
3. Something about the design still doesn’t quite say “E-Commerce website” to me. Not sure if it’s the color scheme or what.

There it is. Traffic is getting split 50/50 between this page and the control. So far, with approximately 30 visitors each the test page has 3 sales and the control has 2. Obviously it’s too early to tell.

Hopefully this test either wins big or goes down in a blaze of glory. The worst, yet most common theme is for the conversion rates/sale to be even in which case you’ve proved nothing without learning anything.

I’ll keep you (my imaginary readers) posted on the results.