Thursday, 1 March 2012

Web Designer Resources: Use of A/B and Multi Variant Testing

What a goodness if we could be able to measure the performance of one layout over other or impact of individual element presents on web page and could evaluate the importance of each based on visitors behavior. As an online marketer, it is better to trust your visitors instead on thoughts of web designer on better acceptance of your website. When you spent good amount on implementing specific object in your website like introductory video or animation, it is extremely important to know whether you are getting good response of your visitors that you deserve on investment. More than investment, you must know whether that thing doesn’t make bad impact on your visitors.

Previously when there wasn’t any method exists to analyze user behavior on new design, people used to perform lab usability test where they recruit some people and kept them in room with one mirror which is visible from single side. People were asked to perform certain task on website and expert on other side of mirror used to keep eye on the problems people have been facing while completing the task and used to evaluate important decision based on observation and communication with people. Due to high cost of lab and recruiting people, this method didn’t work well. Hence your visitors would view your website in different browser and platform so lab based test wasn’t the right scenario of design evaluation.   

To replace this method, two tests have been discovered which are A/B testing and multi variant testing to extract some important data from analytics to take decision. Below is the quick info about it.

A/ B Testing

Two web pages A and B which are different with point of its design are compared with each other. You are supposed to present these pages to your visitors for equal amount of time. Based on performance driven by each web page, you would choose the one with better result. You may observe completion of conversion rate, depth of visits, visitor loyalty and completing of custom goal defined by you. The test is efficient at evaluating the outcome of web page not single element and you can apply this test when you need to select the design submitted by different web designer. Google website optimizer is free tool to perform this kind of test.

Multi Variant Testing 

When there is a need of testing different variant of same element on web page, MVT Is more preferable compare to A/B. If you have created different things like introduction video, animation, promotional text or use of images to implement same call to action function, you measure the success brought by each variant and select the one with better statistics. Different variant are tags with special tags or scripts for identification and dynamic page with changing variant would be showed to visitors. Implementation and measurement of MVT testing is quiet difficult and expensive as it evaluate each element and difficulty grows if you increase the total no. of elements and their variants to test. 

For our premium client at Chicago web design firm, we apply this kind of testing on design of special landing page and suggest the best layout based on visitor driven data instead of estimation of designer. When you are going to spend thousands of bucks on promotional campaign, you must prefer to test different variant of its landing page to get the maximum benefits of you money that you deserve.

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