Here are the best ways to go about improving your site’s conversion rates in 2019.

Voice Engine Optimization

Voice search continues to gain popularity and acceptance, with research firms predicting that by 2020 up to 50% of all searches will be conducted via voice. This means that brands need to optimize for voice search if they wish to stay ahead of the game.

As pointed out by Search Engine Journal, the first organic search result on Google’s SERP (search engine results page) gets up to 35% of clicks. When it comes to voice search it’s even more crucial to rank at the top, as only the top three results are shown on mobile, and just one for smart speakers.

The key to voice engine optimization (VEO) is to optimize content, location and page/product/brand information. Voice search is quickly penetrating across industries, particularly for those looking for answers and information on-the-go.

Here are some of the things you should do for VEO:

• Optimize Business Information – Some $10.3 billion are lost annually just because of inaccurate or unavailable listings. That’s just far too much business to lose for something so rudimentary. Make sure your business listings (name, address, email, phone, socials, etc.) on your website are clear and consistent.

• Improve Page Load Time – As mentioned above, voice search is mainly utilized by those looking for on-the-go results. You may have the info/product they’re looking for, but if your page won’t load, you can kiss your chances of converting goodbye. Simply making your page load faster can improve your ecommerce conversion rate.

• Focus on Questions – Users have learned to speak to voice search like they were actual people. Instead of typing keywords as they would on a standard search, they ask questions. This means that you should work on conversational, long-tail keyword phrases in your site’s content as this enables you to answer natural language queries.

Email Marketing Hacks

Email marketing remains to be a powerful tool for customer acquisition – 40 times more effective than Facebook or Twitter. Additionally, marketing emails are six times more likely to earn a click-through than tweets. This means that if you aren’t focusing on optimizing your email marketing, you’re wasting a golden opportunity.

Personalized content has been all the rage for the past couple of years, but email personalization begins with the sender. Check out the image below. Names, even if you don’t know them, catch your attention better than “Grammarly Insights” or “Blogging Wizard.” It’s also easier to tune out promotional emails.

Once you get a sender name and subject line good enough for your email to be opened, you need to make sure that there’s value in the body. Understanding your segmented list allows you to provide content and a CTA that would resonate with the receiver.

Optimize Your Message Across all Social Channels

There’s layers to this strategy. One is you need to identify which platforms your audiences are in. Then, you need to understand the strengths of each network and the type of content that works best in each platform. For example, on Facebook, images get 53% more likes than average posts. The same applies in LinkedIn where posts with images get 98% more comments.

Once you establish a brand messaging, tailor it to the different platforms you’re utilizing to make sure they perform at optimal level.

Invest in Product Video Content

You can include the more comprehensive product specs. You can even display the most honest, useful user reviews. But unless they can see how your product actually works, your chances of converting remains mediocre at best.

Product videos provide them an up close look at what you’re selling without them actually using it. To see if it’s worth the investment, test it by producing video for your top performing products. When you see an uptick in sales, move on to the next tier of products.

Increase Conversions with the Help of Your Fans

As customers’ trust for brands continue to decline, and conversely trust their peers more and more, social proof and user-generated content (UGC) become an increasingly powerful conversion tool.

Here are some of the ways you can encourage fans to help you out:

• CTAs – You don’t get what you don’t ask for. Having strategically placed CTAs on your sites that encourage customers to share their thoughts and experiences helps in this regard. You can also put social buttons next to the CTA to allow them to share their thoughts in their preferred space. Additionally, you can even start a forum right in your website.
• Post-purchase follow-up – Send an email after a period wherein customers have had a chance to use your product asking them for a review. As noted by Search Engine Journal, UGC there are UGC marketing platforms that can automate this for you.

You can even offer incentives like a 10% discount on their next purchase if they leave a review.

Gamify

Gamification used to be a popular persuasion tactic (think being the mayor of a location in Foursquare, or getting badges in Waze) but has since waned in mass appeal. But, the reason why you should still implement some of its aspects is to tap on people’s need to be rewarded.

Instead of offering badges that are meaningless, cook up rewards that provide actual value. A simple yet effective example of this is Dropbox. They’ve come up with a list of CTAs that, in exchange for, they’ll reward you with additional storage space. This is simple, yet genius, as they’re not only offering a valuable reward, the reward is what their actual product.

Prioritize Human Intelligence

AI is the shiny new toy everyone’s looking to get a piece of. But the reality is, not everyone has the resources, or even the need to justify the infrastructure investment. What’s feasible for every business, though, is to invest in its people.

