Smashing post! I’m pleased to be reading this just as we’re considering launching a new product which we’ve concluded would work best in this way. We’ve been “perplexed” with extremely spammy looking options, so this has been a wonderful, refreshing read for me this morning.

Thanks for the inspiration!

Cheers,

.nate

The reason we feel that we need elbows is that the design lends itself best to a “desk,” which cuts off other key elements that make the stock images look less awkward. Elbows add just enough angle to make up for the shortcomings caused by the “desk” cutoff line. Strange right?

When I post the results of the A/B testing (which starts next Monday), I’ll let you know what we learn about these elements and share a comp without elbows.

What’s most important though, is that we didn’t realize how much an elbow could matter until we started to play with the A/B versioning – it showed us that the design had limitations that were going to be harder to test and explain to the client who thought we could just add “anything” in the image spot.

Cheers!
:)CB

For anyone interested in landing page optimization, I’d recommend taking a look at http://abtests.com – it’s not strictly about landing pages, but it does have a lot of case studies on how designers and developers have successfully implemented A/B testing to improve conversation rates.

I can only guess it’s to make them look more human, friendly, “real”, etc?

Great article though!

I’ve been fascinated to study University of Phoenix’s approach to marketing their online degrees, and in the recent weeks they’ve moved into the user flow you mentioned (here’s an example http://ow.ly/12hkX).

I’m going to mention this to my client because the actual application process is quite lengthy and that small trick might work for enhancing the experience and reducing the abandonment rate.

:)CB

This was my first time designing these kinds of pages, and during my research process I was sort of stunned that there weren’t a lot of best practices or helpful tips out there. I was also surprised to learn how well my client’s current design is working, because it felt a lot like spam to me. These pages do heavy-lifting, have lots of power, and are so easily testable because of the ad dollars/predictable traffic patterns – that I’ve developed new respect for awesome designers who pull them off successfully (and that includes the ones that feel like spam but are successful).

Thanks for your note!
-CB

Totally agree, the client wants “submit,” but has agreed to let us test out different copy in the A/B stage. I’m looking forward to learning what copy becomes the more compelling copy.

Cheers!
CB

I’m actually a designer at a marketing agency and lead gen pages are nearly all that I do. We’re also primarily involved in the education space so it’s great to read about someone who’s going through the same things.

A roadblock of ours at one point is the length of these forms and the amount of information these schools wanted to capture. Obviously, a lengthy forms substantially lowers conversions. To help increase our page’s success, we’ve separated the form into several different parts and incorporated a “steps” system where users would click “next” and “back” to move forward or back, with only a few fields to fill out on each step. A progress meter helped determine steps towards completion. This has increased our conversions dramatically. Definitely worth considering if your form is lengthy.

Look forward to your results.

These lead gen pages are good for people who do not need a greater level of information before they sign up. It’s very important to cater for the people that need more information and give them easy enough access to the main website.

Great article though – thanks

:)CB

That’s a bit presumptuous, assuming that all stakeholders in dating websites are women. I don’t know the statistics, but I would imagine the sentence would be more PC ending “optimize the design themselves”. :P