The evolution of the 37signals home page | Hacker News Reader

The evolution of the 37signals home page

37signals.com

20 pointscoglethorpe21 comments

One thing that's interesting to me is that they clearly view each of their changes as being an improvement, but do they have empirical data to back that up? According to this copyblogger article, it doesn't sound like they had any metrics for the first few iterations at least...perhaps things have changed.

http://www.copyblogger.com/the-37-signals-approach-to-copywr...

If you want to use metrics, that's fine. If not: well, whatever works for you, works for you. Obviously 37signals is a success, and they design on impulse. They make things that "feel good". That is a perfectly fine way to design, especially if you have experience with designing.

Copyblogger is everything that's wrong with blogging. They take something that should be intricate and personal and try to turn it into a generic "writing copy" style. Is there any blogger worth anything at all that ever got advice from Copyblogger? Because when I read blogs, I go for the ones that don't sound like they're working from a stencil.

If you want to use metrics, that's fine. If not: well, whatever works for you, works for you. Obviously 37signals is a success, and they design on impulse.

Is 37signals a success because they design on impulse, or in spite of it? I'm sorry, but I have yet to hear a solid argument that ignoring easy-to-capture metrics is better business. I'm not talking about anything esoteric, I'm talking about core business metrics, like the number of people who sign up for your service.

If you implement a new design "on impulse" and your signups drop by 90%, your impulse was wrong, no matter how much you like the design or how good it feels to you. Even if you're still profitable after the drop (and thus "a success"), that doesn't mean that you made the right decision.

I'm sorry, but I have yet to hear a solid argument that ignoring easy-to-capture metrics is better business. I'm not talking about anything esoteric, I'm talking about core business metrics, like the number of people who sign up for your service.

That's because a lot of people, namely the intuitive sort, don't track that stuff enough for there to be a good counterargument.

That said: intuition has long been a part of design. Architects don't design buildings according to a numbers game: there's a part of the process that's wholly creative. Obviously, artists don't rely on metrics. They go with their gut. Numbers can show some things, but not always. Would you say that Rotten Tomatoes, by being fair and balanced, is really showing us the best movies? Is Toy Story 2 the best movie ever made? According to their reviews it is. According to ticket sales Titanic is the best movie ever. Are either of those metrics true? If I make a movie expressly intending to score better numbers than those movies, am I doing justice to a movie?

Get rid of this "right decision" argument. Past a very basic point, that's all subjective. There is certainly an objective layer design, but past that it's a matter of "like" and "don't like." The argument is like the Mac versus Linux argument, where one side says they "feel" better and the other side brings up numbers. The numbers are accurate, but to assume that the other side has no argument merely because they base opinions on intuition is stupid.

(By the way: there's more to a business than number of users. I'd rather have a site that had a very bright, small userbase than a site with a lot of users that I personally didn't like. Hacker News versus Digg, for instance.)

Hacker News isn't a business. It's a site. A business has to make a profit.

But 37signals is making a profit. Quite a lot of a profit. So after they're making money, isn't it their choice whether or not to follow their gut? Obviously the results are working for them.

Of course it's their choice. That doesn't mean it's the optimal choice or one to be admired.

Yeah, I get that. The problem is that "optimal" is misleading, because making money isn't the only goal of opening a business.

Would you say that David Lynch is a suboptimal director? His movies aren't enormous hits. He hasn't won for Best Movie. But those aren't his goals. Similarly, sometimes the people developing a site have more at stake than maximizing profits. Sometimes they want to make gorgeous web pages or gorgeous processes. And there's no optimal procedure for that.

Some people look at it another way. The 37s team obviously treats design as a sort of art rather than an exercise in optimization. As it happens, they make better products (in my opinion) than the people who go the other route. So they serve as a sort of inspiration.

That's my point. The argument is not entirely meaningful, because there are two things happening at once, and you can measure the one but not the other.

But not all designs are equal in terms of profit yielded. A business which chooses a design that produces more profit than another design will have more profit. That business will therefore be more successful than one which chooses a less profitable design based on their gut.

Give me a real-world example of two companies, all other things even, that made a similar service where the one that won did so because its designers used metrics rather than "taste".

Comparing company A to company B is not entirely useful here, because so many other things are going on. However, there are loads of examples where a company used metrics to drive design for higher profits. Best example is probably Google.

On the flip side is Apple, which doesn't use metrics at all and relies entirely on guy design.

Do we have any proof of that? I have to believe that if Apple released a new version of Apple.com that caused a huge overnight drop in their online sales, they'd change it back. If they released a new iTunes Store design that caused sales to dry up, they'd fix it immediately. I'm not saying that every tiny little detail should be driven by the data, just that the goal of a business (even Apple) is profit. To the extent that your design doesn't support that, it's wrong.

It's been stated again and again that Apple doesn't run such tests on their products. They make their products to feel good for them.

See, saying that sales are drying up is a completely different thing. You'd be stupid not to change from that. I thought your question was about the intuition-based design process, period, because you can design intuitively and NOT lose all your profit. The 37signals design isn't making sales dry up, for instance, even if they didn't run tests on it. It's subjectively a much better page.

Obviously there a "don't do stupid stuff" rule in place, where if intuition is very, very wrong you slap the intuitor and start again.

I think designers should use their gut and artistic skills to design. But I think the effectiveness of that design should be judged on some quantifiable set of metrics, to the extent possible. Business isn't an art contest.

Of course it is. There's no guide for "how to make money." Usually, wealth is created by making something that doesn't already exist. Similarly, the high-quality services that result from the impulsive process would be stifled if those same designers worried too much about quantification.

37signals uses testing for copywriting (headlines, specifically), a creative process. Do you think that's a mistake?

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1525-writing-decisions-he...

No! Nor do I think that it would necessarily be a mistake if they did it the other way.

My idea is that what works for them, works. If they think copywriting tests help, then by all means they should go ahead - and apparently it worked for them.

"Remember the eight-second rule. Consumers have eight seconds worth of patience while waiting for your pages to load. This is especially true for home pages. It's like the restaurant business mantra: Don't keep them waiting, or they'll leave and never return." - 37s manifesto.

Wow. Now for Google a 500ms -- half a second-- lag for twice as many results per page means a 20% drop in traffic.

Loving the new design - the last one looked like a giant advert and I was always worried that I'd hit a placeholder page.

Agreed. The old design was ugly - memorable, but it felt so cheap and sloppy. The new design is terrific - I love how many different styled sections they have to convey their information. It isn't at all repetitive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com