This popular joke concisely explains the concept:

CFO to CEO: “What happens if we invest in developing our people and they leave us?“

CEO: “What happens if we don’t, and they stay?“

To optimize every aspect of your operations, you need to invest in human intelligence – developing them to a level where it is both easy to trust their decisions, and allow free reign to experiment with ideas.

Use Exit Intent Polls

To optimize your website for conversion, you need to understand two main things:

• Where your visitors are leaving from
• Why they are leaving

The first part is simple enough, just go to Exit Pages in Google Analytics and request for a report.

Getting insights to the next one is where exit intent polls come in. This basically means that when visitors are about to leave the page, a poll is shown asking them why, for example, they are abandoning a cart. Does shipping take too long? Would they prefer same day fulfillment?

This will allow you to get a clearer picture of why visitors are leaving, and what you can do to improve the user experience on your site. You can find a complete guide on how to set up exit intent polls here.

Advanced SMS Marketing

While it seems outdated in the face of all other marketing channels, SMS remains an effective tool because they go straight to where people spend their time the most – their phones. Additionally, SMS is set up that even when you don’t tap it, you’re able to see the message. This leads to over 90% of all text messages being read within five minutes.

Another benefit of utilizing SMS marketing is that not a lot of brands are using it. This means that while people have been accustomed to ignoring promotional emails, people still read their texts. So if you find yourself with the resources (meaning enough mobile numbers), SMS marketing is a solid avenue you should tap.

Takeaway

Conversion may not always equate to sales and revenue, but it is almost always tied up with the bottom line. Analyze which of the points above are applicable to your business and see your conversion rates rise.

The post Strategies to Improve Your Site’s Conversion Rate in 2019 appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

This quick phrase could’ve saved me hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars, but like so many beginners before me, I didn’t listen.

There are countless stories of overcomplicating simple tasks, like the US space program’s epic fail while searching for an anti-gravity pen to use in space. Instead of just buying a $1 pencil, the space program apparently went on a multi-million dollar spending spree.

It’s tempting to overdo things as a beginner, trying to show off everything you’ve learned, but it’s a costly mistake that most UX veterans avoid like the plague. Instead, experienced designers understand that it’s best to keep things super-simple.

Keeping your design simple not only looks better to users, but it converts better too. Here are eight ways to implement user-centered design, and boost your conversion rate in the process.

What Is User-Centered Design, Anyway?

Put simply, User-Centered Design (UCD) is a set of principles that focus design on the user’s needs, desires, and limitations.

By focusing on how users interact with your existing website, you can improve upon its structure, interface, and content to make it more appealing, organized, and useful for them.

User-centered design involves making overall organization, interface, and presentation of content more accessible and cohesive. When visitors to your website can navigate your website easily and find the information they’re looking for, they’re far more likely to convert into buyers.

User-centered design simplifies common tasks and highlights important features and functions. Websites that implement UCD have sensible architecture and navigation that avoids pitfalls such as human error and other frustrating problems.

Get Rid of Obstacles

In order to increase conversions on your website, user-centered design seeks to eliminate user fatigue, doubt, and lack of feedback. Ultimately, the goal is to minimize the amount of mental effort the user must exert in order to get things done.

Eliminate Visual Clutter

Maybe your website has visual elements, graphics and other content that don’t help your users. And identifying these distracting elements among the helpful, productive content is easier said than done.

Make sure your content shows only what the users need to see in order to lead to your desired result. Remove colors, images, layouts and links that don’t add value to their experience, and use environment-like backgrounds on images to reduce distractions.

Simplify the Path to Conversion

From the moment your users first get to your website, they embark on a path to conversion made up of a series of steps. And they can cancel the process at any step along the way, simply by closing a browser window, getting distracted or frustrated, or running out of battery life on their mobile device.

Don’t let it happen to you. Make the path toward conversion a short one, and the steps along the way should be very easy. When my design agency, X3 Digital, added a contact form to the bottom of our home page, we dramatically increased our monthly form submissions. By reducing the mental effort of the entire contact process, we reduced steps and increased our conversions.

Use Clear and Conversational Content

Website visitors don’t like content presented in a “wall of text” format, and may be easily discouraged, overwhelmed and bored because of it.

Make sure your content is straight and to the point. It should be conversational, and easy to read. And if the message is better conveyed as an image, chart or other visual device, use that instead. When I wrote a tutorial about how to make a website, I first needed to understand exactly who would be reading the post.

Afterwards, I made sure that the tone of the article matched the typical language of the readers. This is instrumental in improving your content.

Speak One-On-One, Right From The Website

Customers sometimes need a more direct approach when it comes to assistance, or may have doubts about how certain things work. When they can’t find answers to their questions, they will abandon their purchase and leave your website. Sometimes live chat is all that you need to save your conversions.

