Redesign: Users: Thrilled. Conversion Rates: Up. Sales: Unchanged.

Another issue you might be encountering is that states are adopting the common core standards http://www.corestandards.org/ and word bingo doesn't meet any of the standards for english language arts. Since everything in classrooms is documented, lesson plans are stored and in some cases handed over to the state there's not going to be a lot of use cases for activities that can't be applied to the standards. Even if those activities are just for fun due to a holiday.

It seems to suggest that design just has to be good enough. Below some set threshold for visually appeal and/or usability the design hinders money-making. However, above that threshold, further improvement isn't necessary? If this is a reasonable interpretation, that is actually quite sad and suggests that all the new design-centered startups are wasting a lot of money.

You gave a numbered list of good suggestions and wrote the kernel of a detailed, thoughtful comment, but sabotaged it with poor framing and assumptions. I don't care or anything, but for your benefit: this is a nerdly inclination that will serve you very, very poorly in your professional career. HN often has the opposite problem from your comment (a bias towards being "right" even when we're not "correct", such as in civil liberties stories); here, you're "correct" but not "right", since adoption of all your recommendations is unlikely to change the bottom line for Patrick at all.

One consultant to (I presume) another: my suggestion for next time: either:

(a) (expensively) do exhaustive research so you can frame your high-level assessment and recommendations in the context of someone's business (ie, expend the effort to make sure you're both correct and right), or

(b) (much simpler) develop a habit of writing your comments in a neutral, helpful tone, so that you can be correct without having to be right at all.

By the way, I feel comfortable writing this comment because I have oh my God exactly the same problem with my comments. Look at me on a crypto thread sometime.

Other parts are the way they are simply because, well, we have very different standards for things which should delay shipping. Bits are cheap, my time is expensive, optimizing for bits saved (on my cute little re-demoted-to-hobby project, no less) seems like a poor idea.

Similarly, failure to achieve pixel perfection of the price display in Australian dollars is not exactly the kind of thing that would scare me away from a design. You know what would terrify me? "It looks nice -- women generally hate it." That would cause the business to fold like an origami crane. Happily, it doesn't seem to have that problem.

I'm generally happy to get feedback, even negative feedback, but as one professional to another your feedback doesn't leave me with the impression "Tie a string around my finger to address this later" because it does not persuasively implicate anything I really care about.

Removing them after the fact with a HTML tidier would work, or you could just not care and let gzip handle the compression.

The extra whitespaces are most probably the template output. If he is using erb, erb is a generic template and doesn't make assumptions about relevance of whitespace. If you are optimizing by hand, you will still have all the newlines and indents in the output.

Some people use minifiers, most people don't care. Almost all servers and clients speak gzip, and the extra overhead is so low on the list of things to optimize that it probably isn't even on the list.

> 3- JavaScript, I see that you are loading a good chunk of JavaScript in the HEAD and you are loading a bunch of it in the end. For example the Amazon JS file (http://s3.amazonaws.com/new.cetrk.com/pages/scripts/0004/737...) is certainly not usable, and is yet a whole HTTP request.

Again, I am taking a guess. layout.html.erb yields under body, and head and scripts are same for all pages. Now patio11 can hand include just the needed scripts on every page, but he chose to include all scripts on all pages. This isn't something the designer controls.

> 2- http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2777218/shot2.png

That menu change really looks weird.

I doubt he has the time and 'itch' right now, though.

EDIT: removed an article to clarify

The site shows the old version to some visitors. You can click the link in the footer to get the new redesign.

Do you find me credible on this topic? I'm legally, morally, and practically constrained regarding how much detail I can go into here, but if you trust me: I have recent experience which makes me disagree in the strongest possible way with the generalization of your hypothesis. A recent client CCs me on their weekly Optimizely status report. I've been evangelizing A/B testing for a few years. Every time I read one of those emails my mind gets blown again.

That's not true in my experience. I've seen some big increases in the percentages that complete the checkout process through an iterative process of redesign/test for example.

The motivation behind a user purchase can be very different in different situations. If Mary is purchasing a new gearbox for the car, and she's already done a comparison shop, then she's likely to finish the purchase as long as it's vaguely sane. If Bob is impulse buying that new laptop bag he saw on swissmiss then every single grain of friction between Bob and the final "purchase" button is going to make it more likely that he remembers he really needs that $80 for groceries this week.

At some point you're going to reach a maximum of course and only see small or no increases - but, with my clients anyway, folk seem to be quite a long way from that in many instances :-)

As to cost/benefits: I'm at a point in my life/business where "Spend a week hacking a template to save < $2,000" is an astoundingly poor use of my time.

We can all appreciate that that sort of conversation is pretty exasperating for the engineer, but if he were a nice guy, he'd want to try to explain at least enough engineering to the boss such that the boss understood why "Use an iPad" is not a compelling option there. But he might be disinclined to start that conversation at 2:40 in the morning because it would take a while.

It is 2:40 AM in Japan and improving your understanding of A/B testing would take a while. There exist many comprehensible beginner's guides to it on the Internet. If after reading them you still don't understand why you need two more pieces of data in your hypothetical and why it is not extraordinarily likely that the 7% increase you measure in it reflects an action change in user behavior, I will be happy to explain it to you some day when it is not 2:40 AM.

A/B testing is founded on statistics. You take Option A and Option B and see which one achieves more Goal C.

But you can't just look at the percent difference and decide that Option B must be better! Look, it has a higher percent Goal C! But that could be due to chance, so A/B tests employ tests of statistical significance to determine whether the test results are _probably_ chance or _probably_ reflect a genuine causal increase in Goal C.

For example, if you flip a coin four times, and get heads three of those times, without a statistical significance test you might conclude heads is 3x as likely to appear as tails. We know that's wrong, though- each side on a coin has a 50% chance of appearing face-up for each flip.

The flaw in this experiment is that we tried to extrapolate a result from a very small set of data. A statistical significance test would take these results and say "we have a <very small percent> confidence level that heads is more likely to come up, and doesn't just come up more often by chance".

If we flipped the coin 10,000 times instead, you'd get something pretty close to 50% heads and 50% tails, and your significance test would return a high confidence level that those numbers are accurate.

Short story long, you need lots of datapoints to determine whether an A/B test result is chance or an actual difference, and the smaller the difference between how Option A and Option B perform, the more datapoints you need to be confident they're actually different. Patrick's numbers are so close together that he'd need far more than 300 sales to reach the gold-standard 95% confidence level that there's actually a difference.