A simplified design could prove costly. Or it could prove revenue generating. Depends which side of the risk / reward curve you like. I would think though they you guys get enough traffic to do an effective test without compromising the overall business?

We do use A/B testing in a few different ways. We have just concluded several months worth of product testing where users were severed different product images, names and descriptions. As you might expect this was to test conversion. We are also currently running a similar test with McAfee (Top right hand corner of the site). This is a straight forward A/B test, 50/50 split of users get served the McAfee stamp based on a cookie and we see how the conversion performs. All very simple stuff, however we didn’t try anything similar with the new site design. The main reason being that there wasn’t enough structural change to monitor, a lot of the new design is polish rather than features. It would have been nice to run the two templates in tandem for a while but we have a lot of pages and they are cached in various ways so that would have been a lot of dev to monitor a slightly self-indulgent test :)

Personally I am all up for running a more comprehensive test like you suggest but Will would take a lot of convincing to ‘test’ the traffic in that way. We see a huge swing in conversion from the simplest things, sometimes a well positioned button is all it takes to give the day a lift. So testing a simplified design – one with reduced content – could prove costly.

Next time.

BTW – I do like the 3D flowers idea….*opens Illustrator*

Good to see you carefully considered things when making changes and how you went about the process.

Do you guys use any A/B testing framework?

Personally I would love to see the results of a much cleaner (simpler / less text heavy page). There is a lot to deal with cognitively, and take in. Now that might work with flowers, although I’d love see the conversion ratio for pages of different cognitive load. I know the text stuff is great for SEO, so business wise their is balancing act between incoming traffic and conversion. Lower traffic from SEO but higher conversion could be better business. Especially when you are paying for that traffic on adwords.

I’d also love to see the main content area replaced by a “flower of the day” highlighting a great choice and option / special, with a real high def quality image. Perhaps even a 3d bunch of flowers

It’s funny looking back on the waybackwhen machine to see a pre launch version of the site from mid 2006! Times have changed!
http://web.archive.org/web/20060806115841/http://www.arenaflowers.com/