Friction in your user experience will take a toll on every user interaction, so that even the most well-designed interfaces are difficult to use. On the other hand, a frictionless website experience creates user interactions that are seamless and unravel naturally.

Reducing your website’s friction can lead to more quality interactions without complications. Cleaning up your website will boost your conversions and encourage your users to stay on your site for longer, increasing the likelihood that they’ll take action. Here’s how to do it.

Identifying Friction on Your Website

Friction can come in many forms. Some people define friction as anything a user must overcome to use your site (examples include slow loading times or poor navigation). Others use the term friction to describe anything unneeded or excessive about an interface. Still others equate friction to “cognitive load,” or anything that requires a user to think but shouldn’t.

While these are all essentially versions of the same thing, we can generally identify symptoms of friction as:

• Distracting visuals
• An interface that’s visually cluttered
• Inconsistencies
• Unnecessary actions and decisions
• Functions that are confusing or less than intuitive

It’s also important to understand that in some cases, friction can actually be a good thing. This applies when friction design components slow a user down for some purpose. For example, you might incorporate complicated elements to capture data or keep a user from making a mistake with severe consequences (such as a user deleting their inbox or account permanently).

In other instances, friction may serve an educational purpose. Games are a good example. In games, we use friction to instill learning. With friction, we go from beginner to expert while still enjoying ourselves. It’s the virtual version of riding a bike – through trial and error, we learn something new. No one would like a game without friction, because it wouldn’t be fun.

For most websites, however, you’ll want to make your experience as frictionless as possible. Use these tried-and-true strategies to create weightless user experiences:

1. Start with a Macro Approach

In order to create a frictionless user experience, start with a full user journey in mind. This will help you determine where friction can be helpful to your development process, and when it will be cumbersome to your users.

Each step in a user’s journey presents an opportunity to impact the success of your overall product. Decide when friction is necessary to collect data or prevent mistakes, and remove all other obstacles that might negatively affect your response rate.

2. Minimize the Steps Needed to Take an Action

There’s a good chance you can reduce your friction by cutting out some steps in a user’s process. A famous example is the complex process of using an iCal function:

• Double click the date in the month view.
• Type the name of your event.
• Skip past Location.
• Skip past “all day” checkbox.
• Skip past month.
• Skip past day.
• Skip past year.
• Enter the hour of the event.
• Enter the minute of the event’s beginning.
• Enter AM or PM.

If you think that’s stressful to look at, you’re not alone. Now, contrast that to the user journey in the calendar feature of Backpack:

1. Double click the date of the event in your month view.
2. Type the name of the event and start time.

Compare these two apps together, and it’s easy to see which has less friction. In some cases, you may have a process that requires many steps. If this is the case, ensure each step is as effortless as possible. You may accomplish this by using checkboxes instead of requiring typing, or by consolidating steps whenever possible.

3. Know that “Less is More”

The ultimate goal of an interface is to make things as simple as possible. This forms the foundation of the best practices of web design. By removing the unnecessary, we can convey the essential.

Take care to prioritize the elements that meet user expectations, and get rid of anything that isn’t strictly necessary. A prime example of this in action is Google’s home page. There’s only one thing you can do, and there’s a lot of white space around it.

Don’t get too overloaded with features – you run the risk of making things complicated and harmful to the user (which is ultimately bad for your product).

4. Use Good Navigation Practices

One of the enemies of weightless experiences is poor navigation.

Unfortunately, a lot can go wrong when designing navigation, so it’s also a common cause of friction. There’s no “one-size fits all” approach to clear navigation, but there’s a source where you can learn what works for your site: your users.

User testing will help you understand how people access content in your site or app and categorize it. Use this information to guide and adjust your navigation practices so they meet the needs of your users.

5. Chunking is Your Friend

Any student of psychology will recall that George A. Miller posited that the average human mind could hold 7 objects in working memory, plus or minus 2.

This is where the practice of chunking stems from – it prevents cognitive overload. Organizing information into chunks works around the limitations of the human brain and increases memory retention.

We can apply this concept to web design by breaking up complex tasks into a serious of smaller, simpler ones. Apply this technique to input forms and other cumbersome tasks to reduce your bounce rate and improve user attention.

6. Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

It can be tempting to do something new or innovative to your website. As creative people, it’s natural for web designers to create something unique. However, users prefer to interact with familiar UI elements because they can use their knowledge from previous experiences.

Every time we force users to learn how something new works, we create more friction for them. Predictable UI patterns help users understand systems and complete tasks. Use pre-established UI and UX standards as much as possible. For example, a magnifying glass icon for search is readily recognizable for users and requires no extra thought.

7. Stay True to Your Brand

Lastly, put yourself in your user’s shoes for a minute. Would a visitor know what you’re about within 4-6 seconds of visiting your site? If not, you’re creating friction from the get go.

Your landing page or app homepage should readily address a solution, solve a problem for users, or help users achieve their goals. This concept applies to layout, typography, graphics, and more.

Conclusion

Your website or application should be as frictionless as possible. By removing unnecessary steps and cluttered design elements, you can help your users achieve their goals faster and reduce your website bounce rate.

Friction in a website ranges from the practical to the aesthetic. For example, slow load times or sub-par navigation can cause users to abandon your site, while a lack of white space or even the wrong font can create an increased cognitive load. This is why it’s important to consider the entire user journey when designing a product.

By following the steps outlined above, you can identify friction in your website and take steps to reduce it. By doing so, you’ll increase your conversions and become more successful at solving user problems.

The post How to Reduce Friction in Web Design appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

Thanks to modern developments, it’s easier than ever to capitalize on these design concepts to the benefit of the user. To leverage these concepts effectively, designers have to empathize with their users.

Empathy Drives UX

To create amazing UX, you definitely need a different approach. Unless you empathize with your users, it can be hard to understand what they are looking for when they land on your site. You need to be honest in guiding users while understanding their requirements.

With users in mind, look at their different perspectives and give them engaging solutions.

If you have trouble with this, step away for a moment – what would your mother feel like if she visited your site? How would that differ from your college-aged cousin? Whether you choose your mother or your cousin matters – who are you talking to with your site?

Get to know your audience a lot better by understanding their demographic. Figure out how their needs can be best addressed. Simultaneously, focus on result-driven solutions that will attract them.

Modern businesses have plenty of data at their fingertips, so it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out who your target demographic is.

That information can be used to engage customers, and customers – happy to see a brand they know is targeting them – will engage back.

To do this, brands need to make a solid first impression and establish value and reliability to consumers as quickly as possible.

If you’ve spent time getting to know them and implementing practices that makes their UX easier, they will feel it. Failing this, consumers will look elsewhere and see what competitors have to offer.

Most contemporary business strategies use data collected from their audiences and user bases to craft new tactics for generating brand interest and making connections to customers.

Data drives the modern world, and it’s critical for designers to leverage the insights gained from data to the benefit of their customers.

This aligns seamlessly with overall business goals: you analyze your data to see what customers are most interested in buying, which pieces of your content they enjoy the most, and how much time they spend engaging with you.

While companies leverage these data trends to provide better customer goods and services, these insights can also help web designers create better user experiences for their consumers online.

Intuitive Web Design

When you visit a website, you generally have a better overall experience if you can quickly and easily navigate around the site and find what you need.

When web designers imagine what their customers are going to want to see on their sites, they can devise more intuitive user experiences. Anticipate how a user will want to engage with the site and design it with functionality and usability in mind.

Intuitive design hinges on knowledge of your customers and understanding their goals and reasons for engaging with your brand. Customer profiling, or the concept behind defining your ideal customer types, is crucial to intuitive design.

Depending on the type of business you conduct, the typical customers you serve, and the overall culture and mission of a company, potential website designs can vary widely. The first step in effective, intuitive design is taking the time to understand your customers.

Design for Users, Not Search Engines

Once you know who you are targeting, you must establish value to them. This means proving your relevance in your market and showing customers what sets your brand apart from the competition.

This matters in web design, too. Countless companies use cookie-cutter templates for their websites, and stuff them full of keyword-laden, generic content to improve their search result rankings.

It’s imperative for modern web designers to avoid falling into the trap of designing for search engine bots rather than actual users.

Search engine giants like Google and Bing regularly update their search result algorithms. This practice aims to create a more level playing field for every brand vying for top search result page positions.

