If you run a blog or a website that accepts user submitted content, you are probably familiar with
Akismet. They are a company that helps remove spam from your submissions. About.com uses them on this blog to keep the spam to a minimum. And they offer a free service for WordPress users to help block spam.
Earlier this year, they decided to ask their users how much the free service was worth to them by asking them to pay them a little money if they wanted to. You can still use it for free, but if you support Akismet, you could show your appreciation with some cash.
When they first released this pay-what-you-want form, they just included a slider that incremented in small amounts how much money you could pay. This resulted in people paying for the service, but most paid only the minimum or just above the minimum. Then they added a smiley face icon.
As you move the slider higher, the icon changes from a slight frown to a big smile. And what they noticed in testing the icon was that as soon as the frown turned into a smile people paid more. In other words, when the frown went away, that's the price more people would choose.
Testing is Important
Testing your web pages is important at all steps of the process.
Akismet didn't just test the page before they went live, they put it live and continued to test and make changes. And this paid off for them. By testing a simple thing like a smiling icon, they increased their payments a lot. In fact, just that change from a slight frown to a slight smile caused their customers to double their payment, from 33% paying $12 to 33% paying $24. And they wouldn't have known this if they hadn't tested the page both with and without the smiley face.
The other moral, of course, is that smiles help. Humans like to smile and like to be happy, and if your web page makes them happy, they are more likely to buy things from you and stick around longer. When even a simple smiley face icon can have this big an affect, I'd be smiling if I were the Akismet designer too!
Smiles and Testing originally appeared on About.com Web Design / HTML on Tuesday, August 16th, 2011 at 02:27:14.
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