Also, live chat is an opportunity to build relationships with your customers, garner positive reviews and gain some insight into what works and doesn’t work in your website.

Make Your Forms Easy

Anyone who has ever filled out a contact form on a website knows that they are obstacles. They can be tedious, intrusive, and sometimes clumsy. But they are necessary in order to get things done.

It’s up to you to keep user fatigue at a minimum by reducing the number of required fields that the user has to fill in. To keep things as easy as possible, keep related information in groups.

Customers also hate clicking on the “Submit” button, only to have it return with errors. Be sure to give feedback at the completion of every step, whether by highlighting correct inputs, or suggesting revisions.

Don’t Forget Mobile Users

As much as users like to fiddle with their mobile devices, conversions on mobile phones have always been significantly lower than on other devices.

The reason? Credit different usage patterns. If you haven’t optimized for mobile users already, it’s time to consider implementing one right away.

A user-centered design for a mobile site would be highly simplified, reducing the amount of text, and having more white space around call-to-action buttons and input fields.

Also, since cellular data plans have limitations, use visual elements that are compact and efficient, improving site speed. Remember, it’s a race against time.

Be Persuasive, Yet Subtle

Visual Design. This element will make your website’s first impression, and will influence your users to give you the benefit of the doubt. By using professional illustrations and photography, a clever color pallete, and implementing a user-friendly layout, users will spend more time on your site, and your conversion rate will improve.

Value Proposition. A value proposition is a clear, direct statement of what your product will specifically do to help your users. Users will find it reassuring that they’ve come to the right place, and that you will deliver on your promises.

Call-To-Action. Be sure to have this button on your website, and that it is clear and clickable, with plenty of white space surrounding it. This button represents the end of the user’s journey and the moment a website visit converts into a sale. Again, keep it simple, and make it clear as to what will happen when your user clicks it.

Next Steps

Jeff Horvath of Human Factors wrote:

“A good user experience, like a measurable ROI, doesn’t typically happen by accident. It is the result of careful planning, analysis, investment, and continuous improvement.”

Designing with users in mind means your website’s interface should be straightforward, logical and intuitive, while maintaining the right aesthetic. This requires strategic placement, spacing and visual coding techniques that facilitate all the actions that can result in sales.

Your website content needs to resonate with your users, delivering marketing messages that answer their questions and are relevant to their needs. This can be accomplished through research and strategic writing to keep users engaged.

Keep your users in mind when you design your website, and they will reward you with conversions.

The post How User-Centered Design Skyrockets Conversion Rate appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

With bottom lines hanging in the balance, savvy designers and marketers keep a watchful eye on conversion rates. But even the best landing pages typically convert less than 40% of visitors. With so much riding on conversion rates, you’d think analytics tools would do a better job helping designers improve landing page performance. Yet, out of the box, tools like Google Analytics are completely inadequate for understanding why pages are converting poorly.

Bounce rates and demographic data tell us almost nothing about what a user is actually doing when they visit your landing page. Instead, we need real, actionable insights.

Dwell time-the amount of time a user spends on your page-is the key to unlocking this information and increasing your conversion rates.

Why Dwell Time Matters

When most visitors to your landing page bounce, the obvious question is: why?

Are there issues with your website’s performance? Do your traffic sources stink? What about relevance and trust? Are you providing all the information your users need to convert?

Dwell time is a critical metric because it can indicate user intent and help you narrow down the root cause of your page’s poor performance.

If users bounce almost immediately, it’s highly likely that your traffic sources or site performance are to blame. When users scroll and read the site, only to bounce a few minutes later, it can indicate that users are interested in your offer, but aren’t comfortable moving forward without more information.

In fact, Google takes this indication of user intent so seriously that it actually uses it as a search ranking factor.

Why Current Tools Don’t Work

Given the importance of dwell time, you’d assume that most analytics tools would measure it out of the box. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case.

Most analytics packages-including Google Analytics-calculate session duration by measuring the time between pageviews.

This means that session duration stats never include the time a user spends on the final page they view. If a user hits your landing page and never views a secondary page, their session duration will read as 00:00:00, even though they may have spent minutes reading and interacting with your page.

This is a huge problem. Luckily, it’s easy to fix.

How to Measure Dwell Time

We knew that measuring dwell time was important when building the landing pages at Swish, so we wrote a simple JavaScript snippet to measure it in Google Analytics.

