This subject seems to be the topic of conversation here at EUI over the last couple of days. Ther have been a few articles floating around.
Leah Culver, web designer, developer, and entrepreneur likes Amazon’s sign-up/login all-in-one approach and riffs on it a bit. Though the comments both on the blog and here at EUI seem to suggest that the Amazon approach is a little jarring. Several folks wonder if we are at the point where the system can decide wether or not you are a returning or new user and take the appropriate course of action automagically.
Luke Wroblewski takes a look at the Mad Libs approach. If you remember, Mad Libs created narratives where the reader could fill in the blank. So the approach is a narrative one. They did some A/B testing that suggests that this approach increased traffic 25-40%.
But the science bums me out just a little. He throws this statement out there:
“While it’s possible these adjustments also contributed to the increase, it’s unlikely they were solely responsible for it.”
Well, they have reduced the number of visible fields from 9 (A) to 6 (B), and the white space created by those fields has been cut by about two thirds. That alone might be solely responsible for the increased adoption. What if you took format A and simply reduced the fields without adding all the narrative text in format B? would there be an even larger increase?
I really think it’s about the impression/perception of how much info I’ll need to provide. Version B reduces the cognitive overhead and perception of work in terms of space comprised of form fields, but increases it again even more than A by forcing me to read. I’d love to see them run better tests on this. Still, great work and a 25-40% increase is pretty awesome.