Keep your focus on the problem

At the weekend I put up a corner shelf in our bathroom. My wife was happy. I was happy. I had done A Good Thing.

Maybe I should put up a corner shelf in the kitchen too. And a couple in the living room! Then we’ll be even happier. Right?

Of course, this is faulty thinking. The reason it was good for me to put up a shelf in the bathroom is that there was a problem in the bathroom – we had nowhere to put the hand soap. Now we do. That’s really what we’re happy about.

It seems simple, but this kind of thinking – that when something fixes a problem, it must be A Good Thing in itself – is very common, and it leads to a lot of wasted time. Here’s an example that I noticed recently.

PetPlan Equine, one of the UK’s leading insurers of horses, recently made a few changes to their quote form. Many of them were clear successes, and the form as a whole is now much easier to fill out.

But one of the changes seems to stem from the sort of thinking I outlined above. It concerns the section of the form where you tell them how tall your horse is. As we all know, a horse is measured in hands, a hand being four inches. So your horse might be, let’s say, 14 hands and 3 inches.

On the original form, there were two select boxes – one for hands and one for inches. The hands field had 14 options, and the inches one had four.

Figure 1 - two shorter fields

On the new form, there’s just one select box. It has 48 options in it.

Figure 1 - one long field

Is it easier to select from one long list of options than two shorter ones? Common sense doesn’t seem to favour it, and I’ve certainly never seen any research to suggest that it is.

My guess is that the designer’s aim was to remove fields from the form, on the principle that a form with less fields on it is easier to fill out. But the truth is that forms that ask you less questions are easier to fill out – and just because this often translates into ‘less fields’ doesn’t mean that ‘less fields’ is an end in itself.

In the conversion rate optimisation business, this erroneous logic is something that we are always sure to keep a sharp eye out for. It’s all too easy to think that doing the same thing you did before – on a different site, or even a different page – will have the same effect. Just because changing the colour of the continue button on one site raised their conversion rates doesn’t mean it will on another site. It depends if the second site has a problem with people not knowing where to click.

At StormForward, it’s part of our standard process. For each client, and for each intervention, we always start from the analytics, so we know we’re always starting with a real problem.