I’ve noticed a lot of designs with a mostly black and white color palette lately, and not just for site types you’d expect. Is the colorful, rainbow trend being phased out with something more classic? Are people tired of safe, middle-ground gray? Welcome to this week’s Friday Focus.
Designs of the Week
It’s interesting how even the background is a strong black and white graphic.
Lots of other trends here: folded ribbons, subtle noise texture, and centered logo. Note how the social buttons and feed subscriber count come before the navigation; guess that’s what’s more important on this site!
Just as simple and minimal as the color palette.
Love the hanger icon on the current navigation item, and the feather in the drop-down menu.
Yellow as accent for black and white designs start here. And are you for or against sidebars?
Screenshots and product shots are getting bigger and bigger. I vaguely remember them occupying one-third of the page but now it’s half.
I like how light and playful this looks, including the irregular pattern in the background, and the recurring circles.
Great breathing space between everything.
It’s so clever how when you hover over the a navigation item at the top, it also affects the navigation at the bottom (not pictured). Also note how the browser frame in the portfolio carousel is abstracted and black.
The amount of gradients here is a little strong but I think it works. Perhaps it’s just the text in the lower half that could be improved.
A little bit of alignment issue but as usual I love the whitespace.
Still not a big fan of the noise texture trend but it’s slowly warming up to me. Here it looks warm and fuzzy!
The post navigation here is a wonderful idea, but the arrows could be a little more obvious and closer to the center post.
What a nice idea to put the slideshow on the top right across vertical navigation, and place your name big front and center. Memorable branding.
I love how the nut on the logo repeats on the ticket icon.
The video area doesn’t really work for me but everything else looks nice.
More and more I’m seeing a layout divided in halves instead of in thirds.
The design is compelling although as a website design, not so much. I would have loved to see more.
The mix of patterns and the interactions feels nice, but I don’t understand why you have to hover twice to navigation: first to make the designer name appear, then to make the menu appear.
Big, bold, but still clean and easy to read.
Social Media Weekly
AccessibilityHow do we save longdesc?
“The longdesc attribute, although potentially useful, was removed from the HTML5 specification, despite recommendations to retain it from the HTML Accessibility Task Force.”
Usability – DarkPatterns.org
“This pattern library is dedicated to Dark Patterns: user interfaces that have been designed to trick users into doing things they wouldn’t otherwise have done.”
UsabilityYou’re a failure: Deal with it
“Every website has points of failure. It is inevitable. The question is do you know what they are and are you doing something about them?”
Today we present some useful free CSS/(X)HTML templates which are available for free download and use. You may want to consider using them for your next projects or build upon them, creating more advanced themes from these basic templates.
Free CSS/(X)HTML Templates
Blue Jeans (Demo | Download) Stand out from the crowd with this cool, free template for a portfolio website based on blue jeans texture.
Portfolio (Demo | Download) An HTML 5 and CSS based website template suitable for businesses. It has a jQuery slide show in the home page header for displaying your latest work, featured contents or can also be used to tell your visitor what your web site is all about.
High Five (Demo | Download) It can be useful if you need to show case your work / portfolio. Most of the style elements are in the CSS including styles for Blog, Comment Template etc.
AppCloud (Demo | Download) It has been designed with tones of blue, white and a bit grey to point out the gadgets and provide more usability that you can obtain information you need faster and more easily. You can display all gadgets you are selling.
RS 18 (Demo | Download) This blue colored well designed template can be used by people doing business.
Dandoot (Demo | Download) It has been designed so that it is suitable mostly for major/indie music recording companies, bands, musicians, music products affiliates, music event organizers or simply online music stores.
Bamboo (Demo | Download) This template will go extrremly well with suitable Blogs, Small Websites etc.
Acallia (Demo | Download) A smart template, it can be used by service sector industries and persons like event management compnies or graphic designer firm.
Reinvent (Demo | Download) It features a narrow, one column layout with minimum graphics, clean and legible typography.
Alexx C (Demo | Download) This template gels well with person/firm in service sector.
RealOne (Demo | Download) This template is created keeping in mind property selling/buying sites and its quite neet.
CSS Heaven 1 (Demo | Download) This template can be used for some design or lifestyle related website and it gives a contemporary look.
Turrion (Demo | Download) A blue colored template, it tends to give all the necessary information to clients at one go.
Zen Design (Demo | Download) This template can be used for websites with loads of information or which issuing articles/tutorials on regular basis.
