[Sigia-l] IA Mythbusters - impact of redesign in traffic

[Ziya Oz]

Livia Labate:

> Often I hear quotes at work about user behavior, metrics and design
> guidelines that I can't imagine where people pulled from.

Best practices.

> "Whenever sites go through redesign there is a dip in traffic, then
> rebound and increase [...] 20% dip is an industry standard (average),
> but the dips range typically depend on the scope of changes"

Best practice.

Man, where does one start with this gem!

Christopher gave you the base answer in that redesign = change = different
behavior, by definition. As in, you can't make an omelet without breaking an
egg.

The only question then is: will the traffic go up or down, as a result?
There CANNOT possibly be a non-contextual answer to this, period. If you did
a good job (as defined by your rules and goals, and assuming traffic boost
was one of your goals) it will go up. Otherwise it may go down or stay the
same. IOW, you can't decouple the execution of the goal from the mere fact
of redesign/change. Anyone saying otherwise is a jackass, or selling a book
or a seminar.

The higher order bits of this general problem should not really be the
direction and size of the change, but what exactly is being questioned here?
Is it a decision about budgeting (or not) the redesign? Calculating back-end
server resource allocations? The impact of traffic volume change on on-going
UX? ROI? And so on. I'd rather deal with these more interesting and
meaningful questions (that get to the heart of the problem) rather than some
silly and contextually meaningless percentage.

-- 
Ziya

It depends.
If it didn't, you'd be out of a job.