It must be very hard to make a one-size-fits-all page design that works for everybody. I also imagine it’s a tough job to present the idea that short, punchy, benefit-first pages convert better to creators who have lost themselves in writing a thousand words of explanation and parentheticals and FAQs, as is so easy to write.
However, I really think this change was rushed into production in a way that deserves criticism. You should have taken your A/B testing results and used it as inspiration to develop a more comprehensive change to the page (and page editor), rather than just implementing it straight away.
I won’t repeat critiques about white space and the clumsy overuse of “Show more” links, though I share them with everyone. I would like to highlight a few smaller things that I think you ought to address with your next redesign:
Use your vertical space more judiciously!
I understand that users who don’t know what they want will often rebel against the breathing room they really need, but there are so many clumsy choices that do not seem intentional. Why does it take four and a half scrolls of an iPhone 8 to get through my tier list, a tier list that doesn’t even show what’s in each tier anymore?
I think it’s because you insist on centering too many elements: tier image, tier title, tier price and select button. You also include an eyecatching Includes Discord rewards bit that takes precedence over my actual benefits beyond the second line and is repeated over and over! There are so many ways you could resolve the problems with this sprawling design, but here’s a quick idea that doesn’t even put any elements beside each other:
This preserves all the luxurious whitespace, avoids the truncation, and comes out 20% shorter simply by integrating “$3 per month” into the “Select” button. OK, so maybe a dollar value on the button converts poorly! But you could also put the image to the side of the tier name. You could put the price in small text below the button. You could remove support for custom images entirely. You could do so many things I could mock up here.
But instead you went with a small tweak to a design intended for a sidebar that had loads of vertical space to soak up and patched it over by hiding much of the critical benefit information with a fade and a "Show more” link that looks ugly. It seems unbelievable to me that this was the best way to do it. I’m guessing you just didn’t try that many variations of this now utterly critical part of the page design.
How about on the desktop?
What’s going on with the Twitch icon wrapping over like that? How did that make it to production? Did you consider that we might not need the "ABOUT <CREATOR NAME>" heading anymore, given the clear position of this section within the page? Why is “Share” and “Follow” there — do people use Share, did you test it, does it earn a place? Is “Follow” adequately explained? Should it be more proximate to the posts section, with a better descriptor like "Follow public posts”, or “Follow free posts”?
Open up the About section on desktop
The font size, thin grey border and narrow column width don’t make sense for the about section anymore. Why don’t you take a hint from sites like Medium and open it up a little wider? Here’s a quick mockup:
This just looks so much better to me, and it avoids the “did it load the mobile CSS by mistake” gut feeling I have with the page currently. Of course, please, massage the numbers to make the column width and line height just right, and establish a limit on the about section’s height. Maybe mine is too tall, but not by too much, I think.
Another idea that could work is to have a means for creators to put decorative images on the left and right voids, so you could ban images from the about section proper while keeping a (controlled) space for creators to put enticing bits of art.
Revamp the goals section
It’s just huge and clunky. I deleted it in the above mockup. Surely you could make it nicer — even reduce it to a starburst that says “92 patrons away from goal!” I can’t really be bothered to dream up ideas for it, but it seems like another clunky leftover from the three-column design that squanders vertical space and fatigues me as I scroll.
Provide time and guidance
If you’re gonna make changes like this that necessitate page redesigns, I think it’s important for you to provide a transition period (for all the poor people that thought it was OK to have 800px-tall tier images who got screwed by this change) and clear guidance for us as we convert our legacy designs to the new thing. Tell me my about section is too long! Tell me that I should make my benefit descriptions shorter! Do it in a blog and do it in an email and do it in the page editor!
If you make radical changes, you need to develop the page editor hand in hand with the page appearance to facilitate these tips, character counts, vertical space estimators, etc. I know it’s a lot of work, but if you did touch it…
Allow some (sensible) customisations
It’s apparent to me that you don’t want a wild west of Myspace\Livejournal\Tumblr style campaign pages, and while I think many here would prefer total customisability, I am one of the creators here who values consistency even if I sometimes have to fight with the system provided. Indeed, I hope that my Patreon fees pay for smart people gawking at analytics software to figure out what works best and to arrange my page for me. I believe in you!
So, assuming that we’re on the same page: it’s clear that with your current page editor there are problems we’re all struggling with. It seems to me that there’s a number of page appearance options you could offer for tiers:
- Allow 4 or 5 tiers to be displayed at once
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Let us select which tiers we’d like to display (you can let us know that “3 works best!”, but give us a choice instead of forcing another ugly “More…” button on us!)
- Let us hide the Discord rewards thing
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Let us highlight a particular tier, perhaps by letting us tag a tier with custom text like “Most popular!” or “Best value!” — I’d even be fine with a restricted list of phrases that test well!
Beyond that, I’d really like to be able to feature posts or tags to ensure a new patron sees an exciting array of public and locked posts.
Highlight public posts
Use your new “Recent posts” design as posted by @ursula, but consider a tab control that toggles between “Recent posts” and “Public posts” (or add a short block before the actual “recent posts” block?) that highlights public posts. Before this change came out, knowing that there was going to be a change, I actually expected the new page design would be more revolutionary and less iterative! It seems obvious to me that making your Patreon page a great place for non-paying fans to check up on new content is a perfect way to get more of your audience right on the edge of that funnel, and an easily accessible “free posts” section would make the page much more likely to actually achieve that.
And that’s all I have for now. Hopefully some of these ideas can at least be mocked up or played with. But, of course, I’d also be open to a more comprehensive design overhaul! This one just feels like a proof of concept rammed through way too fast, and I just can’t imagine that your (seemingly quite talented!) designers were entirely OK with it. I’ll go back to mulling over whether I should rework my page all over again, given that new changes seem due soon anyway… grumble grumble.