Urban Gear (Demo | Download) Great free html template for on-line shop dedicated to the urban fashion industry. Remove the slider area and use this template as a start point for your on line business.
ubly (Demo | Download) This format is most suitable for blogs related web sites.
beSMART (Demo | Download) Simple corporate CSS/XHTML template ready to meet wide range of requirements for effective on line performance.
CSS Heaven 2 (Demo | Download) CSS Heaven 2 is a free CSS Template suitable for small business websites and blogs
Easy Slide (Demo | Download) Easy Slide is a simple but cool css template based on the famous Coda Slider.
StudioClick (Demo | Download) Studio Click is a simple, well-structured portfolio theme that focuses on one thing: gorgeous photos, screenshots, and content. It displays works easily and stylishly using large images of your products.
Bizgroup (Demo | Download) Simple corporate CSS/XHTML template ready to meet wide range of requirements for effective on line performance.
Photo Pro (Demo | Download) Photo Pro is a simple css template for portfolios and photo sites and it’s very easy to edit.
Shop Around (Demo | Download) Great free html template for on-line shop. Use it as a start point for your on line business.
Free Nova Studio (Demo | Download) The Blog page features a simple blog design, easy on the eyes, allowing you to express your thoughts freely and in a stylish way!
Mondays (Demo | Download) This template gives us a break from usual design and cn be used by service industries providing 24*7 supprts.
OWMX 1 (Demo | Download) Color of this template is easy on eyes and is stylish.
Classic Luxury (Demo | Download) It is clean and has a lot of whitespace and nice typography. The code is well-organized and uses standards-based HTML and CSS.
Outliers (Demo | Download) This template can be best used to showcase your idea and ideation process.
Portfolio Template (Demo | Download) This is a clean and professional looking template for small portfolios or business sites. Very easy to edit if you have a basic understanding of html and css.
Market Leader (Demo | Download) It can be used to showcase the reasons to prospective clients to choose you.
clean-white (Demo | Download) This is a simple but beautiful css template with lots of whitespace and a professional look. Perfect as a frontpage for small businesses or photographers.
Ninja Assassin (Demo | Download) Impress visitors to your site with a high-quality one-page portfolio site inspired by the Japanese ninja culture.
Kelontong (Demo | Download) You can use use Kelontong WordPress e-commerce theme to modify your store and sell more of your products.
Small Business (Demo | Download) This is suitable for small scale business websites that don’t need a lot of pages.
RS 19 (Demo | Download) Its a attractive template using combination of white & bright colors and css techniques like Box Shadows and text shadows.
To mock-up the user interface of a website, software or any other product, you’ll need some basic UI elements. And this is where wireframing kits and UI design kits come in handy. When you want to create a low-fidelity prototype for your projects, you can use these kits to give your idea a certain shape, keeping it abstract and not losing yourself in details.
In this post, we’ve prepared an overview of useful web and mobile user interface kits, handy PDFs and resources that you can use in your projects. We’ve carefully selected the most useful kits and resources to get you going in the early stages of a project.
[Offtopic: by the way, did you know that there is a Smashing eBook Series? Book #1 is Professional Web Design, 242 pages for just $9,90.]
Free Mobile GUI PSD
Android GUI PSD This Android GUI PSD is based on elements of the Android 1.5 GUI and was made to help the open-source community with its Android application mock-ups. Most of the elements and phone illustrations are done in vector paths and so are easily resizable. Android Sans was used for the text.
RIM Blackberry PSD A complete PSD file with layer styles, this has 135 layers of Photoshop goodness.
Android Sketch Stencil Version 1.0 A Sketch-style Android OmniGraffle template. The purpose of the sketch style wireframe is to prevent the audience from thinking about visual design and encourage them to focus instead on functionality and behavior.
All elements of Maemo 5 GUI in PSD This downloadable PSD file contains GUI template elements for the Maemo platform. These are indispensable for prototyping GUI applications running on Maemo devices.
iPhone 4 GUI PSD (Retina Display) GUI PSD kit for creatives who design for the retina display (640×960). The file is huge, both in file size (62.7MB) and dimension (4074×2986). You’ll need to work at 25% – 50% even on the largest screens to roughly grab elements before zooming into 100% for the actual work.
iPad GUI Kit in PSD This version offers a canvas size true to the iPad at 768×1024. In addition, most of the graphical elements are provided in vector format, allowing you a lot of room to scale up for high-resolution presentations. This version is layered in Photoshop, making it easy for you to go nuts with your mock-ups and client presentations.
