As a frequent user of Edgeryders, I like the idea of having a sort of dashboard that tells me, at a glance, what is going on: new content and comments, new tasks, new projects, upcoming events etc. Since I have admin credentials for the website and a little knowledge of Drupal, a while ago I actually built myself one, and I have used it instead of the home page as a first stop onto the platform ever since.
But wait, maybe there are other people like me out there? So, I decided to run a little test, using Content Experiments to see if a dashboard-y home page leads users to contribute more content to the Edgeryders conversation. It works like this: half of us, when we hit the “home” button as logged-in users, will see the old home page; the other half will the dashboard. Content Experiments then runs a simple statistical test called an A-B test and determines whether one of the two variants performs better than the other, and which one.
In the experiment I called the normal Home Page Monkey Brain, because it is based on the psychological principle of imitation. You are shown avatars and stats from Edgeryders – and (hopefully) this tells your brain that Edgeryders is a nice place animated with nice people like you, and will make you feel at home. The variant is called, less imaginatively, Dashboard. Through cookies, the website knows you are you, so you will always see the same variant of the home page. If you want to make a direct comparison you can use the following links: Monkey Brain and Dashboard. Which one do you prefer?
It’s friendlier i think. Although the homepage is not where I access the new content, it is through email notifications & What’s New page. So I guess one’s preference for a homepage is a function of how they're using the website and what’s the preferred way to get a hold of new content.
As older users, I guess we have established routines, which is why it’s great that the content experiments test their efectiveness statistically, also including new users.
Initially Dashboard was in the lead, but it has been overtaken by Monkey Brain. It is very inconclusive: there are only 46 observations so far, of which 27 have seen Monkey Brain and 19 have seen Dashboard. The conversions against the target of “visiting at least 4 pages” have been 26 for MB and 15 for DB – both pretty good. At the moment it seems that DB’s conversion rate is 18% lower than MB’s, but the difference is not statistically different from zero. In fact, Content Experiments keeps running at the test until it gets a statistically significant difference (p-value of at least 95, 99 or 99.5%, according to what I set it).
