Marginal gain is an iterative approach to problem solving. What does this mean? Through the use of design patterns, most websites perform broadly similarly to their competitors; that being the case, even a minute improvement is sufficient to make a website stand out.
1% is, of course, not a literal figure. It's impossible to quantify a design improvement in terms of a percentage. And even when a percentage can be found by measuring conversions, or performance, it's not always desirable to do so the key point is that marginal gain focuses on small improvements.
Finding 1%
Adopt the mindset that there is a 1% improvement to be found in every element of your website. The benefit of 1% is that it's an attainable target. Naturally some elements of a project have greater scope for improvement than others. To find 1% improvements, teams need to adopt a multi-disciplinary approach. Every element needs to be planned, designed, and engineered. The key to a marginal gains approach is that everything can be improved, and that every incremental step is worthwhile when viewed as part of a whole.
When optimizing an image, there is a tendency to save in accordance with default application settings: commonly we'll save a JPG at 60%, then try and drop it to 40%. If the resulting quality is too low we revert to 60%. But we only need to find 1% so try saving your JPG at 59% quality. In a few quick tests I found that dropping 1% off the quality resulted in an average 3% reduction in file size. The key to success with marginal gains is that the cost of implementation is negligible: we want the 1%, but we don't want to pay for it.
If there's one area that fully embraces marginal gains, it's typography. Finding the correct measure, the optimal leading, and making use of advanced features such as smart quotes, ligatures and small caps provides a measurable improvement in readability.
1% is an easy figure to bear in mind, but it‘s plucked from the air. What matters is making small improvements that carry a negligible cost. Any improvement to an already refined website is incrementally harder. Finding a 10% performance boost will introduce unwanted side-effects such as loss of quality. If we can find 1% in ten different areas we can make the same 10% performance boost with no pay off. Come to us for your website solution.