The (Un?)Importance of Design

[FWIW, I'm a partner in a marketing/dev services firm and we do lots of this re-design work. When a client asks us to use existing content and just re-paint/organize it, we very clearly call it out as a "re-flow" so that no one expects miracles...]

There is a huge difference between re-flowing content (as ASB seems to have done) and re-designing/structuring a page (something we're working on with a client right now). If you 're-design' a page and metrics don't change, you know you re-flowed and that's sometimes exactly what you're trying to accomplish (re-branding; increasing existing customer trust/happiness).

That said, we see lots of people on the marketing, dev and design sides of businesses who, like ASB, don't seem to grok that design is about communication and not about colors and shapes. This often leads to re-design that doesn't communicate anything different or differently.

Increasing/optimizing conversion rate is rarely about the layout of content; its usually about the content itself, the motivations produced by the content, the avenues provided to users to engage with their new motivation and the flow/paint. Those who say otherwise are believe in green-button-FTW or think users can be tricked into clicking.

Edit: restructured, expanded.

I feel like prettying your site up should only be a minor consideration when doing a redesign. You need to have clear goals, and some hypotheses on how to reach those goals. It sounds like his hypothesis was "If I make the site nicer looking, then more people will sign up and pay". By looking at the data he's found that isn't the case.

There's still a lot of other stuff to test on a site, only some relates to how it looks. Things like headlines and images/screenshots can have a huge impact. A nice design gives you a good base to work from, but shouldn't be the end. Throwing in the towel and saying "design must not matter" is the wrong way to go.

For example... their new site has way too much text, not enough visuals. Especially the features page. I would add some screenshots and try to use a more descriptive headline. Instead of "Features" or "Gory details" I'd try something like "We make WordPress run like a well oiled machine".

There's a Japanese word that represents the process perfectly, "kaizen". Committing to continuous improvement will end up in results eventually, fancy design or not. Design can definitely be part of the process, but it's not the only thing to work on.

Sigh. Yet another otherwise-smart person who appears completely oblivious to the distinction between design and "making stuff look pretty".

The first thing I thought of when reading this was the following video: "Saul Bass: On Making Money vs Quality Work"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfDCNpaPBiA

He seems to miss the difference between the improvement of visual design between versions of his site and the difference in usability design between Hipmunk and it's competitors. That's an almost completely different issue. It's no wonder he comes up with weird results.

Design with out a goal or design with out a purpose is not design.

Design can mean so many things these days, it's hard to fault the author or give him a hard time, but the remarks he makes at the end of the post are worth reading. To succesfully utilize design, you need buy-in from throughout the company. What I don't like about those remarks is his approach to design that seems to say it's an all or nothing affair. Design is definitely not an all or nothing endeavour, and you can easily incorporate good design principals, without spending too much time or resources on it.

Design is fundamentally about solving a problem. In this case the problem was that the product was ugly, not something more serious such as the design hindering successful interactions with the product. People can deal with a certain kind of "ugly" if it makes sense to them and works. This could help explain the lack of a significant, immediate uptick in the provided metrics.

Also, even though the current design may look nicer, it may have also introduced some new issues such as confusing users with all of the detailed automotive illustrations.

As a counter example, twittermachine (or was it tweetingmachine) creator posted a little while ago that a simple theme from theme forest increased his conversions dramatically.

edit: http://tweetingmachine.com

the product/service will outshine the design if the idea is still conveyed (in a pretty fashion or not).