[Sigia-l] Real World UI Design Failure

[Jonathan Baker-Bates]

On 15 January 2011 17:30, darin sullivan <darinqsullivan at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Jan 15, 2011 at 6:21 AM, Jonathan Baker-Bates
> <jonathan at bakerbates.com> wrote:
> >
> > As an aside, I find it interesting that while UI design is usually fair
> game
> > for multivariate testing, media sales usually aren't. I'd love to A/B
> test
> > the pinned header with something other than a banner on that page so see
> if
> > it then got noticed, or had some other effect, but the business won't
> hear
> > of it. That said, we did an A/B test of Google Adsense turned on and off
> > (elsewhere on the site), and turned them off as a result, so it's not all
> > bad.
> >
> > Jonathan
>
> Hi Jonathan... Are you referring to ad placement, or marketing tactics
> in general, when you refer to media sales? If it's ad placement, then
> there's usually a business agreement in place that carefully governs
> its appearance throughout the site, in return for revenue. Of course,
> test placement can be a part of that agreement, but expect your ad
> sales folks to express concern ;)
>

I mean marketing tactics in general. It's quite possible that plonking ads
(be they internal or external) on a site might raise bounce rate, lower
conversion and erode the brand, so it would be good to test that hypothesis
with an A/B. As to the placement, the adsales team will request a placement
in the layout, and we'll "consider" that when we do the design work for the
page. In many cases we simply deep six the blighters though.

Jonathan