Your Pretty Designs are Lost Without Real Metrics

You may have read my post about Chartbeat, and their great approach to real-time analytics, but this time I’m bringing you the results of some simple data mining from our Champion Sound email templates. Consider this a different kind of analytics.

When we launched our Champion Sound email template system, one of the first questions my co-workers and I had was: “Which template will the users like the best?” About a year later, I’ve got the answer to that question and I must say that the results aren’t what we predicted. Here’s where design meets usability, simplicity, and analytics.

When we looked at the Champion Sound users’ combined template usage, what did we find?

• Is the prettiest design is the most popular? – No.
• Was the most revolutionary design was the most popular? – Nope.
• Is the design with the best use of colors and texture the favorite? – Not even close.
• Did they like the design with boring colors, the least texture & a minimal approach? – Yes!

From the bullet list above, it’s obvious that Apple is on to something with their minimal approach to design, and the results from my mining support that. The graph above shows the usage spread for email blasts sent using Champion Sound. I only counted emails that used a template, sent between February 15th 2009 (when we fully rolled out our first set of templates) and October 28th 2009 (when we rolled out our 7 new templates that you can see below). Some of us guessed that the pretty sky-blue “birdies” template would rank super high in the list, many thought the “grunge” template would rank higher than 6th as well. The end result is that the template with the least amount of personality turned out to be the most popular.

The reasons for this landslide of template choice might be simpler than you think. Perhaps the authors of the emails did not want to detract from their message. Maybe the flashier templates did not fit the music style or the subject matter being written about. Another interesting aspect of the templates that I observed is user loyalty-the users who used templates typically used the same templates over and over. However, of the several styles of templates above, ranging from minimal and clean to grunge-inspired, bright colors to subtle ones, and  monochrome to photographic, all varying in complexity, the simple dark theme was chosen more often than all the others.

Here are our newest round of Champion Sound templates. Which do you think will be the favorite among these? Additionally, do you think that the designer of “dark” can be dethroned by any of these new designs?

From Left to Right: green, aged paper, vines, clouds, mocha, hanging, billboard

I’m taking unofficial bets in the comments area. If you’d like to see larger versions of the templates, create a Champion Sound account and try them out. My bet is that “mocha” and “hanging” will dethrone “dark” and rise as the new minimalistic template favorites.

Related Reading:
40 Killer Minimalist Blog Designs
70 Stunning examples of Minimalist Web Design
Email Templates are not Print Graphics