Add this script to your page somewhere before your Google Analytics Tracking code:

(function (global) {
    
    function trackDwellTime() {
        var intervalInMilliseconds = 1000;
        var timelimit = 3 * 60 * 1000;
        var label;

        var timeSpentInSeconds;
        var timeSpent;

        if (typeof arguments[0] === 'string') {
            label = arguments[0];
            timeSpent = intervalInMilliseconds;
        } else {
            timeSpent = arguments[0];
        }
        timeSpent = typeof timeSpent === 'undefined' ? intervalInMilliseconds : timeSpent;
        timeSpentInSeconds = timeSpent / 1000;
        setTimeout(function () {
            if (typeof gtag === 'function') {
                gtag('event', 'Dwell Time', {
                'event_label': label,
                'event_category': 'engagement',
                'value': 2
                });
            } else if (typeof ga === 'function') {
                ga('send', {
                    hitType: 'event',
                    eventAction: 'Dwell Time',
                    eventLabel: label,
                    eventCategory: 'engagement',
                    eventValue: timeSpentInSeconds
                });
            } else {
                console.log("No Google Analytics Code Found");
            }

            if (timeSpent < timelimit) {
                trackDwellTime(timeSpent + intervalInMilliseconds);
            }
        }, intervalInMilliseconds);
    }
    
    global.trackDwellTime = trackDwellTime;

})(window);

This code will fire a "Dwell Time" google analytics event every second for the first 3 minutes a user is on your page, but you can easily modify it to fire at a different interval or for a different duration.

To fire the tracking script, add the following right after your Google Analytics Tracking code on pages you want to track, replacing "label" with the name of your page or some unique identifier you'd like to see in Google Analytics:

trackDwellTime('label');

This code will work with the newer gtag.js version of Google Analytics, as well as the older analytics.js version.

Analyzing Dwell Time Results

Once you've got your code installed, you can verify that it's working by navigating to your page and opening up the "Real-Time" section of Google Analytics and navigating to the Events report.

Assuming that's working, it's time to create some user segments so you can analyze user behavior based on dwell time.

I like to segment dwell time into the following buckets:

Under 2 Seconds - A high percentage of users with dwell times under 2 seconds can indicate page performance issues or poor traffic sources, since these visitors are bouncing so quickly that they're likely not really reading anything at all.

2 - 10 Seconds - Users who spend between 2 and 10 seconds on your page are likely reading above-the-fold content, but not much else. This may indicate that they believe the page isn't relevant or trustworthy and bounce as a result.

11 - 30 Seconds - Users who spend between 11 and 30 seconds but still don't convert are likely reading your landing page, scrolling, and interacting. There's good news and bad news here. The time they're spending on your page indicates clear interest. The bad news is that your page likely isn't answering important questions or addressing key concerns.

31+ Seconds - Users who spend more than 31 seconds without moving on could be slow readers, but many of them simply got distracted and left the tab open. It's helpful to segment this group out; if you find lots of users in this group, consider breaking it into multiple sub-groups.

These buckets serve as general guidelines; you can and should segment based on your own intuition and unique business situation.

Once you've decided on your segments, you can create them in Google Analytics by using the Segment Builder. From the top of most reports, you can click Add Segment, then New Segment:

Once you're in the Segment Builder, select the Conditions segment type. You'll want to add filters for the "Dwell Time" event action, as well as the event values, in seconds, you're trying to match:

Repeat this setup for each of your segments. Once you've saved your segments, you can break down any report based on them:

Looking at the breakdown of users and which segments they fall into can help direct your thinking about what to change for the next iteration of your landing page. I've personally used this tactic to gain insights that resulted in doubling my original conversion rates.

Beyond Dwell Time

If you need even more insight into what's driving your landing page performance, usability tests, user interviews, and session replay tools like FullStory can be incredibly valuable. These approaches require a bit more investment, but when you're really stuck, they can definitely be worth the time and money.

If you're just starting to iterate, however, dwell time is a quick, cheap, and easy way to analyze your landing page bounces and pinpoint areas for improvement.

The post How to Use Dwell Time to Unlock Better Conversion Rates appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

It’s interesting to note that these two disciplines, known as User Experience (UX) and Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) have similarities and overlap, but generally have a distinctly different approach and methods of research.

What is the difference between Usability and Conversion Rate Optimization? UX is intended to make your website easier to use, to navigate around, and to take key actions on. CRO is intended to help you make the actions you want them to take available and taken more often.

There are differences in the key intent of each strategy, though they work in concert:

• Usability = Make it easy to navigate.
• Conversion Rate Optimization = Get them to take actions that are key to the business more often.

Here are some clearer definitions:

Conversion Rate Optimization is the art of getting a higher percentage of website visitors to convert into customers or take any desired action on a web page.

