Which Test Won this week is more of a conversion and usability test—Long vs Short Copy.
A great example of something you just have to test.
Conversion & Usability Test
Short vs (Long) personalised text? Test it!
- There are good reasons to personalise a text
- And good considerations to keep it short and simple
- That is why it’s so much fun to test!
Looking at this test and deciding which test won, I considered the context of the task at hand: I want to know more… but I might not like it… What reassurances am I given? Other than its safe to give them my credit card details! A quick and clear message worked for me.
You scan text very quickly online, but reading (on-screen) takes more effort and time, as shown in a 2001 study “reading from hard copy was reliably faster (200 wpm versus 180 wpm onscreen)”—”Reading Online or on Paper: Which is Faster?” Sri H. Kurniawan and Panayiotis Zaphiris.
What is on your mind?
Usability for any action related page should take the following typical mind-set of your visitors into account:
- Extreme impatience… “I WANT IT NOW“
- Commitment to your website is low
- Text is scanned, not read
- Short fixation (see below) on prominent items of interest
- Attention is drawn to certain kinds of pictures on your site
- A visitor’s usual “NEXT ACTION” is to “CLICK” something
Screen size?
What effect does Scrolling have on Conversion?
A heatmap analysis as shown here below, is not conclusive. Non the less revealing though when analysing a long page or a short page view—you always need to take into account screen and browser window sizes, see also What are you looking at?
Interesting to notice are the order in which parts of the page are scanned—especially when testing “visible areas” of a browser window as shown in the top vs bottom heatmaps.
