If you're going to A/B test something, you need to reduce the variables down to one. For all you know, the supposedly 'pretty' framing and box-shadow you added to the grid layout may actually be what's causing customers to prefer the flat list.
Testing multiple variables in a given trial makes it impossible to discover which change (or combination thereof) actually improved the conversion rate.
That was my first reaction to this test as well. It's not an A/B test and the conclusions are pretty much worthless.
From experience though, an 'uglier' site getting more clicks is actually fairly common. I've seen the results on 100,000's of visitors across a multitude of landers. The rationalization that seems most common is that people click to 'get away' or get to whatever they want.
Well, they could have done a multivariate test if there was enough traffic to make it statistically significant and tested all combos, like GWO allows.
Testing multiple variables in a given trial makes it impossible to discover which change (or combination thereof) actually improved the conversion rate.