In turn, you must find new ways to make the search engine rules work in your brand’s favor.

In years past, getting the top spot in search result rankings depended on a web designers’ ability to make their sites easily readable for the bots that crawl through web pages to determine value.

Now, most search engines prioritize sites optimized for human browsing, penalizing sites that use exploitative tactics like keyword stuffing to reach the top spots.

Think about who will be visiting your site and what they will need to find, want to see, and which kinds of content they’ll enjoy. In many cases, this may require quite a bit of testing.

You’ll need to carefully define your customer profiles and determine where they spend their time online, which social media networks they use, how they prefer to consume content, and what types of content they tend to share.

Once you have an understanding of the type of customer you want to attract, it’s much easier to design a website built around providing that customer type with a stellar experience.

Personalization Takes Intuitive Design Deeper

While intuitive design aims to provide various general customer types with fantastic experiences, personalization takes this endeavor further and strives to generate functionality and content tailored to individual users’ preferences.

Many services like email clients, social media platforms, bill paying websites, and various eCommerce sites provide their users with a plethora of customization options. Users can tailor their experiences how they like, only seeing the content and information that most appeals to them.

Customization vs. Personalization

Customization can be enjoyable for many users, but ultimately personalization has a more profound effect.

Some of your users may not want to have to tailor their experiences themselves, or may not realize the option is available. They’ll assume the site’s apparent clumsiness is the fault of the designer, not their own, for failing to investigate how much they can customize on their own.

When you employ user data to craft personalized experiences, it conveys that you are paying attention to your users and want them to have a fantastic experience.

For example, in Android’s BBC News app, users can select their preferred news topics and access them quickly in the ‘My News’ section of the app.

Most modern consumers likely engage with highly personalized designs on a regular basis without realizing it.

As we all know that if you regularly sign into a Google account to read emails, browse the web, pay your bills, and make purchases, you probably agreed to allow Google to collect your user data as part of your end-user license agreement.

Google collects your data to determine your habits and which aspects of the web you find most appealing.

Eventually, you’ll notice the advertisements shown on various websites resonate with your interests, and may even directly relate to products and services you’ve purchased or researched in the past.

Personalized Data Creates the Best UX

Ultimately, customers must make peace with the fact that their user data is a valuable commodity to the businesses that advertise to them. By providing companies with this data, users will eventually start to have more meaningful and engaging experiences with those companies.

Data is a critical element for achieving this, but solid design matters just as much. If users aren’t enjoying the time they spend on your site, it doesn’t matter how much time and money you’ve invested in researching them.

Great user experiences in web design should be a marriage of artistry and functionality. We’re growing closer to a world in which every internet user has a unique, carefully tailored experience on the internet.

Web designers should strive to make this a reality on a smaller scale with their own websites. Intuitive and personalized design will invariably generate better.

The post How Empathy & Personalized Interfaces Can Help Improve UX appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

But what would happen if we broke free from tradition, and tried to live without those pesky habits and patterns?

Let’s dive into the experiment below and discover the results.

What are UX Design Patterns, Anyway?

Put simply, UX design patterns are predictable ways that designers come up with for users to interact with a website.

For a real-world example, consider the keyboard layout on your computer. It has a predictable layout and hasn’t changed in decades.

Web designers frequently ask their website visitors to take actions, that must be easy to accomplish. These tasks include signing up, logging in and out, submitting email addresses, and other important information.

If you’ve ever created a website before, you’ll know the pains of user experience issues from both the front facing and behind the scenes sides.

Since most Internet users tend to access multiple web and mobile applications on a daily basis, the fact that we have to constantly re-enter our information can become pretty tedious. This presents opportunities to implement UX design patterns to make things easier.

How is UI Impacted by UX?

There are many subtle differences between UI and UX:

User interface design is the part of the website that the user interacts with upon arriving at a website. User experience is the broad scope of the site itself, and the emotions and impressions that the user comes across upon looking at the site.

Generally speaking, UI deals with form and UX focuses on function. This means that UX patterns and UI patterns have some overlap, and sometimes the terms are used interchangeably. Some design philosophies consider UI to be an integral part of UX, so you could say that without good UI, you’ll never have good UX.

