We don’t usually tell the community when we are doing A/B testing so the results don’t get skewed. One recent one has been running for the past few weeks and it looks like its not going to end up with a conclusive result so we are stopping the test right now.

“Schools & Colleges” vs ”Academic Programs”

We are ever changing and refining the navigation for wayne.edu and over the past year of so many more universities have been changing their wording from “Schools & Colleges” to “Academic Programs”. That got us wondering, we thought academic programs had a more concise description of what is on the page behind the link. So we decided to try it out.

Technical Results

May 21 – June 15, 2009 (3 weeks)
126,433 Page Visitors
20,644 Conversions
16.33% Conversion Rate

Why was there no clear winner?

Two reason’s why I think no winner was found. The first is an issue on our end, we displayed the test for everyone, internal and external computers. Typically on campus staff/faculty have wayne.edu set as their homepage, they know the site and what they need to get to. Regardless what the link is called they will click it, this throws off the results since they are not our primary audience and they are not actually thinking about the click they are making.

The second is that someone looking for our list of programs has really only one route to get to it from wayne.edu and that is this link. It might take someone longer to figure out “Schools & Colleges” will give them a list of our programs but they still got there. They are adapting to our wording instead of ignoring our wording and using another method to find the information they need. I even wonder if we changed it to “What we offer” we would still get people clicking on it because they have a specific task in mind already.

We ended up just keeping Schools & Colleges for now

The thought is since there was no real winner although we love academic programs better we cannot justify the change. The university community has been voicestrous about any changes to wayne.edu and we want to make sure we have some real numbers to backup a navigation change.

Frankly the homepage navigation is not where we want it to be at all. It’s these types of tests that get us in the right direction on purpose instead of on a whim.

We are going to run another test on an unknown date for an unknown time with the lessons we learned from this test. Sorry we can’t tell you more but I am sure we will write about it afterward.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 15th, 2009 at 12:52 pm and is filed under optimization, statistics, usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.