Android 1.6 Wireframe stencil for Omnigraffle Download this beautiful wireframe stencil add-on for OmniGraffle 5.x. Use this toolkit to wireframe Android-based apps and websites on the 1.6 Donut SDK.
Google Android GUI PSD Here are the GUI elements of Android, built using vectors to scale.
iPad GUI PSD Kit This pack includes full size graphics, as well as 256, 128 and 64 pixel icon sizes. The pack includes four sizes of the iPad graphic in PSD, PNG and Mac ICNS formats.
Fireworks template for Android In this Fireworks template, Android UI elements have been redrawn as vector images. In the folders, the elements have been mostly labeled according to the Android vocabulary.
Sexy Vector Cell Phone This phone can be scaled to any size. Easily add your own image to the screen with the included object mask. All objects are layered, grouped and labeled for easy customization.
iPad Stencil for Omnigraffle Contains backgrounds, title bars, buttons, selectors and other iPhone UI elements. The text is fully editable in lists, title bars, buttons and scroll wheels.
iPhone GUI Elements Some beautiful iPhone elements. All graphics are layered Photoshop files.
iPad and iPhone Design Design your application for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad with this exhaustive set of stencils. All stencils were created by hand with native OmniGraffle shapes, and groups and can be scaled, resized and exported to other vector formats in Graffle.
Design Stencil for iPhone and iPad A stencil for designing OS applications for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. The stencil for now is targeted at developers familiar with the default characteristics of the views and controls provided by UIKit.
Apple iPad fully editable PSD A fully editable Apple iPad in PSD format. Every element you see is editable via vector masks, and everything is scaleable.
Palm Pre GUI PSD This set contains a PSD to help designers pitch and develop polished concepts using Photoshop.
iPhone UI Vector Elements Most visuals for applications start out as vector mock-ups in Adobe Illustrator. So, here are some cool iPhone UI vector elements. And there are even a few good Photoshop resources and even a nice OmniGraffle iPhone UI file or two in there.
iPad Vector GUI Elements: tabs buttons menus icons This set contains almost all of the iPad UI elements, including buttons, tabs, menus, keyboard and balloons. Useful for designers and developers, it includes scalable and totally editable vector versions (AI).
Free Social Networking GUI PSD Kits
Free Full-Layered Facebook GUI PSD Kit The idea behind this kit is to speed up the prototyping of Facebook application UIs and Facebook fan pages, sparing you from drawing all the comps and letting you customize all the text, buttons and data as you need. The kit is free to use in all projects, without any restrictions.
Facebook GUI Free PSD Resource A Facebook graphic user interface (FBGUI) resource kit for Photoshop to make your work easier.
Facebook Applications A sizable collection of elements for creating wireframes for Facebook applications.
Best Practice UX Forms Stencil v1.1 A comprehensive release of stencil that follows best practices for UX form design, providing three different ways to lay out forms, each with its own benefits. This version also provides different button layouts, a progress indicator, a Captcha code input field, labels and more.
Form Elements UI Kit Form elements stencil from the Design Stencil kit in the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library.
Wireframe Shapes Here is a set of shapes for making wireframes in OmniGraffle version 5.x ( forMac OS X). It consists of most of the basic elements you’ll need to create user interface specifications.
Wireframe kit for UI Designers A set of various wireframes, such as product details, list of items, front page, mobile phone.
MBTI sketching paper for ideation MBTI sketching paper for ideation sessions. It helps you think inside the box of four personality traits. Describe a design challenge and the problem to solve on every piece of paper. There’s also space for annotations.
A4 sketching paper This sketching paper can be used after generating ideas for functionality. Design preliminary screens based on the ideas you come up with.
Wireframe Magnets (DIY Kit) This DIY magnet template is based on the Konigi wireframe stencils, and it includes three sheets of elements that might be useful for whiteboard prototyping. Simply download and print the PDFs onto magnet sheets, optionally laminate them if you intend to use with dry-erase markers, and then cut them out.
Wireframe template A useful print-and-sketch template available for downloading.
iPad Idea Sheet A total of three sheets: one full size (landscape), one at 70% reduction (vertical) and one at 50% reduction (landscape). The 80 tiny dots make it easy to split the screen horizontally and vertically.
Free Photoshop browser template Need a clean browser screenshot for a design presentation? Look no further. These free professional Photoshop browser templates come in 1024×768 and 800×600 pixel sizes and all kinds of flavors.