Some UI libraries contain ideas and solutions that address UX problems, such as user flows and empty states. Other UI libraries simply showcase ideas for creating engaging user interfaces.

Now that you’re up to speed on what UX and UI design patterns are, let’s take a look at the experiment: Testing the usefulness of these patterns.

The Experiment

A UX designer and cognitive scientist recently conducted a simple experiment to quantify the effects that disruptive patterns can have on the performance of tasks.

Intuitively, we feel like when we deviate from convention, it will have negative effects on productivity, reaction time and satisfaction. In this scenario, the main question is to understand if there’s any truth to this nagging feeling.

The experiment used a standard telephone keypad as a conventional pattern and a logical variation of the keypad as a disruptive pattern.

Standard keypads are found universally in telephones that don’t have rotary dials, and we all know how to operate one without much thought, effort or concentration.

However, the disruptive keypad requires cognitive functions. Users simply aren’t accustomed to using it, and there’s a learning curve in making the keypad work.

Most importantly, the disruptive keypad competes with the standard keypad. Our previous experience with using the standard keypad interferes with our ability to use the disruptive keypad with the same amount of accuracy and dexterity.

A web app was developed for the experiment, based on a jQuery keypad for the participants’ inputs, and MySQL to record the data. The experiment asked the participants of the experiment to dial a ten-digit phone number from memory twice: first using a standard keypad, then a second time using the disruptive keypad.

There was a three-second-countdown screen prior to showing the keypads. The web app measured and recorded the performance time for dialing the ten-digit number, as well as the number of occurrences the backspace button was tapped.

The Results

The experiment was conducted using Android and Google Chrome browsers, with roughly 150 subjects participating in the study. Some results were excluded, such as easy-to-type number patterns, such as “1-2-3-4-5”, as well as inordinate outliers that may have occurred due to technical issues. The final count was 130 valid pairs of inputs.

Based on the table above, the average time required to dial a ten-digit number on a disruptive keypad was 35 percent longer than on the standard keypad. The median time to enter the number was 54 percent longer on the disruptive keypad as compared with the standard.

It’s interesting to note that 28 of the number pairs didn’t match up correctly at all. I’d assume that the number was correctly entered on the standard keypad, but incorrectly entered, or even unnoticed, on the disruptive keypad.

Conclusion

There’s a high price to pay for not using UX patterns.

In the experiment, we learned that a non-standard design could slow down performance by up to 50 percent, and greatly increase the likelihood of mistakes. When the familiar conventions are broken, the results are significant issues in usability, function and efficiency.

There’s just not getting past the results that we tend to love patterns. Look for patterns that already exist and work well. We’re hard-wired to love those pesky patterns and the order they bring.

As the saying goes, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.

The post The Research-Backed Impact of Not Using UX Patterns appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

One of the best ways to grow a customer base is focusing on the user experience.

The processes for creating the best UX possible are going to vary from business to business, but one of the most important tools any company can use to improve UX is data. “Big data” is a term seen quite often in the marketing world, and describes the immeasurable amount of consumer and online user data companies collect. Modern business thrives on innovation and speed, and understanding your customers is one of the best methods for staying relevant and profitable longer.

Collecting data is vital, but so is what you do with it. Every company needs to invest in data collation and analysis tools to make the most of this wealth of information. User data analytics will tell you how long users stay on your website, when they abandon a shopping cart before confirming an order, and which pages draw the most attention.

It’s vital to leverage your data analytics to create a better UX for your website, and it’s possible to do that in several different ways.

Data Helps Build Better Consumer Profiles

When you decide to pursue better UX backed by data, one of the best jumping-off points is your target customer profiles. Almost any customer-focused company is going to have customer profiles, which are essentially avatars that represent the types of customers who will be attracted to a company.

Marketing departments and analysts use these profiles to determine the best ways to reach the customers most likely to find value with the company’s products or services. Data helps them create even more detailed profiles based on customer behaviors and changing trends.

Data gathered from your ecommerce site, social media pages, and other web-based content is going to provide a broad view of how customers and leads interact with your brand. While having a big picture is certainly valuable, it’s also vital your team knows how to extract the specific patterns that help shape your customer profiles. You’ll be able to break your customers and site users down into more well-defined groups.