To track general conversions, many people use Google Analytics or something similar, and to do side by side comparisons of versions of a page there are many options like:

• Optimizely – A very easy to use interface that gives you a slick indicator when you’ve reached statistical significance, so you can feel confident about ending the test and permanently implementing a change.
• Visual Website Optimizer – A little less slick of an interface, but uses has a few different types of features, such as it showing you which different parts of a page are contributing to the success of a particular variation.
• Convert.com – An affordable third option to the two above.

UX refers to an overlapping segment of disciplines and research that study how easy a website is to use. Usability, as it pertains to the web, is the degree to which a site can be utilized by a particular demographic to achieve quantified objectives with effectiveness.

Often the method to find information about the usability of a website involves sitting down with and watching a non-technical person interact with it and try to perform key actions on the website.

This can also be done online with tools and services like:

• UserTesting.com – An amazing way to test users quickly: you choose what questions you want to ask and they give you really great suggestions, you usually get videos of the person talking and navigating around on the website within an hour or so.
• Try My UI – This is very similar to UserTesting.com, just cheaper and a little newer.
• UserBob – This has the simplest interface of all three, is much cheaper and allows you to get ‘first impression videos’, and has other options for short videos.
• UserBrain.net – The difference with this service is you pay a monthly fee (very reasonable,) and get a new video every week. They tout it as “finally making user testing a habit.”
• Userlytics – A more expensive option, but has a white-label offering that allows you to brand the user testing interface.
• If you’re feeling really brave and particularly strapped you can even find people willing to user test, give you feedback, and send you the video on Fiverr.

There are differences in the methods of UX and CRO, though they both complement each other:

• Usability = Testing with people outside the business to see how easy it is to navigate the site.
• Conversion Rate Optimization = Testing two different versions of a page against each other to see what works better in driving key actions.

Both of them are incredibly interesting if you are in any way helping a website to be more effective online, and both generally require original research and testing, and that is why the practitioners of these disciplines can become incrementally more effective outside of individual tests in the other websites they design.

Studying and implementing tests around these disciplines helps provide a system for becoming a better web designer, not just in aesthetic preferences, but in an objective way. Not ‘I feel‘ this design decision will be more effective, but this design decision is more effective according to the numbers.

Both types of research are useful, but which should you do first?

If you have less than 10,000 page-views a month on website, User testing might be your best bet as it doesn’t require a certain amount of people to get statistically significant results. If a website does have more than that and you see opportunities for getting a higher number of conversions, Conversion Rate Optimization is a great option, but ideally, you’d be able to do both.

Usability testing allows you to dig deep into the psychology surrounding key actions and come up with great hypotheses to test during A/B Testing for Conversion Rate Optimization.

Used in concert with a keen problem-solving mind, these methods will allow you to find and fix any user flow problems or confusing elements on your site and get your website fine-tuned like a well-oiled machine.

The post The Difference Between User Experience and Conversion Rate Optimization appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

A/B testing is important for CRO (as are CTA buttons), but it needs to be adopted within a more comprehensive approach. This approach is user-centered design, which I believe is the best strategy to improve conversion rates.

User-centered design is a methodology; a broad framework of processes where the focus is placed on the users. It encompasses not only the design of the user interface, but also activities such as user research. The intent is to create a product shaped around the needs, desires and limitations of the users, rather than forcing them to adapt to it.

What is User Centered Design? [Source]

A strategy for CRO that takes into account these activities is recommended, and represents the optimal solution. But crucial improvements can also be achieved by directly modifying the user interface in accordance with the principles of user-centered design.

Get Rid of Obstacles

UX issues are obstacles on the path to conversion and should be removed. They often belong to these categories: lack of feedback, doubts, and user fatigue. The overall goal is to minimize the cognitive load – the amount of mental effort imposed by the user interface in order to use a website.

Let’s have a look at some common issues and how to get rid of them to clear the path to conversion.

Visual Clutter

User interface elements that are not helping users achieve their goals (and your business goals) are detrimental. They are a source of distraction, and require additional effort to distinguish them from the helpful elements.

Show only the information that is needed in any particular situation. Avoid colors, images, links or layouts that don’t add value. Leave sufficient white space between elements.

Great use of whitespace from Google

Steps

The path to conversion consists of a series of steps. A good solution requires a minimal number of steps. A better solution requires a short number of easy steps. Adopt solutions that reduce the mental effort of the entire process, rather than increase the mental effort to reduce the number of steps.

Content

Too much text can overwhelm and discourage the user. Follow these indications:

• Omit the needless: Use the minimum amount of text required to convey your message.
• Make it easy to read: Good contrast, sufficiently large font-size, short text lines, short sentences and paragraphs, and short sections with enough white space in between.
• Create a conversation: Use “you” to address your users, answer their questions (what they came to your website for), and avoid jargon.
• Illustrate the content: Images, illustrations and charts are often an efficient way to convey a message faster and clearer.

