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Removing stuff is never obvious yet often better

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Re: Removing stuff is never obvious yet often better

#51

Post by shubhamjain »

mquander wrote: post #22

I don't know if this calculator was good or bad, but the rationale sounds superficially ridiculous. > Visitors who didn't see the calculator were 16% more likely to sign up and 90% more likely to contact us than those who saw it. There was no increase in support tickets about pricing, which suggests users are overall less confused and happier. Of course if you hide the fact that your product might cost a lot of money…

Absolutely true! An A/B test enthusiast in our team once significantly reduced padding on the pricing page to bring the signup button above the fold and used the increase in signup button clicks as a proof of success of the experiment. Of course, the pricing page became plain ugly, but that didn't matter, because "Signups are increasing!!"

In this case, I do agree that the calculator is a bit daunting if you're not used to all the terms, but what should be done with it should have been an intuitive decision ("what can we do to simplify the calculator?") Not a fan of A/B testing culture that everything needs to be statistically analyzed and proved.

Re: Removing stuff is never obvious yet often better

#52

Post by imoverclocked »

jmathai wrote: post #45
nxicvyvy wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wireshark is a pretty bad name to choose.

Yeah - I didn't think there would be confusion with the networking tool but based on feedback we're receiving...I was wrong. We're considering options including changing the name.

The HN feedback is likely heavily biased… even if you are deploying your product in Silicon Valley. Most people that will be fishing wire through their home have never heard of the networking tool. ie: You might consider not changing it too :)

Re: Removing stuff is never obvious yet often better

#53

Post by refibrillator »

Upvoted to spread the immense wisdom in this post. But golly I must say the line can get blurry quickly.

> Would anything of value be lost if this or that chunk of it was removed?

In early stage projects I’ve seen this mentality backfire occasionally because it’s tough to estimate future value, especially for code and data.

For example, one time in a greenfield project I created the initial SQL schema which had some extra metadata columns, essentially storing tags for posts. The next week, a more senior engineer removed all those columns and associated code, citing the YAGNI principle (“you aren’t gonna need it”). He was technically correct, there was no requirement for it on our roadmap yet.

But the original work had taken me maybe an hour. And the cost of keeping the data around was approximately zero. It seemed he didn’t consider that.

Guess who needed the columns to build a feature a year later? Yeah me, so I found myself repeating the work, with the additional overhead of prod DB migrations etc now that the product had users.

I guess my point is, sometimes it’s also wise to consider the opposite:

Would anything of value be gained if this or that chunk of it was removed?

In this article the evidence is clearly affirmative, but in my case, well it wasn’t so clear cut.

Re: Removing stuff is never obvious yet often better

#54

Post by bruce511 »

shubhamjain wrote: post #51
mquander wrote: post #22

I don't know if this calculator was good or bad, but the rationale sounds superficially ridiculous. > Visitors who didn't see the calculator were 16% more likely to sign up and 90% more likely to contact us than those who saw it. There was no increase in support tickets about pricing, which suggests users are overall less confused and happier. Of course if you hide the fact that your product might cost a lot of money…

Absolutely true! An A/B test enthusiast in our team once significantly reduced padding on the pricing page to bring the signup button above the fold and used the increase in signup button clicks as a proof of success of the experiment. Of course, the pricing page became plain ugly, but that didn't matter, because "Signups are increasing!!" In this case, I do agree that the calculator is a bit daunting if you're not u…

>> Of course, the pricing page became plain ugly, but that didn't matter, because "Signups are increasing!!"

I'm not sure I'm following you here, so perhaps you'd care to elaborate?

The GP critique was that it was perhaps just creating a problem elsewhere later on. I'm not seeing the similarity to your case where the change is cosmetic not functional.

The issue of whitespace (padding) is subjective (see the conversation recently between the old and new windows control panels) but "scrolling down" does seem to be something that should potentially be avoided.

If sign-ups are increasing is that not the goal of the page? Is there reason to believe that the lack of padding is going to be a problem for those users?

Re: Removing stuff is never obvious yet often better

#55

Post by lathiat »

raylad wrote: post #48

I experienced something similar. We had a website with several products that seemed fairly similar, so we were concerned that people might have trouble deciding which one to get, and not buy as a result. So we made a product advisor applet where the user would answer a few questions and it would suggest one or two products that would be best for them. Getting the applet right took a bit of work, but once it was done…

That is the value of testing things. Sometimes the result is non obvious :)

Re: Removing stuff is never obvious yet often better

#56

Post by CookieCrisp »

shubhamjain wrote: post #51
mquander wrote: post #22

I don't know if this calculator was good or bad, but the rationale sounds superficially ridiculous. > Visitors who didn't see the calculator were 16% more likely to sign up and 90% more likely to contact us than those who saw it. There was no increase in support tickets about pricing, which suggests users are overall less confused and happier. Of course if you hide the fact that your product might cost a lot of money…

Absolutely true! An A/B test enthusiast in our team once significantly reduced padding on the pricing page to bring the signup button above the fold and used the increase in signup button clicks as a proof of success of the experiment. Of course, the pricing page became plain ugly, but that didn't matter, because "Signups are increasing!!" In this case, I do agree that the calculator is a bit daunting if you're not u…

I feel like that example is missing some context - if signups did increase then their experiment was successful - we aren’t here to make pretty pages, we’re here to make money.

Re: Removing stuff is never obvious yet often better

#58

Post by pentaphobe »

refibrillator wrote: post #53

Upvoted to spread the immense wisdom in this post. But golly I must say the line can get blurry quickly. > Would anything of value be lost if this or that chunk of it was removed? In early stage projects I’ve seen this mentality backfire occasionally because it’s tough to estimate future value, especially for code and data. For example, one time in a greenfield project I created the initial SQL schema which had some…

Thanks for this balanced (and IMO necessary) reminder.

It's all too easy to get caught either doing way too much defensive/speculative stuff, or way too little.

one person's "premature optimisation" is another person's "I've seen roughly this pattern before, I'll add this thing I wished I had last time" - and AFAICT there's no _reliably_ helpful way of distinguishing which is correct.

Re: Removing stuff is never obvious yet often better

#59

Post by vincnetas »

nxicvyvy wrote: post #44
jmathai wrote: post #43

Not only is it often better but it can literally enable you to get to market an order of magnitude faster (at with higher probability of success). I'm working on a tool that makes running wire inside residential homes easier. It requires carving a channel on the back side of the baseboard. My original idea required a mechanical tool with a motor [2]. We prototyped a working version of this but always felt that the ma…

Wireshark is a pretty bad name to choose.

And logos are almost identical with wireshark software.

Re: Removing stuff is never obvious yet often better

#60

Post by shubhamjain »

CookieCrisp wrote: post #56
shubhamjain wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely true! An A/B test enthusiast in our team once significantly reduced padding on the pricing page to bring the signup button above the fold and used the increase in signup button clicks as a proof of success of the experiment. Of course, the pricing page became plain ugly, but that didn't matter, because "Signups are increasing!!" In this case, I do agree that the calculator is a bit daunting if you're not u…

I feel like that example is missing some context - if signups did increase then their experiment was successful - we aren’t here to make pretty pages, we’re here to make money.

The problem is that it's easy to prove that signups are increasing, and lot harder to prove that there was a measurable increase in number of paying users. Most A/B tests focus on the former, very few on the latter. We had a free plan, and most users who signed up never made a single API request. So, assuming that the increase in signups is driving more business is just foolhardy.
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