The Case for Experimenting
Designing an e-commerce website is a dark art - one that many web developers, UX specialists and graphic designers practice, but rarely master. They might spin gold from thin air and weave it into a beautiful tapestry of sleek photos and sliding boxes, a dream to behold but often a cursed nightmare to actually use. Whilst they admire their artistry and bask in the heaps of lavish praise poured upon them like glorious confetti, customers bash their faces on their screens until the thin tendrils of cracks stretch across the glass and then, the worst part - leave to go somewhere else. Without buying a thing. So how do we leave behind these dark ages of design? Cold, hard science. We retrace the steps of Aristotle and Newton by turning to empirical evidence - we measure, discern patterns and relationships, and in this way, build up a model of our World that we can use to make progress. Experimentation is the key. By running an A/B or multivariate test for each new change to a...