Interactive Sketching Notation 0.1 The idea behind this notation is to visualize user interface states as well as user actions in a clear and rapid manner.
MobileMe Full iPhone GUI For use with WinterBoard, this is a beta release, so there may be unthemed elements.
Dragnet website wireframes kit v 0.9 Dragnet website wireframes kit v0.9 is a common library for Adobe Fireworks and contains over 25 objects that are useful for rapid prototyping of websites. It is completely free to download and use. The kit contains common Web design elements, such as scrollbars, buttons, menus and alerts.
User Interface Design Framework This pretty and comprehensive design framework contains a GUI library of hundreds of vector elements for interface design. This minimal UI icon set has 260 vector icons and a library of 200 styles for Illustrator.
Browser Form Elements PSD Included here is a set for Firefox 3 for Mac and another for IE7 on Vista.
Sketching and Wireframing Kit Here is a free set of elements for sketching and wireframing. It consists of form elements, icons, indicators, feedback messages, tooltips, navigation elements, image placeholders, embedded videos, sliders and common ad banners.
Photoshop Form Element Templates This set includes all common form fields and mouse and link pointers, optimized for ease of use.
Web Browser Elements This excellent and useful kit contains pull-down menus, input fields, radio buttons, check boxes, buttons, text fields and scroll bars, all in an easily editable PSD file.
UI Design Kit This Web UI template kit is made completely with shape objects, which in some cases convert to SmartObjects, so they’re totally scalable.
Wireframe Symbols This download contains a symbols library and a full Adobe Illustrator file, with all of the elements spread out on the art board. To install this library, just drag and drop the Wireframe Symbols.ai file into your Illustrator Symbols directory. Once you are in Illustrator, go to your Symbols palette, and load the library.
Web UI Element Pack This pack, in PSD format, contains 19 elements including loading bar, default and clicked-state buttons, button toggle, icons for “Close,” “Next” and “Previous,” paging icon and slider.
OmniGraffle Stencil for Ext JS v3.0 This updated version of Ext JS Omnigraffle stencil contains many improvements and additions, namely the recreation of most Ext JS elements as Graffletopia shapes or groups, especially helpful for resizing titles, tables cells and so on.
Flex 3 Stencil Includes all Flex components from the Flex 3 Style Guide: panels, data grid, buttons, fields, links, toggle, menu, scrolls, accordion, tabs, list, data picker, tooltips and errors.
Aqua GUI A series of elements inspired by the GUI Design Palette 1.2 and the Mac OS X interface stencils, based on Aqua, and mainly intended to make simple window designs.
Web Wireframe Kit Here is a simple way to plan a layout and a cost-effective, time-saving wireframe kit for Web designers.
UI Buttons and Icons This set contains 165 high-quality UI icons and buttons in five different colors. Available in AI, JPEG and SVG formats.
Quommunication Stencil Kit This beautiful set contains design elements for wireframing, RSS feeds, colors, advertising units, browser windows and grids.
Mac OS X Interface 2 A Leopard-y interface stencil kit that makes extensive use of tables for maximum flexibility while maintaining pixel precision.
OmniGraffle UX Template The OmniGraffle Pro (v. 5) template for interface design. Includes shared layers for basic UX document needs (e.g. title page, wireframes, storyboards).
Template for Blueprint CSS Comps This template allows you to create visual design comps to be implemented using a CSS layout framework. The Adobe Illustrator document features a 24-column grid for CSS frameworks such as Blueprint.
Apple Elements for OmniGraffle Stencils of Apple hardware and miscellaneous networking components. Excellent for creating physical diagrams.
DeviantART ID PSD Kit These 15 professionally designed, fully customizable templates include MINI and Original ID templates.
Browser Screens and Website Elements Here is a useful set of vector assets you can use to mock up client projects, present your work or get a quick visual while laying out a website.
The Importance of Wireframing A comprehensive article on how wireframing plays an important role in information architecture
The Future of Wireframes As we move into the next decade of Web design, it’s time to re-evaluate our understanding of wireframes, a tried and tested user experience staple.
Wireframing Is Not a Religion Wireframes are an indispensable tool for design thinking, a digital sketch pad ready to be drawn and erased, scrapped or resurrected at any moment.
Five Commandments for Wireframing Paul Boag is a wireframes fanatic and believes they are an indispensable part of the development process. He espouses five unbreakable rules.
20 Steps to Better Wireframing Possibly the biggest mistake made in any development project is failing to plan. This article goes over why.
