Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Here's an anecdote for you: I am generally religious about reducing the length of funnels, because length kills conversion like nothing else. This lead me to once let the customers make two choices with one click: whether they wanted download or CD of the software, and whether they wanted to pay by Paypal or Google Checkout. The four combinations were laid out in a 2x2 table.

This proved immensely confusing for people, so much so that adding a shopping cart on top of two bare "download" or "CD" buttons caused sales to rise substantially, despite the fact that the shopping cart was a virtual riot of distraction and required minimally an extra click to get through.

Why the table? I can imagine being confused by something like that. I'd attempt a solution like this before using a table.

    Order a CD:
          [Google Checkout]
          [Paypal]
    Purchase a download:
          [Google Checkout]
          [Paypal]

That way, I still make the decisions in order but only click one link. The tree could be inverted and still work, but this way the label on the links match exactly where you are going.

I imagine that the confusion arose because the two dimensions which varied across the button grid had no relationship to one another.

Interesting. On the 2x2 table idea, I wonder if there are any other two decisions in the conversion funnel context that could work in such a table and not be as confusing.

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