Web Design Trends
weavora.com
weavora.com
In comparison tests, longer copy almost always wins. You keep offering more and more reasons to buy, and you keep converting more and more readers.
This relates to one of the basic observations about selling: people don't like to change their minds. They won't spontaneously go from "no" to "yes". But if you offer a new piece of information, they can change their mind without admitting they were "wrong" before. Every new piece of information, or new story, is another opportunity for them to get to "yes".
Obviously, the copy also needs to be good.
On the one side, defending long-form copy ads are David Ogilvy (probably popularly considered to be the greatest advertising genius ever, and who rigorously statistically tested all his methods), and today, companies like Apple.
On the other side, are lots of Web 2.0 A/B testing results that basically say, shorter is better.
Now, I'm sure there are times when each are right. But I've never heard anyone explain when long-form is better vs when short-form is better, and when each performs worse.
Is it high-end products (long copy) vs low-end products (short copy)? Is it "experience" products vs "utility" products? Is it left-brain vs right-brain consumers? Is it impulse buys vs researched buys? I could invent a million ideas, but I want proof, not hypotheses.
I am positively desperate for some kind of researched and statistically backed-up explanation that figures out the factors on both sides!
http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/scrolling-tips/
In split tests, long pages often beat shorter pages.
As a rule of thumb, your page should contain at least as
many words as you’d use when selling your product or
service face to face.
The winning page we designed for SEOmoz was six times
longer than the control, which it outperformed by 52%.
Whenever someone tells you that they’d never buy from a
long page, remind them how long Amazon’s pages are.
Long pages are effective, but only if your users know that
they can scroll and are given compelling reasons to do so.
The redesigned page is about 20 times as long as the
control... new page outperformed the control by 30%.
In our initial micro-test, long copy outperformed short
copy by 40.54%. Click-through traffic sent to the short
copy page was unprofitable (-14% ROI), while traffic sent
to the long copy page produced an ROI of 21%.
Short copy performs better when there is low perceived
risk, low cost, and low commitment... when the customer
has an emotional, impulsive, and “want-oriented”
motivation. When you want people to take action that
doesn’t cost them dollars (email signups, free trial,
clickthrough)
Visitors are equally likely to scan the entire page no
matter the page size.
Below 540 pixels, both visitor attention and page exposure
decline exponentially.I might have missed that one. Could you provide a representative link or three?
a) Easily reversible or just insignificant action, no commitment—you offer a free product or trial, or a paid service that could be easily cancelled. Long copy would turn on ‘decision mode’, but we may want to avoid that, so less info is probably better.
Example: Lots of ‘Web 2.0’ services.
b) Not easily reversible action—money are required up front, or you're upselling something to free users. Regular people (not yet fans of your product) are likely to consider different options in this case. Long and good copy, therefore, would present more and more reasons to pay.
Example: Apple website.
That said, I'd like to see a study too.
Why don't you learn to write copy and test it yourself? You will arrive to the same conclusion that every industry veteran arrives to: long copy out sells short copy. Why? Everyone has different hypothesis. Mine is that long copy allows for the writer to disqualify prospects and attack all buying objections right from the start. When you have those two things working for you, the decision to buy mostly boils down to how attractive the product is to the prospect. Try it out. Learn it. I'll even teach you the basic if you want. If you can program, this stuff is cake. email in profile.
Really? I'd love to see A/B results somewhere of this, as it doesn't agree with my experience. Maybe it depends on industry. Or, maybe sufficiently good copy beats out shorter designs, but most people just can't generate that kind of copy. (Though it sounds like we're getting to a New True Scotsman a bit.)
When my start-up did an A/B test of our homepage, we found less content won out. Also 37 signals did their series on optimization, and had strong results[1] that shorter beat out long form, too.
[1] http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2991-behind-the-scenes-ab-tes...
My rule of thumb is that if you have a very solid on-boarding process, then short copy and a giant signup button will likely work well (Dropbox, 37Signals, etc). They transition the prospective customer from mildly interested to an active user via the app itself.
If it is not, then longer copy on the homepage to prime the customer for why they need your product makes more sense.
When A/B testing, it is important that you are optimizing for active users, not just trying to maximize the number of rows in the user tables. When I run A/B tests, the units are dollars, not percent. It means the tests have to be run for a really long time, but it is common that what is best for revenue, is not always what creates the most button clicks, or the most rows in a database table.
http://conversionxl.com/4-cases-where-short-home-pages-outpe...
Case in point a lot of startup websites that have one sentence of huge text saying "X let's you do Y with Z" and then a gigantic "SIGN UP" button and nothing else on the page.
There's also a lot of pages that seem to do a halfway house and provide a lot of images for re-enforcement. Like this one: http://www.apple.com/uk/ipad-mini/overview/
For varying values of 'good'. I think I remember Eben Pagan (aka "David DeAngelo") saying that he split-tested copy with some mistakes and sloppy writing vs copy that was more polished, and got more conversions from the sloppy version. Maybe it gave readers less of a 'slick marketing' vibe?
I think of dimension (and texture) as one of the tools in the design toolbox, along with proximity, alignment, proportion, color, shape, and others. These tools allow us to create hierarchy, affordance, focus/highlights, contrast, legibility and other design paradigms that hopefully result in usable, visually pleasing design.
The effectiveness of each tool depends on the design objective (using color or proportion to highlight an element might be more effective than simply using alignment). In a minimalist approach, I like to work with the tools in "layers", in a specific order, and in quantities as small as possible. First, I begin with alignment and proximity — positioning elements. The challenge is to create something usable and attractive using only those tools. Sometimes, it's just not possible, so I'll move on to proportion, then color, then shape. I generally find that dimension and texture are unnecessary, so I leave them in the toolbox. Sometimes, perhaps because there's a high density of elements in the design, one element (button, dialogue, header) may need additional contrast or focus, at which point I'll consider adding some depth.
The prototype should never be better than than the final version because what we try to give is awesome design which work awesome as a static version but when it come to dynamic view developers keep changing things.that will completely change everything you need to change accordingly
sometimes people think that single page apps are better.it's true in some cases but not in all the cases
trello is the best example it can be a single page app but they dint.pjax is what you can really use for dynamic design but still when it comes to micro-blog or blog the ajax will just fine. but you should really try pjax technic for mega apps.
i work on django so thats what i suggest for others using pjax is awesome
But in re-checking the site I didn't see any claim that these are somehow trends of 2012; in fact, they say, "Let’s take a moment to look around some trends we witnessed in last couple years."
Edit: Just correcting to help, not mocking.
(/s)
On a more serious note, IMO Apple's wild ride into skeuomorphism is already starting to look dated, IMO. Their web designs don't suffer from this as much as their native apps do, but whenever I see a new app with a background that's brushed chrome or leather or some form of wood grain, it looks a bit stale in terms of design. Of course YMMV, this is a mostly subjective thing, but in terms of overall software visual design, I'll take what MS is doing with Metro or what Google has been doing with Android from ICS+ over the Apple texture-everything approach any day.
Or maybe does the design need to exist on said influential sources for shotcallers to dare say OK ship it!