Resources and Round-Ups
I Love Wireframes A tumblog dedicated to wireframes, prototypes and mock-ups.
Wireframe Showcase This site is a place to look at websites based on wireframes and analyze how the designers transformed mock-ups into working designs. Because the wireframes and designs were submitted by their creators, Wireframe Showcase includes a short explanation of each piece. Most of the websites grew out of digital mock-ups, which have the advantage of being easy to tweak and rearrange. The result is a pleasing and informative collection of wireframes.
50 Free UI and Web Design Wireframing Kits and Resources This post focuses on wireframing tools and standalone applications, as well as resources you need to build your own wireframe: wireframing kits, browser windows, form elements, grids, Mac OS X elements and mobile elements, which you can use in any graphics editor such as Photoshop or Illustrator, or with pen and paper.
Useful (Offline) Utensils and Toolkits for Designers Why start completely from scratch when you can use one of these pre-made guides to save time and better direct your creative energies? In this article, you will find a great list of free downloadable tools, as well as a collection of notepads and other products to purchase for offline planning and design.
Related Posts
35 Excellent Wireframing Resources Here are more than 35 resources for creating better wireframes, including tutorials on different methods and a variety of tools available.
Free Printable Sketching, Wireframing and Note-Taking PDFs In this article, you will find a concise collection of ready-to-print sketching, wireframing and note-taking templates. Most are geared to the design community, but some could be used in any industry for any purpose.
Would you like to see more similar posts on Smashing Magazine?
Recently, A/B testing has come under (unjust) criticism from different circles on the Internet. Even though this criticism contains some relevant points, the basic argument against A/B testing is flawed. It seems to confuse the A/B testing methodology with a specific implementation of it (e.g. testing red vs. green buttons and other trivial tests). Let’s look at different criticisms that have surfaced on the Web recently and see why they are unfounded.
[Offtopic: by the way, did you already get your copy of the Smashing Book?]
Argument #1: A/B Testing And The Local Minimum
Jason Cohen, in his post titled Out of the Cesspool and Into the Sewer: A/B Testing Trap, argues that A/B testing produces the local minimum, while the goal should be to get to the global minimum. For those who don’t understand the difference between the local and global minimum (or maxima), think of the conversion rate as a function of different elements on your page. It’s like a region in space where every point represents a variation of your page; the lower a point is in space, the better it is. To borrow an example from Jason, here is the issue with the local vs. global minimum:
As even Jason acknowledges in his post, this argument isn’t really concerned with A/B testing, because the same methodology could be used to test radical changes to get to the global minima. So, calling it an A/B testing trap is unfair because it doesn’t have anything to do with A/B testing. Rather, the argument uncovers the futility of testing small changes.
So, if A/B testing is not the culprit, is the real issue the local minima? No, even the theory of discounting local minima is flawed. The image above shows you a very simple one-dimensional fitness landscape. You can imagine the x-axis as the background color and the y-axis as the bounce rate. Jason’s argument goes something like this: if you tested dozens of shades of blue, you might decrease your bounce rate, but if you tried something completely different (such as a yellow), you might achieve the absolute lowest bounce rate possible on your page.
There are two problems with this argument…
1. You Never Know for Sure Whether You’ve Found the Global Minimum (or Maximum)
The global minimum (or absolute best) exists only in theory. Let’s continue with the example of an extreme yellow background giving you the global minima (in the bounce rate). Upon further testing, what if you found that no background color at all gave you a lower bounce rate? Or better yet, that a background full of lolcat images gave you an even lower bounce rate? The point is, unless you have reduced the bounce rate to 0% (or the conversion rate to 100%), you can never be confident that you have indeed achieved the global optimum.
There is another way to determine whether you have found the global optimum: by exhausting all possibilities. Theoretically, if your page didn’t contain anything other than background color (and you couldn’t even add the background image because, well, your boss hates it), then you could cycle through all background colors available and see which one gave you the lowest bounce rate. In exhausting all possibilities, the color that gives you the lowest bounce rate should be the one that is absolutely the best. This brings us to the second point…
2. It’s Not Just About the Background Color, My Friend
When optimizing a Web page, you can vary literally hundreds or thousands of variables (background color being just one of them). Headline, copy, layout, page length, video, text color and images are just a few such variables. Your goal for the page (in terms of conversion or bounce rate) is determined by all of these variables. This means that the fitness landscape (as seen in the images above) is not one-dimensional and never as simple as it appears. In reality, it is multi-dimensional, with a ton of variables affecting the minima and maxima:
Again, imagine the peaks as your conversion rate (or bounce rate) and the different dimensions as the variables on your page (only two are here, but in reality there are hundreds). Unlike a one-dimensional case, exhausting all possibilities in a real-world scenario (i.e. in conversion optimization) is impossible. So, you are never guaranteed to have found the global maxima (or minima). Lesson to be learned: embrace local minima.
