> Of course statistics lie.
I definitely see your point, and I'm not going to presume to know a lot about statistics, but I'm talking about some pretty basic math, I think, so I'm wondering if you can elaborate based on an example. Let's say you make some small design tweaks to a homepage and see a 25% increase in conversions within a week after the new version goes live, and the increase stays decently stable for months afterwards. Before, you had 6k conversions per month, and now you have somewhere between 8k and 9k per month. Can you elaborate on how something as simple as this can be misinterpreted? I believe it can be, I'm just having trouble seeing how. Also, I realize many stats and such are a little trickier to interpret than this, but generally, site stats aren't that complicated. Once, for example, I noticed that out of 1,100 new registrants for a subscription-based application in the span of one week, only about 10% had actually gone through the setup process for the app after paying their initial subscription fee. This was easy to spot because the EULA was the first page a new user hit, and only 100 or so of these new users had hit the EULA that week. Tracing the process backwards, I saw that the email that went to new users after signing up contained 42 links (stupid Marketing dept!), only 1 of which went to a Help doc about how to set up the application and get started. This link was buried in the middle of a long block of text. The safe bet was that most people were not seeing the link. We stripped out the vast majority of the links, left in only a few key ones, focused the email around the 3-step process for setting up the app instead of linking off to a Help doc, and generally cleaned things up quite a bit. A week later, the percentage of people who hit the EULA had gone from 10% to over 80%. Again, how can simple numbers like this be misinterpreted? -r- ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
