Letting go

The human capacity for subjective or indeed plain sentiment in web design is fascinating. As optimisation specialists we testers or CRO experts hold little stock by either of these two concepts and have sacrificed both these a longtime ago in favour of asking the general population what web experience works best. And yet you can conduct some quite clinical testing on the value of a specific web design or element and put hard facts & figures behind its actual value in the user journey but still be told THAT widget or page design is staying because the product team wanted & designed it. Classic case & point this week in my world of testing. We have a web page where the primary call to action is a savings calculator. Some indepth analysis showed that visitors who engaged with this widget converted at just 1%. Conversly visitors who didn't engage with the calculator converted at a staggering 12% by comparison. MVT testing backed this up conclusively. This calculator deserved no place in the sales funnel. Presented with the hard, black & white facts the stakeholder was intent on retaining this ill conceived widget because it was the baby of person X and cost £££££ to build. In conclusion, sometimes you can never win out with testing. Sometimes subjectivity & sentiment wins despite evidence to the contrary. Sometimes either the client or you need to learn to let go. Be strong. Happy testing : )