Ideas are cheap
July 2019
It’s great that you have ideas. Have more! You can keep them in a pile in the corner of the room.
What’s cheap
- “We should use lifestyle imagery on the homepage”
- “Visitors struggle with the Billing step of checkout”
- “A minimalist theme, heavy on whitespace, would look way better than what we’ve got”
- “We need a punchier value proposition”
These ideas and observations are a great start, but you could probably think of a million of them. They’re cheap - unless you build them into an inconclusive or losing A/B test, in which case they’re expensive. Not valuable.
What’s valuable
Your tireless efforts to:
- Identify high value pages and elements of your site
- Test a variety of experiences that are as different as possible
(Maybe a third bullet should be “Take action on the results,” but that’s for another day.)
You need ideas - lots of them - to pull this off. And you need to be in charge of your ideas, not in love with them.
You can still believe lifestyle imagery is what your homepage needs. But even as you choose the perfect smiling stock photo, you’ll ask “What would the exact opposite approach look like?”
And you’ll test a simple solid color or gradient background. And some product imagery. May the best idea win 😁