Once you do so, ask a few questions and see what your data has for answers:

• How do your user groups perceive a specific product or service?
  When you examine how different types of customers interact with certain areas of your site and which products and services they buy, it can help you determine how best to reach the ones that don’t seem as interested. Every product isn’t going to appeal to every potential customer, but you will probably generate much more interest if you tweak your approach to wrest the attention of your lukewarm leads.
• What does your audience find most valuable about your products?
  Product reviews and other feedback from your customers are crucial. Consumers typically don’t pull any punches when it comes to telling companies what they think of their offerings. Spikes in social media activity after a new product launch will tell you where people are talking about your new items, what they think of them, and what needs improvement.
• How do your products and services solve your customer’s problems?
  Today’s marketplace demands a laser-like focus. Customers want very specific and effective solutions to very precise problems and pain points. Your data is going to show you what people find most valuable about your brand and how they think it fits into their lives.
• Where do you need to improve?
  Is a certain section of your site seeing very little traffic, or has a recent blog post generated much more negative feedback than usual? User traffic is going to show you what is getting your users’ attention, and what generates reactions. Of course, you want to create positive reactions and for your products to be well-received, but when you fall short of doing so, your data can show you why so you don’t make the same mistake twice.

When it comes to creating more robust customer profiles and user groups, you can also go so far as to ask your users these questions. You can even take the opportunity to ask pertinent questions about your UX and generate some flash revenue by rolling it into a promotion. Offer your site’s visitors a coupon for a future purchase in exchange for taking a short survey about their experiences on your site, or conduct a similar survey on social media.

Research is one of the best ways to find out where your online presence needs the most work. Once you’ve found your pain points and those of your customers, you need a process for making significant, meaningful changes that will result in better UX.

Marrying Design and Data

A company’s web designers and data analysts may work in the same department, but they have very different approaches to site construction. Design is typically focused on visual appeal and psychology while data science relies on quantitative analytics and engineering.

A fantastic, in-depth quantitative data set is typically visually unappealing, and intuitively functional, visually attractive interfaces usually don’t effectively communicate data.

Data-centric apps need to be intuitive to navigate and visually appealing. Web pages used to be mostly static and offered very few means of interaction, but this is no longer the case. Users have much more control over their online experiences with web pages, and UX designers can play a big part in making those experiences more meaningful and engaging.

Data scientists and analysts can help their teams understand the patterns that emerge from data, and UX designers need to take that information and use it as a tool to enhance UX. When data scientists take the time to present data in more visually intuitive ways, it’s easier to leverage it as a design element.

Build Data-Driven UX

Once you find the patterns and elements of your data that affect UX, you can create a more user-focused and data-driven UX that is going to generate much more meaningful user interactions with your brand.

Qualitative data showing things like how users behave on your site and why reveals the motivations behind the quantitative data you collect. That quantitative data includes who your users are, what problems they have, when they are most active, and where they look for answers to their problems.

The data you collect will shape much more detailed customer profiles and provide a clearer picture of your users’ behaviors. Once this data is firmly in hand and you know how it affects your users, you can start creating an actionable plan to create a more engaging and finely-honed UX.

Data-driven design is a continuous process. As your organization evolves and your customer base grows, the methods you use to engage with those users are going to need to change, as well.

The post Leveraging User Data for Improved UX appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

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.

Here are my top tips for harnessing its full potential.

1. Always have a goal

Google Analytics has continually evolved since it was initially released and now offers a mind-boggling amount of information about your site visitors. This is a double-edged sword, though, as one of the most common mistakes I see analysts making is getting lost in a labyrinth of data without any clear goal or direction.

Sure, you might find some interesting tidbits by just poking around through the various views and filters, but you need to be setting some study goals before diving in. I find it’s best to work with stakeholders before the study and make a list of all the questions you need answered.

Some examples might include:

• What content is trending right now?
• What are people doing on the homepage?
• Are people reading a specific piece of content?
• Do mobile users exhibit different kinds of behavior to desktop users?

The questions you’ll set out to answer will depend on the unique needs of your business, but having goals ensures that you stay productive in gathering meaningful, relevant data.