Links

If the anchor text is not clear, users might avoid a link because they are unsure of what will happen next. Write meaningful links that indicate what the user will see or get. Use a verb to invite the user’s action.

Forms

Forms are critical. Follow these indications:

• Reduce user fatigue: Minimize the number of fields that the user has to fill in. Ask only what you really need (remove optional fields). each extra field increases user fatigue and negatively affects conversion rates.
• Group logically: Group related information in sets.
• Give feedback: In a multi-step form, clearly label each step to give the user insight about the entire process from the start. highlight when a step is completed to show progress.
• Avoid doubts: In drop-down menus, the answer options should cover all the possibilities and not force an answer. Add the option “other” if required.

Live Chat

Sometimes users have doubts or need immediate assistance while performing a task on your site (e.g. filling in a form). If they can’t find an answer, they will leave. Live chat support saves conversions, prevents users from sharing negative reviews, and allows you to discover pain points for further improvement.

Touch

Mobile phones traditionally suffer from low conversion rates. It’s important to understand that different devices have different usage patterns. When designing for mobile phones, the key is to always simplify. Reduce the amount of text and introduce even more white space around elements on the user interface.

Simplify the forms, and “think thumb” rather than pixel. Remove or replace heavy visual elements to improve the site’s speed.

The Thumb Zone (via SmashingMagazine.com)

Be Persuasive

Visual Design

Your visual design is the first impression your website will make, and it has a big influence on whether users will trust its credibility. Users are more likely to give an attractive application the benefit of the doubt and spend more time on it. Visual cues can be used to prioritize tasks and draw the eye to the correct functionality.

Invest in good, professional photography and illustrations, be clever with your color palette and typography, and respect the (white) space.

Value Proposition

A value proposition is a statement of how your product or service will benefit your users. Make your value proposition clear, specific, and visible. Reassure users that they are on the right website and that you will deliver on your promise.

CTA

The design of a call-to-action button has a big influence on its effectiveness. Your goal is to avoid doubts in the user’s mind and reduce friction:

• Make it look like a clickable button and give it a color and size that emphasizes it. Create white space around it.
• CTA buttons are for action. The text should be short and start with a verb. Use the words your users use and clearly state what users will get if they click on it.
• When designing for mobile devices, don’t simply resize the page. Make the CTA button big enough so that it can be easily tapped, and add more white space around it (proportionally).
• Avoid the “banner blindness” effect. Make sure that the CTA stands out, but still fits with the overall design of your website. Keep it simple.
• Avoid choice overload and give priority. If there are several actions you want to direct your users to, assign priorities. Make it clear which one is the most important in accordance with your business goals.
• What follows the CTA is equally important. Be consistent, keep things simple and avoid distractions.

Conclusion

Conversion rate optimization shouldn’t simply focus on isolated elements. It should instead adopt a comprehensive approach to achieve better results. User-centered design principles inform design decisions that are crucial to improve conversion rates.

The post User-Centered Design for Conversion Rate Optimization appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

I examine three case studies where flat design has increased conversion rates (and in some cases sales!) and how you can apply these to your next project.

Read to the end to get my free bonus resource: “25 conversion rate best practices to test in your next design.”

Minimalism Increases Conversions by 261%

Let’s take look at our first case study and see how minimalism can increase conversions.

Underwater Audio redesigned their website with a flat layout. They A/B tested a more complex version of their homepage against a stripped-back minimal version.

They made the design much simpler by removing some product information and images. They also removed social proof, something that is often thought to increase conversions, but in this instance, it did not.

The simpler version had a conversion rate increase of 261% or 3.6x. Customers liked the minimal approach more.

Content-First & Mobile-First

When approaching a design with a content-first approach, eg starting with all the copywriting before even thinking about sketching a wireframe. A few things happen.

Firstly you end up with a content inventory which helps you visualize the page hierarchically before getting bogged down with too many layout options. Secondly it helps you refine the content and copy into something concise.

By reducing your unique value proposition to it’s simplest form you make the user experience of the page much better. When it is clear what people are looking for and what they should do next, they enjoy the experience.

The user should be able to tell within a split second why they are on the page and how they can actually benefit. Benefit, not your features, it’s the benefits that sell.

Mobile-first design takes into account the huge number of people surfing the web from mobile devices. The website or app is optimized for the smallest screen first and then feature-enriched as the devices get larger and connections get faster.

Because good developers care about performance they care about what actually makes it onto the page. Resulting in the content again being streamlined and considered in much more depth.

As you can see the two go hand in hand and result in fast loading, concise, well thought out content that speaks to the users needs and wants.

