Case Study - Design elements and hits, should we care?

[Melooon]

So this is a quick post about a little study I conducted on a recent design change to GifyPet, its more of a quick note but I think there could be an intresting discussion around it.

On GifyPet I replaced my Melonking ad:

From this:


To this:


I then took note of the traffic coming from GifyPet to Melonking.Net before and after the change! And here are the results:


To me it seems pretty clear, following this image change, waayyy less people went from gifypet to melonking.net, yet to me both those banners look pretty good, I like both! I also ran this test again on Melonking.Net, I changed the navigator "Melon's Universe" to "Stuff", since that edit that page gets about 4x more hits.

I suppose in the case of the gifypet ad, the older one was more direct, and "Stuff" is more relatable than "Melon's Universe", but its interesting that these small design elements can have such a big impact on how people interact with a site.

It also raises the question, should we care? As people making retr:ha:weird and otherwise not usability optimized sites, is this something we should even worry about at all? I'm curious to hear your thoughts and learn if you've ever done such a test?

[Nightdrift]

I've not done an actual study of user interaction (admittedly my sites feel too early in development for that), but it's something I want to keep eyes on down the line for sure

In one current site in progress, I want exploring and interactivity to be at the forefront of the user's mind: I want them to be able to move easily between all the main areas of exploration, and encourage them to visit or revisit areas as things get updated. So in that regard, it's important to me at least, for those areas/images users can interact or click to be very clear and obvious. But on the flip side, there are also parts of the site I want for people to have to "work" a bit to find "secrets", so some elements are less obviously clickable. I guess it's almost Neopets-like in that sense, where users were rewarded for being cheeky about clicking everywhere, or putting together puzzles/collecting codes to find hidden pages.

As for if we should care about how our design elements impacts the way users interact with the site...well, I'm pretty impartial and feel that it often depends on the intent of the website, and the creator's own preference... But personally speaking, I think there can be some great reward to making things a little sneakier or trickier for people to navigate, something that rewards curiosity and a little bit of friction. I think that when designing for personal sites and having fun, there is something really liberating about not having to design for professionalism. Sometimes you just get to be a chaotic architect. The only risk of this in my personal experience is, even I sometimes I lose track of where I try to hide things LOL (maybe that's a good thing, actually?)

As a last note, for Melonking.net, one of my favorite aspects is specifically the fact that some things are a little more hidden than others. I remember being surprised when clicking a random item on the home page actually took me somewhere. It's little surprises like that which make me feel like I'm really surfing the web, if that makes sense! That said, it's also pretty crazy how much a "rebrand" can affect the level of user interaction, 4x increased traffic is nothing to sneeze at. Ironically, I think "Melon's Universe" was one of the first links on the nav bar I clicked...I only remember this because I remember laughing really hard at the "Get A Hacker Name" generator.

[xandra]

we're treading into my professional territory! what you're talking about is user experience (UX) design and strategy, but going the opposite direction of best practices in a good, creative way! UX doesn't allow for a lot of creativity since it's all about optimizing and maximizing efficiency of space and everything that comes with profits. blegh.

i LOVE the idea of hidden areas on sites. i used to love collecting badges people would leave in their secret grottos hidden throughout their website. what a great reminder, i need to add that to my to-do list!

as for my personal opinion, i know how important web analytics are to companies so i'd rather stay away from my usage stats and counters (especially since i deal with a lot of data day-to-day). but i don't see anything wrong with folks wanting to know if anyone is out there, so to speak. i just think we have too much access to too much data too quickly.

[Icey!]

This is an example of A/B testing, a technique used by companies, advertisement agencies, and plenty more to get the most clicks by making slight changes to the appearance multiple times until there is a design that gets the most clicks. However, I would just keep it how it is for now, but maybe try using a nontransparent background?

i LOVE the idea of hidden areas on sites. i used to love collecting badges people would leave in their secret grottos hidden throughout their website. what a great reminder, i need to add that to my to-do list!

On second thought, don't change the background.