2. Make all insights actionable

For an audit to be productive, it’s important to provide actions along with data. The information we’re collecting in analytics isn’t going to be very useful if it doesn’t drive us to do something in response. Usually, an action comes naturally if solid goals are set at the beginning of the study, but it’s still important that we don’t just collect data for data’s sake.

An example, then. If we’re checking to see if a specific piece of content is being read and we find that it isn’t – what do we do with that insight?
In some cases, the improvements might be clear, such as rethinking the site structure, making copy tweaks, or promoting it more prominently on the homepage. Other times, further usability or AB testing may be required. Either way, these are all valid actions and ensure that we’re doing something productive with the data we’re collecting.

3. Prioritise your actions

When presenting the findings of a study to your stakeholders, make sure that the resulting actions are prioritized. In my experience, the prioritization of a study finding is mainly affected by two factors:

• Impact: Is it going to marginally improve content, or will it fix a huge usability issue that is costing us conversions?
• Effort: Is this a tiny content tweak that can be made in the CMS, or the introduction of a whole new site feature that needs building from scratch?

If you plot these actions on a hypothetical graph, you’d see the low-hanging fruit in one corner – this is the stuff you should be addressing right now. The opposite corner is still relevant but might be better considered as a longer term for the next larger-scale site redesign.

4. Compare historical trends (where relevant)

A lot of insights can be affected by the time that data was extracted. Google Analytics allows you to control your sample’s date range quite easily. This is pretty useful for benchmarking any data that we’re gathering, so take advantage of it whenever relevant.

Sometimes, stats can fluctuate over time, which might be due to an outside event. For example, the traffic or behaviors of a museum website could change during school holidays, giving a very different view of the data regarding demographics and content interests.

An excellent way to keep track of this is by using annotations. Analytics allows you to add annotations on a specific date to highlight where these events might be occurring and affecting our data. You’ll also want to include other internal factors that could cause data fluctuations, such as the site going down for maintenance or a sale taking place.

5. Assign a value to goals

Google Analytics allows admins to create on-site goals and assign a monetary value to their completion. To go back to our museum example, if we know that the average order value for tickets is around $20, we can infer that this is the value of a visitor completing our ticket booking form.

Therefore, goal values give a much clearer impression of how much money things like bounce and exit rates cost us. This is a great way to sell proposed actions to your stakeholders and give them a much better idea of the return on investment that they’ll get for implementing the proposed change.

6. Filter out your internal traffic

This is a really important setting in your analytics that often gets forgotten. Internal stakeholders who aren’t representative of your target audience can often be looking at the site for content curation or reference purposes and skewing your data. After all, who can resist the temptation to go and have a look at that new content they were so proud of writing?

You can prevent this by setting up a filter in Google Analytics to exclude all traffic from a specific IP address (namely your office or place of work). It’s important to note that these filters aren’t retroactive, so I’d recommend this is the first thing you look into when setting up a new Google Analytics install.

Also, remember that sometimes internal stakeholders can actually be a valid audience for your site. For example, a large corporation might communicate with existing employees through the .com website. In these cases, treating internal audiences as an advanced data segment might be better rather than excluding them from the analytics altogether.

7. Use advanced segments

Speaking of advanced segments, they’re incredibly useful and should be used to answer all of those tricky audience-specific questions you’ll be setting. An advanced segment is essentially a permanent audience filter that can be applied to any analytics view. They’re fantastic for directly comparing the habits of two different user groups, and you can be as specific as you need to be when creating them.

In the example below, I’ve created an advanced segment for all elderly visitors who have made purchases using older versions of Internet Explorer.

Obviously, it’s rarely necessary to be that specific in your segmentation, but it really demonstrates how complex Google Analytics has become. Just remember to always ask questions, and don’t create segments unless they’re going to provide those answers.

8. Leverage search analytics

Site search analytics are an extremely interesting and often overlooked way to see exactly what people are looking for on your site. They might seem like a no-brainer, but I’d say about 90% of the analytics installs I’ve looked at didn’t have this set up – and it only takes about 30 seconds!

Search analytics are especially useful since they can reveal what users might be after you haven’t accommodated them in your navigation or on your homepage. It might also bring to light that your visitors are using words or terms different from those you might expect, prompting changes to your navigation.