Content-first and mobile-first says ‘We give a shit.’ Flat design says ‘How we give a shit.’

Elements are bigger, simpler, type is generally larger and padding and margins increase. On touch devices this means bigger touch points, easier navigation and, of course, an improved user experience.

The decision to strip back and simplify at every point, from content, coding, and designing, has a cascading effect of clarity and focus on the overall brand communication.

And remember the best converting pages have only one focus per page.

A Flat Button Increases Conversions by 35.81%

Many marketers argue that designers should use buttons with drop-shadows and gradients, so that they stand out more, especially when it comes to primary calls to action.

Sounds logical, what I’ve seen and what this next case study shows is that button design comes down to contrast, not shadows and gradients!

In this instance they were able to increase not only click-throughs, but sales by 35.81%, by simply changing to a flat designed button.

No gradient or text shadow. Simple flat design, with CONTRASTING white text and a simple border radius.

Another win for flat design.

Bad Flat Design Can Reduce Discoverability

However it’s not all good news for flat design.

The Windows 8 Metro style UI is a classic example of flat design gone wrong. With no clear separation of elements including clickable area’s or inputs, it is hard to know what to click. Even though the new look is more aesthetically pleasing it falls short because there is still a need to make objects look actionable; if not through details like shadows then in other ways.

The Nielson Norman Group conducted a study with 12 experienced PC users who struggled not only with the two environments the new OS offers (touch and classic, who wants to learn an interface twice!) but with knowing and clearly seeing where to click and interact.

The ‘Change PC settings’ is actually a button here… dodgy.

However given the right approach, even this level of minimalism can still be functional if usability is taken into account (sorry Microsoft). Take for example the beautifully crafted Take Your Pulse website below.

Even though many areas are not clearly defined as buttons or inputs, because of the subtle animations, the buttons still make themselves known and usable while the design speaks for itself.

Readability Increases Task Completion

Flat design has a focus on legibility and creating truly great reading experiences (yes I’m thinking of Medium.com too!). With so many elements stripped away you are often just left with the copy.

A study by MIT showed that when faced with cognitive tasks users that are shown easy to read typefaces performed much better than users that were shown hard to read ones.

In the first half, the testers were given the candle problem, and in the second half, they were given the remote associates test.

During the candle problem, 4 of the participants in the easy to read typography group successfully completed the test, while 0 participants in the hard to read typography group completed the task.

In the remote associates task, participants in the easy to read typography group completed 52% of the task at an average speed of 6395 ms, and the participants in the hard to read typography group completed 48% of the task at 6715 ms.

Here we can see readability and clarity, a core focus of flat design, improves UX and enables users to complete tasks easier and quicker.

Why Great Flat Design Is Hard

People like intuitive interfaces. Skeuomorphic design aims to be explicitly intuitive by relating tasks and representation to real world objects.

Raskin (1994) says designs are intuitive when they feel familiar. Intuition therefore comes from past experiences that we can draw on easily, reducing the learnability of an interface. Skeuomorphic designs aim to harness these familiarities to improve the user experience, so that the patterns you learned in the real world are mirrored in the interface.

However the real and digital world are not one and the same. A folder for instance on a computer can hold infinite numbers of files, have nested folders and all sorts of complicated intricacies, while the real world version cannot. Therefore this intuition can only be taken so far.

Spool (2005) says that intuition comes from bridging the gap between the users current knowledge and required knowledge of the system for effective use. He refers to this gap as a ‘Knowledge Gap.’

Flat design is new, and still developing it’s design patterns. This means that it is intrinsically harder than skeuomorphic design to get right.

However when we combine existing design patterns with flat design, taking into account what we know about content-first, mobile-first, typography and contrast, and ensuring that our minimalist approach does not remove elements and details necessary to maintain Spool’s knowledge gap, the result can be wildly successful designs.

Conclusion

Flat design is no trend, it’s here to stay, but only when paired with content and mobile-first approaches that present information in intuitive and familiar ways.

When our designs are flat, simple and content focused with good reading experiences, we can dramatically increase the likelihood of users completing desired tasks per page or view.

Users complete tasks, conversions go up and more often than not that means more revenue as well.

The post How Flat Design Increases Conversion Rates appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

Conversion rate optimization is one of those cases where your guts can lead you astray. Even best practices, as described here, occasionally fail to produce results. Today we’ll explore some examples of some counter-intuitive findings in CRO where best practices weren’t always ‘best’.

Can Encouraging Your Visitors NOT to Try Your Offer Increase Your Profits?

