Professional product designer / fixer constantly striving to make the cow more purple-er so the sneezers keep sneezin.
Patrick Sullivan Jr, is a professional UI fixer constantly striving to make the cow more purple-er so the sneezers keep sneezin. He thinks he is hilarious. (Full Bio)
05:43 @katrenadrake No flash on the iPhone? Bummer. At least you have YouTube. #
05:59 @katrenadrake Here’s a TechCrunch article about iPhone copy and paste, that your iPhone can actually view. twurl.nl/44t2cy#
07:05 @melonhelmet "Shattering" isn’t covered under the 1 yr warranty I take it. #
07:15 Teaching Skip how to upload a video to YouTube. Reminder to all: How To’s for the SIMPLEST tasks have MASS appeal. #
07:44 @chrisbrogan Here we are now, entertain us. #
07:54 @tweetdeck Feature Request: Would be nice if Tweetdeck made use of horizontal two finger scroll on the touchpad. #
08:03 How to build a road in Haiti. is.gd/1LON (Takes 6 mos to build12 miles, but it feeds 100 families for 6 mos. Slow is.gd) #
08:14 @cdrake @katrenadrake Reading a draft of Skip’s "Born To Be Me" about the 7 zones. Wow! Asked him to add the thread about defying physics. #
I know there is one person (ie. you, Jordan) who stalks me and I thought if I used LoudTwitter to do a digest for you, it would make your job a bit easier.
One of the comments on that thread was from Jason M. Putori , the lead graphic designer of Mint.com. (It’s so easy to forget there are REAL people on the other end of these websites. Or is that just me?)
So here’s my first impression of the new Mint.com. (Executive Summary: Looks really pretty, not sure how it will increase conversion…worried conversion rates might actually drop because you pulled the "Learn More" conversion beacon from the homepage.)
UPDATE: I wrote all that and recorded that video yesterday (August 18th) afternoon, but I didn’t publish this post because I had to wait 80 minutes for vimeo to process the video and by then, well…you know how it goes.
However, since then, Jason (the designer of Mint.com) and I have exchanged a few heated emails (kidding!), and he watched the video you just watched. Our thread is below. What say you?
Editweapon wrote:
Jason, just did a “first impression video review”…waiting for vimeo to convert the video.
Candidly, I like it, but I don’t like it as much as the “old” version. The new one really popped nicely on first impression. And clearly, you are brilliant with Photoshop, etc. I’m not totally sure why I like the old version better.* My biggest concern, quite frankly, is only having one conversion beacon button “Sign Up…” above the fold on the homepage instead of “Sign Up” and “Learn More”. But that’s strictly intuition.
Mostly, let’s just see what happens to the overall conversion rate and abandonment rates when the new site goes live.
* = Just realized that I don’t like the hero shot on the new one. The graph is pretty and legible, but it’s not in the context of being inside a browser window like the “old” hero shot is. The old hero shot told me visually what mint is. This hero shot is, well, just a pie chart. It’s missing context. If that makes sense??
Jason wrote:
We actually ran it as an A/B test for I think two weeks before launching it, and the new site converted [significantly better than the old one].
Removing the second glossy CTA [Call To Action] button was conscious. I felt if you didn’t want to sign up there are plenty of other call outs elsewhere, like the tabs, and the other boxes on the home page. The second button failed my personal ’squint test’… you no longer really have to read that button title to intuit what’s going to happen because there’s no other one.
The change from the screenshots was mainly because we wanted to merge that tour below the fold, with the above the fold space. We weren’t sure people were clicking on those, and I got many complaints about the screenshots not being readable, despite that readability wasn’t the intent, it was more an overview shot. This way we were able to kill those two problems in a single shot. Your feedback though is valid… one way to solve would be to switch the tour stops. If the second one was first, then would that do it?
I greatly appreciate your thoughts… keep it coming.
Editweapon wrote:
Well, the numbers don’t lie! (Except I do distrust Google Web Optimizer a little because of some oddities I’ve experienced…)
Good logic for removing the second CTA, I can agree with that. I’ve only my intuition saying that if the biggest/boldest choice is A) Sign Up, or B) Leave the page, or C) Figure out which OTHER button, tab, nav link to click because I want to “learn more” before I sign up, then that might cause higher abandonment. The “Learn More” button might be sort of ugly, but it’s the lazy man’s answer to “Well, let’s see what this is all about before I sign up.”
> we wanted to merge that tour below the fold, with the above the fold space.
I don’t understand what you mean?
> one way to solve would be to switch the tour stops. If the second one was first, then would that do it?
I don’t understand this either. What’s a “tour stop?”
Btw, I couldn’t get to the Features and Why Use Mint pages earlier, but I can now. Wow, those look dynamite!!
Jason wrote:
Hah, that’s a problem. Did you see those tabs on the grass? You can click on them to go to different features. I’m guessing I need to make them more obvious.
Learn more I can do, as long as it’s not a heavy button. Text would be a great compromise.
Editweapon wrote:
Yeah, I saw the "grass tabs" at the bottom of the fold, but I wasn’t compelled to click on them. When I did, I saw the screen image change and thought "Oh cool."
Multi-variant test without a "Learn more" (what you have now), with a "Learn more" button equal to the size of Sign-up, and with a "Learn more" text link under the Sign-up button??
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