[sn1de]

20+ years of web site ecommerce development experience and what I see is that consistently the designers and the managers and/or product owners (who have the final say and must be suitably impressed) have no access to, or don't bother to consume or understand the site metrics and in many cases don't even have a rudimentary understanding how how their site works (or doesn't work). I've been in so many meetings where the group was ready and willing to kill a feature, or a link or a button and I've had to bring up hard metrics to keep them from killing something that not only people used, but converted more often with a bigger cart. And these are ecommerce sites, so I can only suppose that it is even more so with any site where cold hard cash is not on the line. The trend towards hiding things just to make the design look clean is ignorant and lazy. UX is hard. It should be driven by metrics and validated by observing real user behavior. Anyone who doesn't do that is being vastly overpaid and inevitably eroding the user experience. Nobody should ever have to hover randomly around a screen to hunt for controls, but I see it every single day, and now even on former bastions of usability like core Mac interfaces. How does this stuff get through usability testing? A: It was probably never done, or if it was the aforementioned decision makers never gave it a first let along a second look. Best advice I can give is to never, ever, do a wholesale site redesign when conversion counts. Always incremental, always iterative, always driven by metrics and true usability labs. If someone balks at doing any of this, they shouldn't be in the business, get rid of them or ask for another designer/team.