On so many websites, the designs are just the whims of web designers who care more about how elegant a web page is than how it performs.
This interesting little report from an agency called Conversion Rate Experts demonstrates once again why hiding important stuff can be a mistake.
In the experiment described, there was an ‘accordion’ interface on a web page (one of those design niceties where you have to click a small ‘down arrow’ to reveal more). User analysis had shown that a high proportion of visitors clicked one particular section to reveal more, so a change was made to the site design to reveal this content by default, without any clicking. The result? A significant increase in sales.
Now, most of us don’t have web stores where we can immediately see changes in sales outcomes like this. So we just have to learn from those who do. I’m not suggesting that showing more text to an initial view of web page like this is going to make every page work better. There may have been very sound reasons for keeping the page uncluttered in the first place.
But there may not.
On so many websites, the designs are just the whims of web designers who care more about how elegant a web page is than how it performs. We should all be looking at every element of our website and asking if the styling was chosen for performance reasons or just because it looked nice.