One company tried this approach (from the WhichTestWon archives). GetItFree added a “No thanks, I’m not interested” link on their landing page offer which, as expected, caused revenue to go down. But something quite unexpected did happen.People didn’t actually abandon the page, but continued to browse other offers. This resulted in an overall increase in revenue, since the secondary offers generated more than the primary one.

Some really cool conclusions can be drawn from this:

• If people are not interested in what you have to offer on your landing page, maybe you should provide a “substitution”, like GetItFree have done which would re-direct to your other offers.
• You should measure and track your visitors every step of the way. If this company didn’t do that, they wouldn’t have realized that their visitors were purchasing something else. If they just measured the conversion rate on that specific page, they would conclude “wow, people aren’t buying” and quit testing.

How Changing a Plural to a Single Word Produced far Better Conversion

One of conversion rates best practices is that if you want radically different results, you have to try radically different tests.

This wasn’t the case with Brad Geddes. He has graciously shared some surprising improvements from some simple changes. One change was really surprising: Changing a word from plural to singular in an ad produced a far, far better conversion rate.

Now, this is one of these things that doesn’t make any sense at all. Why would changing a simple word have such a profound impact?

The interesting thing about our minds is that they came come up with rationalizations once we present it with a conclusion. Maybe that word was the “word” people were looking for when searching for that result. Maybe they were perceiving the “singular” version to be less expensive. But be honest: Would you ever think of testing such a small change? That’s what these case studies are for, giving you unexpected ideas.

Can a Mobile Version of a Website be Worse For Mobile than a Desktop Version?

It doesn’t make sense. A desktop version providing worse user experience; users would probably have to scale horizontally etc. Yet, an experiment by Jeff Allen demonstrated that the desktop version actually outperformed the landing page which was mobile-specific by 4% (15% vs. 11% conversion rate).

Remember, best practices means, at best, “good ideas”. They are, after all, practices, and not proofs and the Holy Grail of conversion rate optimization. I can’t think of a better best practice than optimizing sites for a specific screen, yet, as you can see, this recommendation fails in some cases.

I think what often confuses people is that using best practices only is the wording. Best means there isn’t anything higher, right? Here’s another experiment to demonstrate that isn’t the case:

Privacy Policy Wording Can Have a Big Effect on Conversion

In this wonderful experiment, Michel Lykke tested the effect of privacy policy wording on conversion. Truth be told, there isn’t a single best practice on whether to or how to place privacy policy notifications on your conversion panel.

Now, pause for a moment. What type of wording do you think would produce higher results?

1. Wording focused on the prevention side, saying you will never send bad emails to your users?
2. Wording focused on the promotion side, saying that their information is safe with you?

It turned out that the first, prevention-focused message lowered the conversion rate, while the second one increased it.

As more and more experiments come out on this topic, I’m pretty sure there will be a “best practice” on how to do this. We’re smart, however, and realize that “best” practices doesn’t necessarily mean “best” when conversion rate practices come into place.

When Going off the Funnel has a Positive Impact

John Doherty has decided to follow one “best practice” which recommends eliminating any links that help people go “off the funnel”. For example, if you offer a web design service on your landing page, you don’t want to have a link where they can go to your personal blog and so on.

What he discovered, however, is that the bounce rate increased and conversion rate went down when they removed the navigation which led to other areas of the site.

The most likely reason was that people felt ‘trapped’. I personally am aware of that feeling when you’re on a site and can’t click on anything except that damn “Sign up” button. What if I wanted to find out more about the company? What if I wanted to see more of their products, who they are, what third party sources have to say about them?

Some Quick Tips for Testing

All of these examples have shown if there’s one thing that’s considered as ‘best‘, then it’s testing. Everyone’s customers are different and each and every situation is different, so it’s essential we test. Many people get testing wrong, however, and I wanted to focus on one particular thing to be aware of: Interpreting your results.

When you start testing with a tool, it’s good to do an A/A test. What’s that? It’s when you test your existing design against your existing design. This is a pretty good way to check if the tool itself doesn’t skew your results.

Another thing is the interpretation of the results themselves. The actual date when you do the testing is important, like avoiding major holidays or an industry-specific event. Or, say some major news outlet mentiones your market and all out of a sudden you have thousands of people wanting to find out more. So they go to Google or some other search engine, click on your site and buy out of curiosity. You see an increased conversion rate and determine that it’s due to the new landing page, but you would, of course, be wrong.

Conclusion

Pay careful attention to these three things if you want your test to be the best you’ll do.

Conversion rate principles are just good ideas to start from, but that’s all. If you’re hoping for results, you cannot, under any circumstances take them for granted. It would be a waste of money since testing tools are so abundant these days.

Hope you enjoyed this article!

The post Why Best Practices in Conversion Rate Optimization Aren’t Always Best appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.