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- "i only speak liquid" #19: The Myth of Trends 🔮
Hey all 👋!
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What I’ve been thinking about:
As a developer you will often find yourself being asked to add elements to a client’s site or to be more specific, adding elements to existing Shopify stores and themes.
These will sometimes be elements that a client has coveted on other sites or that they have seen their competitors use and want to incorporate themselves. Trends can be seductive to a client and easy go-tos for us as developers.
But what happens when you take that request, have a look at the client's website and realize that what they are requesting will bring them little to no benefit and comes purely from a position of wanting to keep up with the Joneses?
To illustrate what I mean here I’m going to focus on one aspect of UI design, the ubiquitous hero image/content carousel. We’ve all seen them, we’ve all built them and none of us have ever interacted with or normally ever seen anything beyond the 4th slide in that carousel.
In talks about a site build with a client recently I was asked to add a carousel to their home page as they felt it was a great way to get multiple messages across to their customers, a noble cause if ever there was one.
But I pushed back and asked, ‘How many times have you ever really sat and looked through all of the content in an accordion?’.
They paused for a moment, ‘But everyone else uses them so they must work right?’
A reasonable assumption, but is it a correct one? I’ve always had my suspicions about their effectiveness, so I went looking for an answer and lo and behold it would appear that they absolutely do not work.
I came across a fascinating article by UX professional Robert Mohns. In this he outlines the significant dropoff that occurs on a carousel after the 1st slide and the research that proves it.
To quote from the article:
The clearest numbers yet were provided by Erik Runyon of Notre Dame University:
3.7 million visitors
1.07% clicked the carousel
89.1% of those clicked the first slide
Positions 2–5 received 3.1% to 2.4% of clicks
That’s a minority of your users that interact with the carousel, with a drop-off rate of those who continue to interact after the first slide that is genuinely astonishing.
For most websites the addition of a content carousel will in reality provide the following to your client; A media heavy component that will significantly increase the load time of their website with the content contained within the carousel never to be seen by the vast majority of site visitors. Or put simply, something that brings no real benefits to your client.
As Mohns succinctly states:
“The data says static, unmoving feature with simple, concise copy and a clear call to action will out-perform a carousel every time.”
I’ve picked Hero carousels as an example here but as developers it is our responsibility to listen to what a client requests, research the outcome of that addition, consider the benefits it will bring them and then advise them accordingly.
Sometimes that advice will be contrary to the client’s request but this honesty will create trust between you and the client and maintain your integrity as a developer.
3 links you can’t miss:
Do Homepage Carousels work? by Robert Mohns. Take a look at the full article referenced above here. Astonishingly it was written in 2015 and yet carousels are still endemic on current websites. Are they always a bad idea? Maybe not always; product image slideshows for example - but on the whole it really does seem so.
Taylor Page's Youtube Channel - A fellow freelance developer and Storetasker expert, Taylor has in the last few months started dipping his toes into Shopify video tutorials and I thoroughly recommend taking a look and subscribing to his channel for helpful nuggets of Shopify knowledge.
Rich Page CRO teardowns - I have recently started following CRO experts on LinkedIn to get their perspective on the current state of UI/UX design and development. I follow Rich Page and he occasionally posts a CRO teardown of a popular website - I find it incredibly interesting to watch someone pick apart the reasons a page may or may not be working.
One app I like:
Colorsnapper - It’s Mac only, it’s nothing to do with Shopify - but this simple app contains a shortcut which sees a magnifying glass appear on your screen and using it you can click a color on screen and it records that color in almost every conceivable value. I use this app more times in a day than I can say.
One learning as a freelancer:
Sometimes pushing back on a client’s requests could be seen as having a negative impact on your working relationships and income.
But I have found the opposite of this more often than not. If a client requests something that you know, and can prove, will not bring them the results that they are looking for then it is your responsibility to let them know.
Saying ‘No’ is not always a negative response, look around at the client’s site and look for updates or additions that will bring tangible results. Use it as an opportunity to find other avenues of growth for them. Your honesty and expertise could take that ‘no’ and change it into a working relationship based on trust and transparency.
As always I appreciate your time in reading this. Have a great rest of week.
Cheers