First impressions are more crucial than ever - whether it’s a website, a mobile app, or a marketing email, the visual design plays a pivotal part in capturing the attention of your audience. But determining what design elements work best can be hard. This is where Visual A/B Testing comes in. This blog post will deep dive into what Visual A/B Testing is and provide you with advice on how to effectively implement it to improve your designs.
What is Visual A/B Testing?
Visual A/B Testing, also sometimes known as Visual Split Testing, is a data-driven approach to comparing different visual design variations of a web page, app screen or any other visual element. Its main goal is to identify which design elements and layouts resonate the most with your audience and drive desired actions, such as clicks, conversions, or engagement.
The core idea behind Visual A/B Testing is simple: you create multiple versions (A and B) of a design element, where each version features distinct visual elements, such as colors, fonts, images, or layout. You then present these variations randomly - but consistently - to your users and then collect data on their interactions to then analyse the results to determine which design performs best.
Why Visual A/B Testing Matters
Visual A/B Testing offers several compelling advantages. Instead of relying on “gut feel” or assumptions, Visual A/B Testing enables you to make design decisions based on real world data. This data-driven approach reduces subjectivity and increases the likelihood of creating designs that resonate with your target audience.
By identifying the design elements that users prefer and find more engaging, you can improve the overall user experience. This will lead to higher conversions, longer on-site engagement, and a lower drop-off rate.
Efficient design optimisation will also save you time and effort. Instead of a lengthy trial-and-error process, you can quickly identify and implement the specific design improvements that yielded the best results. As for statistical significance, you may need to wait a little longer for low traffic websites to achieve valuable results, but the time and money saved as opposed to punching in the dark will be measurable.
How to Do Visual A/B Testing Effectively
Define your goals
It’s crucial before starting to test that you first define clear and specific goals. What are you trying to achieve with your design? Is it higher click-through rates, more sign-ups or increased engagement? Setting clear goals will guide your testing process and help you measure success accurately as well as to allow you to design tests which may positively (or negatively!) impact your desired outcome.
Choose what to test
Decide which design elements you want to test. Common elements include headlines, images, colors, button placements, and overall layouts. It’s essential to focus on one element at a time to isolate its impact on user behavior. Testing multiple elements simultaneously which could impact the outcome will lead to ambiguous results.
For example, two tests which aim to improve the sign-up flow could end up leaving you with muddled results. However, two tests which have no over-lap such as one a user account sign-up test and a blog newsletter sign-up would not.
Create variations
Design different versions of the element you want to test. For example, if you’re testing a call-to-action button, you might create two versions with different colors or text. Ensure that the variations are visually distinct to make the differences noticeable to users.
Choose your A/B testing tool
There are many tools out there which cost an arm and leg with added complexities which are rarely ever used. Software such as Simple A/B Testing offers a simple interface for product managers to go in and make the changes themselves. Stop waiting on engineers to implement changes and start testing now!
Audience split
The default test case is two variations, your A variation and your B variation. Group A (50%) will see your A variation, while group B (50%) will see your B variation. The assignment is random but consistent, ensuring that someone in group B always sees variation B.
Gather data and analyse
Allow the test to run for a sufficient duration to collect a significant amount of data. This could take more or less time depending on your website or app’s traffic. Avoid making premature conclusions based on limited data.
Analyse Results
Now that you’ve collected the data, this is the easy part! When logging in to your Simple AB Test Dashboard you should hopefully see a clear winner based on the bar chart and the raw data shown for each test. Now you can implement your winner and be confident that it will positively impact your website’s performance.
Privacy and GDPR
Collecting data on users means you must work within the confines of GDPR. Different tools use different ways of tracking users, however as Simple AB Test uses the IP address to calculate which variation to display, we do not need to store any cookies, sessions or even store the user’s IP. It’s a privacy win for everyone!
Best practices for visual A/B testing
As mentioned earlier, it’s important that you test one element at a time. This allows you to isolate the impact of that specific element and draw clearer conclusions. Running multiple tests on the same part of your app or website will result in tests impacting each other and not give you a fair answer, putting you at a disadvantage.
It’s also important to make sure that your target audience are the ones seeing your tests. Showing users who have zero understanding or interest in your product A/B tests will end up with you getting results for an audience not representative of your target audience.
And finally, you should be patient. Getting enough users to view your tests can take time, especially for smaller websites with less traffic. Enabling a test and then focussing on another task might be the best thing you can do to allow your test the time it needs to validate. You should always aim to allow your tests to reach statistical significance before acting on the results.