The powerful effects of changing defaults
A series of A/B tests aimed at changing buying behaviour
When a customer buys a print from King & McGaw, they can choose to have it framed with one of dozens of frame options. Framed products have a much higher customer satisfaction rating than unframed, and also generate 5x revenue.

Last year, we ran a series of tests which made framed products the default option. A series of A/B tests eventually lead us to a 20% uplift in average order value, and a confidence to think of frames as our primary product. Changing defaults can have powerful effects.
You can’t add simplicity, you can only take away complexity
This year as part of a drive on simplification, King & McGaw removed thousands of products from the site. Opening our London store increased their confidence in selling a smaller, more opinionated range.
The site still had a cluttered product page with too many choices, and converted poorly on mobile. A fundamental overhaul was the only way we thought we could get to a better situation.
Enter the Design Sprint
We took the best parts of the Design Sprint process and condensed it into three days (here are the actual notes). Some of it was squeezed into a train journey to the King & McGaw factory in Newhaven.


Our goal was to “build a high-quality, simple to use way of buying framed art that is curated and guided, and converts equally well on all targeted devices.”
After three days of interviewing, sketching, debating, voting and countless sticky notes, Nick Cotton produced this prototype, and Alannah Wood used it to start collecting feedback from customers in our London store.
The key change was displacing the upfront choices behind the “customise” button. We knew this would have an effect on a customer’s propensity to buy the “default” choice, so we ran an A/B test (~50k samples in each branch) to find out how the new page performed against the old.
A/B test results
Our analysis found that the new page had the following effects (to > 95% statistical significance):
- increased add-to-cart conversions by 13%
- increased purchases of the default option by 14%
The improvement in add-to-cart conversions was a welcome result. But confirmation that removing upfront choices caused more customers to buy the default option wasn’t necessarily good, as we default to the smallest size.

The shift to smaller products eroded some of the value brought by the change. So our next test will change the default size of our products to encourage customers to buy larger sizes. We hope to do this without losing our add-to-cart gains by losing customers to sticker shock.
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