37 Signals does A/B testing for Basecamp and gets very different results

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

Very interesting:

Designers, you’ve been in critiques where Clients, Art Directors, Creative Directors, Project Managers, Copywriters, Executive Assistants, and other Designers have picked apart your work. You listened with agony when they questioned your choice of this shade of red or this typeface. You winced when they said that photograph wasn’t “right”. Your vision is already changing based on a series of opinions!

Next time say, “I hear your concern about the shade of red. Why don’t we test that? I feel strongly about the color red, but it sounds like you need to be convinced it won’t affect X.”

Increasing our Signups through A/B Testing
A few weeks ago Noah and I talked about the testing we’ve been doing with the Highrise marketing site. Here’s a summary of the findings we posted:

37.5% more people signed up for Highrise with the Long Form design.

Jason Fried’s mantra while testing was: We need to test radically different things. We don’t know what works. Destroy all assumptions. We need to find what works and keep iterating—keep learning. (I’m paraphrasing here…) We tried out a radically different design with these results:

The Person Page was far shorter. There was less information about Highrise. However it had a 47% percent increase in paid signups than the Long Form design. Why exactly was the Person Page working? What might happen if we added more information to the bottom?

Post external references

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    http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2991-behind-the-scenes-ab-testing-part-3-final
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