It looked worse. It converted 17% better.
Twitter liked our old Senja homepage better. The buyers didn’t.
We don't look at websites the way we look at them in Figma, I wish more designers understood this.
Corey posted our Senja redesign on Twitter and the top reply was: “I don’t understand. The one on the left looks way better.”
The one we designed (on the right) converted 17% better.
That kind comment is something an amateur designer says when their work has never had to perform. If every design you’ve made has only been judged as a Dribbble shot, a still frame is the only arena you know. In a still frame the calm page that looks good from afar wins every time.
But nobody browses a giant tall slab.
People scroll through a window the size of their screen, one section at a time. Even though it doesn't look as pretty as a whole when zoomed out, the right side has a logical, buyer-oriented sequence. So here's what they really see:
1. The hero
The hero's job is to convey social proof and quell any objections this person might have to scrolling further. We accomplish that by:
A. Making it look nice as a the entry into the page.
B. Making sure that the main elements of their features or addressed at the top.
In the case of Senja, social proof was the main focal point of this entire landing page.
2. More social proof followed by a before/after
These before and after sections are a conversion factory staple. After we provided the users with another large testimonial to make them feel like they were missing out by not being a part of the product, we immediately transitioned to a tit-for-tat, "this-is-why-your-life-sucks-and-how-it-could-be-better" card layout.
3. Then we got into the features
But we didn't want to do them in a boring left-right block style... at first.
What I opted to do was create a spinning pinwheel that highlighted all of the different widgets available within Senja.
This is a more playful, evocative way to not only break apart the page layouts from conventions and create rhythm between the preceding and proceeding sections, but it also made users get a taste of Senja's playfulness.
Back to the designer who thought the page on the left looked better.
It does... when it's displayed as a singular canvas viewed as a single artpiece, but that's not how people read websites. You learn this the first time a page you loved flatlines and a page that looked "messy" in Figma prints money.
Put your work in front of real traffic and let it grade you. Not some aesthetician on Twitter.
— Zach
