Website Redesign Lessons from a Digital Giant

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by MrOptimization in Basics

The Dumbest Digital Designer Motto Ever?

Digital designers have a lot of motto's, but one of them is so dumb and backwards we can hardly stomach mentioning it.

Like a lot of bad digital habits, this motto appeared in the early days as we transitioned from print and was never properly killed and buried.

If you ever hear this motto uttered in a professional situation, leap up and run away. Fast. Don't try to take anything with you. Just run.

Pixels are Free!

There we said it. We'll be back in a few minutes.

OK. We're feeling better now. YouTube is feeling better too because they recently purged that dumb motto from their design lexicon, hopefully forever.

In announcing the results of the healing process last week, Shiva Rajaraman, YouTube Senior Product Manager said:

“The basic idea was that pixels were cheap, and what that meant is that there was a lot of wasteful use of real estate. In the future, pixels will be expensive. We’re going to guard, essentially, the usage of our page and ensure that only the actions that matter are presented there, as opposed to showing all actions all the time.”

Didn't what Shiva said there make you smile? Who says you can't put the "You" back in the Tube?

The YouTube Optimization Process

YouTube did it right. They started by identifying their core success events and then optimized the new video page around those, curing that terrible "pixels are free" disease in the process.

Success events, KPIs, whatever you want to call them are usually pretty easy to figure out—they're all about your digital audience.

Can you guess what YouTube's audience wants to do?

• Search for videos

• View videos

• Upload videos

• Discover new videos

• Rate and comment on videos

Can you guess what else? With the audience doing more of those things, YouTube gets more of what it wants—views and clicks. Everybody's happy and YouTube gets even more insanely popular.

TestTube

YouTube spent several months running tests to figure out which redesign configuration worked best.

Surprise! The audience likes the version that gives them what they want—without all the "pixels are free" googaws:

MrOptimization Digital Do's

• Your mission is to help your digital audience accomplish THEIR goals quickly and easily
• To fulfill your mission, you must understand your audience's goals and give them what they want
• Your audience's goals can almost always be reduced to five or fewer "success events" that you then optimize for
• An ongoing digital optimization program with Multivariate Testing is the best way to continually understand and deliver what your audience wants

MrOptimization Digital Don'ts

• Pixels are NOT free. If a digital googaw doesn't help your audience accomplish their goals, it shouldn't exist. If it already exists, run Multivariate Tests then do what the data tell you—usually REMOVE IT
• With today's Multivariate Testing technologies, "website redesign" doesn't mean "tear it all out and do it again." Today you can "redesign" one element at a time, letting the data guide you
• No Multivariate Testing data, no changes
• A worldwide top-5 site can get away with a lot of stupid stuff for a long time. You can't. You need to design by data

How are you preventing—or curing—the "pixels are free" disease in your organization?