Steve McLendon reminded me of another such counterintuitive test result, this one about the customer sign-up process. The findings floored him. We were constantly running tests on the process, but this was a particularly controversial one. The hypothesis was that we could boost the number of people who signed up for a free trial, and then ultimately subscribed, if we removed friction from the initial sign-up by not requiring people to input their credit card information. Steve was adamant that subscriptions would dramatically increase, yet the results were abysmal: they plummeted by half. He
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