Where do ideas come from? (Part 5)
June 2019
We’ve looked at ideas for a button’s border radius 😴 and hero heading copy. Let’s tackle ideas for a full page redesign.
An amazing example
Head on over to this imgur gallery. You’ll find a dozen or so variations from a 2015 full page redesign of malwarebytes.com.
(This fantastic resource was shared by Andrew Anderson in this post, which you absolutely must read.)
Scroll through the images and note how the images differ, and how they’re alike.
Differences
No two designs look the same - of course, since a good test measures the performance of variations that are as different as possible.
We’ve got long pages vs short pages:
We’ve got “professional, restrained” vs “whimsical, cartoonish”:
We see “busy” vs “minimalistic”:
Some variations have a video. Some have product imagery.
There are several different value propositions:
- “Essential exploit protection for browsers and applications”
- “Protects you from new online threats that antivirus can’t detect”
- “Crushes Malware. Restores Confidence.”
- “Defend your PC from threats!”
… though some are repeated across variations.
Quite a variety, which is impressive when you consider the constraints that seem to have been in place.
Similarities
All the variations are aligned in a few key ways:
Imagery
There are product box shots, icons, a happy cartoon man, a robot, and (my personal favorite) some evil red-eyed cyber criminals:
This is a good variety, but there are a lot of options left out. No stock photos or lifestyle imagery. No screenshots of the software itself.
Those types of visual might go against brand guidelines, or they might have performed terribly in enough previous tests to be off the table. Either way, it’s fine; there’s a lot you can do with just a few elements to work with.
Colors
There’s plenty of variety here, as well, but the designs mostly stick with the same blue and orange. There’s no “pink version” or “brown version.”
Repeated sections
Several variations display the same “business options” section:
There are two variations with the “For Home / For Business + 🤖” hero section. The original article discusses treating sections of the homepage like Lego blocks. This saves time on design, while still giving visitors in each variation a distinct experience
Hopefully this helps demonstrate how to produce several as-different-as-possible variations from the range of feasible options. In case you didn’t click it the first two times, I’ll hit you one more time with the link to the original article.
Give it a read, hit Reply, and let me know what you think.