Argument #2: A/B Tests Trivial Changes
Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz, posted an article titled Don’t Fall Into the Trap of A/B Testing Minutiae in which he reiterates Jason’s argument to not waste time testing small elements on a page (headline, text, etc.). His main argument is that getting to the local maxima (by testing trivial changes) takes up too much energy and time to make it worthwhile. See the image below, reproduced from his blog but modified a little to make the point:
The first point to make is that the opportunity cost is not the time required to run the test (which is weeks) but rather the time needed to set up the test (which is minutes). Once you have set up the test, it is pretty much automated, so you risk only the time spent setting it up. If an investment of 15 minutes to set up a button-color test ultimately yields a 1.5% improvement in your conversion rate, what’s wrong with that?
Many A/B testing tools (including Visual Website Optimizer—disclaimer: my start-up) make setting up small tests a no-brainer. They also monitor your test in the background, so if it isn’t a winner, it is automatically paused. What’s the risk then of doing such trivial tests? I see only the upside: increased sales and conversions.
To make his point, Rand gives the example of a recent Basecamp home page redesign, by which Basecamp managed to increase its conversion rate by 14%. Can you imagine the kind of effort that went into such a redesign (compared to a button-color test)? In fact, because the fitness landscape is multi-dimensional (and very complicated), a total redesign has a much higher probability of performing worse. A complex design can go wrong in many more ways than a simple button color can. Because we never hear of case studies of redesigns gone wrong (hello survivorship bias), we shouldn’t conclude that testing radical changes is a better approach than testing minutiae (especially because radical changes require a huge investment in effort and time compared to small red vs. blue tests).
With the local minima (or maxima), you at least know for sure that you are increasing your conversion rate, which leads directly to increased profit. This isn’t to say that we should give up on our hunt to achieve the global optimum. Global optimum is like world peace: incredibly hard to achieve, but we have to keep moving in that direction. Lesson to be learned: the ideal strategy is a mix of both small (red vs. blue) tests and radical redesign tests. By jumping across the mountains in the conversion rate fitness landscape, you ensure that you are constantly seeking better conversion rates.
Argument #3: A/B Testing Stifles Creativity
Jeff Atwood compares the movie Groundhog Day to (surprise, surprise) A/B testing and concludes that because the protagonist failed in the movie, A/B testing must also fail. Stripped of all (non-)comparisons, Jeff suggests that A/B testing lacks empathy and stifles creativity. He goes on to cite a tweet by Nathan Bowers:
A/B testing is like sandpaper. You can use it to smooth out details, but you can’t actually create anything with it.
Whoever claimed that A/B testing is good for creating anything? Creation happens in the mind, not in a tool. The same flawed reasoning could be applied to a paint brush:
A paint brush is like a stick with some fur. You can use it to poke your cat, but you can’t really create anything with it.
A/B testing, like a paint brush, is a tool, and like all tools, it has its properties and limitations. It doesn’t dictate what you can test; hence, it doesn’t limit your creativity. A/B testing or not, you can apply the full range of your creativity and empathy to coming up with a new design for your website. It is up to you whether to go with your gut and implement it on the website immediately or to take a more scientific approach and determine whether the new design converts better than the existing one. Lesson learned: A/B testing is a tool, not a guidebook for design.
Summary
To reiterate the lessons learned from the three arguments above:
Because you can never achieve the global minima, embrace the local minima. Testing trivial changes takes a few minutes, but the potential outcome is far greater than the cost of those minutes.
Constantly explore the best ways to increase your conversion rate by performing both trivial tests and radical redesign tests at regular intervals.
A/B testing is a tool and does not kill your imagination (in fact, you need your imagination most when designing variations).
Lastly, don’t feel guilty about performing A/B testing.
We’re always on the lookout for great freebies to share with our readers, and today we’ve got some seamless patterns. Seamless patterns are a great way to add a lot of detail to a design and fill up a big area, such as a background. Here are over 200 patterns that are perfect for creating website backgrounds. You can use these as they are, or use them as a foundation to build upon.
