Experiment: Towards Improving Consumer Incident Reporting: Designing and implementing an experimental study

Do enhancements made to the landing page, compared to the existing one, resulting in more Canadians proceeding to the consumer incident report form?

This experiment entailed a live, randomized A/B test using the existing consumer incident reporting landing page as well as a modified ‘intervention’ landing page. The intent was to determine if changes in language and presentation could successfully drive online users to continue through to the consumer incident reporting form. That experiment ran between December 12, 2018 and March 11, 2019. During the experimental period, there were 1,999 visits to the intervention landing page and 2,592 to the existing one. After reaching the landing page, visitors would click on a link to enter the consumer incident reporting form. A greater number of visitors from the intervention page entered the consumer incident reporting form (61%), compared to the existing page (27%). This difference in proportions (34%) is statistically significant (p<0. 01). This is an indication that optimizing the landing page content with consumer-focused changes played an important role in retaining consumers within the incident reporting pathway.

The experiment was a randomized A/B test that used the existing landing page for consumer incident reporting and a modified landing page. The intent of the experiment was to determine if changes in language and presentation could successfully encourage users to complete the cosmetic or consumer incident report form. For the experiment, users were sent to either the existing landing page (that is, the control group) or the modified landing page (that is, the experimental group).

The modified landing page improved the user interface by providing: a button that makes it easier to submit a report form and a plain language instructions on how to fill out the report form. The modified landing page provided clearer direction to users about: which incidents should be reported to the Consumer Product Safety Program, why incidents should be reported to the program, and how to report such incidents.

There were two main outcomes for this project: the number of unique page visits for each webpage used; the number of visitors accessing the cosmetic or consumer incident report form.

The experiment ran for 3 months, from December 12, 2018, to March 11, 2019. During this time, there were 2,592 page visits to the existing landing page and 1,999 page visits to the modified landing page. After reaching the landing page, visitors would click on a link to access the consumer incident report form. A greater number of visitors of the modified page accessed the cosmetic or consumer incident report form (61%), compared to visitors of the existing page (27%). The difference (34.0%) in the percentage of visitors who accessed the report form is statistically significant. This difference indicates that making the landing page more user-focused played an important role in encouraging users to access the incident report form.

Randomized

Program

Jul 12, 2019

Consumer and Hazardous Products Safety Directorate

HC-2019-EI-00001

Health Canada