How Web Graphics Affect Conversions
blog.kissmetrics.com
blog.kissmetrics.com
You can minimize the "no spam" widget but apparently are held hostage by the other box until (I assume) you click one of the social +1's.
Assuming the rest of the article's content is well thought out, perhaps they should forward it to their own designer.
One cute statement about their final image example: whenever I have to pay a new web service, there are just an absolutely tremendous number of options for me to be dealing with. In order to narrow down the field to companies who actually care about my time, I have some peculiar general rules:
(1) Name must not be concatenated CamelCase words. This still eliminates about 50% of my options, while GitHub is among the only known exceptions where it might be worth paying them for something.
(2) No autoplaying flash. This no longer eliminates so many services as it once did, but it should still be standard.
(3) SSL is a must. You would seriously be surprised.
(4) May not contain clip art of a white woman wearing a headset. It can be an Asian woman, or a white man, or she can be holding a phone, or it could not be clip art (here is our cofounder Olivia...), whatever. This actually seems to further limit the field by over 50%. Web service hosts apparently have really odd stereotypes, or else they expect me to.
I give that list here, again, because their last example of ineffective image use is, naturally, clip art of a white woman wearing a headset.
The only time it really bothers me is when budding authors are trying to come up with fantasy names. They use (what I lovingly call) Dread Intercapitals alongside Dread Apostrophes and Dread Accents to make names that look like Harâk’Thür—presumably in imitation of Tolkien, who actually knew what he was doing, and had internally consistent language models.
Neal Stephenson has a fairly long, very amusing riff on this in his latest book, Reamde. Well worth the read.
I guess the problem is that it just gets dreary. Just to confine myself to web hosts: DreamHost. HostGator. HostMonster. HostOrca. KnownHost. StartLogic. TotalChoice.
Go on, try to say NearlyFreeHosting in one breath, no pauses. That's the name of that company. Someone actually named their company "neerlafrihostin."
You don't have to go as far as A Small Orange does, where you choose a branding that makes me think of a webcomic. You could just be like Liquid Web and Media Temple -- give me your name with those spaces intact. CamelCase is for programming languages and the occasional wiki -- and it's still ugly in those places too; I just don't see great alternatives there.
What's wrong with it, when it's clip art, is that it's contrived and overly specific in an oddly sexist way. Even worse, it's not explicit in its sexism, but it appears as a statistical pattern -- that is, the gender distribution is not 50/50 but more like 10/90; and the headset-versus-phone distribution is similarly out-of-touch with reality, at least at those offices without a dedicated customer support team; and minorities and Asians are almost completely absent because you might think of that bad word "Outsourcing".
The problem is not with whiteness, womanness, headsetness, or clipartness, but the intersection's ubiquity in the face of its unlikelihood. It appears everywhere and the problem is precisely "I just saw that on ten other sites, and I'm willing to bet that this is nothing like the person I'd actually be talking to if I called them up." If you just gave me real people working at your company, rather than clip art, that would already be a great start.
But, as I said, I agree. Yes, it says a lot about me that I see such a pattern, interpret it as "someone's trying to manipulate my subconscious" -- even if that wasn't their intent, it somehow hits me that way -- and then refuse to do business with people who I interpret as manipulative bastards. It also says a lot about me that I can't escape that feeling even after I have cogitated it.
But I still feel justified, because the companies who grab random images because they haphazardly think "this is what my customer wants to see" are not the sorts that I want to subsidize. I would rather have a company that's so lazy that they don't look for clipart at all, than a company that sets out to find clipart and then gets lazy somewhere midway along and, as you say, "just grabs a random image of a woman with a headset." Laziness is good, but if you're not going to be lazy, be special.
(Serious point: the reason it works is because it works. Ie "sex sells".)
I guess AdBlock and/or Ghostery did a good job once again.
For example:
If the images you’re using are not clearly tied to your value proposition, or to the central theme of your page, then they will only confuse your readers. At best, they’ll be pointless distractions. At worst, they’ll give the wrong impression and lead readers to feel tricked or disappointed.
In my experience, the blog posts I've written gain much more traction when they have images, even pointless stock images (I have experimented with this). So while I agree, that ideally, images should provide actual value to the story, I've found that a couple pointless stock images are better than no images. This is why I would have really liked to see actual evidence to back up their claims.
EDIT: Also, while we're on the topic, I also hate including all those social sharing widgets, but viewership takes a dramatic hit when they're not there.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Ogilvy-Advertising-David/dp/039472903X
I agree with you though that I would have liked to see some numbers, but otherwise it was a good article that should at least give you some ideas on what to test next.
Actually, you'd be losing at most about 9% of your audience. I know that's a bit of a nitpick, but it bugs me when people equate "not X% more" with "X% less".
Also, to actually lose 9% of your readers to your headline position, you have to make the very optimistic assumption that you're not losing readers to any other factor.
Building one myself, I instinctively felt this should be below the image, but my designer disagreed and that's the way it is right now. We will definitely push this down - evidence always wins :)
It just goes to show that quality > quantity.
Thanks for the link, good read!
The trick is to do your own homework, don't take any advice as absolute, fit everything to your unique circumstances, and always remember that your mileage will vary. I've spent enough time reading a lot of crap and had to learn to be extra judicious the hard way. I take most articles like this as very loose guidelines. It was definitely a great article with good advice but I know better than to just run out and apply it just because the experts said it. Experts contradict each other all the time.