This is usually one of the first things I look at when doing a site audit, as it’s a very quick way to identify deficiencies in the site navigation or gaps in content.

9. Use dashboards for frequent reports

A lot of our audits might need to be repeated regularly. For example, it might be useful to provide stakeholders with a breakdown of top content or mobile device usage that is updated every month. The concept of an analytics dashboard isn’t anything new, but Google has made this extremely easy with the recent introduction of in-built dashboards in Google Analytics. We no longer have to spend time mucking around with the API and an excel spreadsheet, our useful dashboards can now be made in the application itself.

As per the previous advice in this post, try to structure your dashboards around answering questions instead of just providing reams of data. Check out this article from Econsultancy for some great examples of dashboards.

10. Avoid analysis paralysis

This is a simple one, but it’s probably the most important point of all.

Web analytics tools have provided us with a fantastic opportunity to get real user insights quickly and easily. But data without action isn’t any good to anyone. Always be actioning your insights, otherwise there isn’t much point gathering them in the first place.

The post 10 Google Analytics Tips for UX Research appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

Something intangible like “user experience” (UX), is hard to put in hard terms and facts that a developer or designer can use. The concept is nice, but how is it reflected in more concrete aspects of web and blog design?

The answer lies in certain SEO ranking factors and practices that contribute to the overall user experience. By targeting these, we can better understand the how’s and why’s of the user experience in a way that allows us to take actionable steps when needed.

3 Vital UX Factors That Affect Rankings

This approach allows web developers and designers the chance to see a vague concept like “user experience” through the lens of more concrete SEO concepts and how these factors and practices can be used to positively affect and alter the UX of your website.

The user experience is something Google is always looking to improve. A brief glimpse into Google’s User Experience Lab shows just how dedicated the company is to understanding how and why a positive experience is achieved so they can better analyze and reward that outcome in the search rankings.

Here are three ways you can analyze and improve your site’s UX today:

1. Page Loading Speed

The UX begins when the user clicks on your website. If they have to wait ten seconds or more for your site to load, they will move on. Site speed has long been a factor in SEO rankings, but it also provides users with a first impression of your site.

The bottom line is that longer load times directly affect your conversions and ultimately your bottom line as a result.According to a study done by Kissmetrics, every second past the ideal loading time of three seconds costs you a seven percent reduction in sales!

If you see a rise in your bounce rate or a decrease in your page views, it could be that your site is loading slowly. To check it, utilize Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to see if your website loads fast on all devices, and if not, how to fix it.

If you suspect that your load times are too high, here are some quick tips to get them down to where you need them:

• Optimize your site’s database by adding an index.
• If you’re on WordPress, use a caching plugin like W3 Total Cache.
• If you’re running an eCommerce store, leverage Shopify’s buy now button.
• Make sure your images are optimized by running them through a tool likeOptimizilla.

A great example is my friend Matt’s website, On Blast Blog. His homepage loads incredibly fast, but still has high-quality images. When building his site, he smartly compressed his images and leveraged a strong page cache.

2. Intuitive Site Organization

Part of what defines a high-quality UX is how quickly and easily visitors can access various parts of your site. The best way to ensure is this is through the use of effectively designed menus and submenus. Start with anywhere from four to six main categories, and then create a contact page and an “About Us” page so people can easily reach you or get to know your brand.

As a rule of thumb, make sure it doesn’t take more than two clicks for visitors to find anything on your site. One click for the category, and one for the post or page. Anything more and you risk overcomplicating the process.

In addition to these things, another great way to improve the UX on your site is to include internal links to other pages. This allows visitors to pursue topics or find another post quickly and easily. This type of convenience is great for your visitors, and it benefits your SEO as well.

Making this change will net you lower bounce rates, increased conversions, and high click-through rates.

Here are some actionable steps to take regarding site organization:

• Break down the path between your homepage and your content into categories (no more than two clicks to reach any piece of content).
• Include internal links to other pieces in your posts (keep it relevant).
• Provide access to an “About Us” page, and a “Contact Us” page.

3. Mobile Responsiveness

In April of 2015, Google released a new algorithm update that focused on sites that were mobile responsive. This term refers to a website’s ability to display itself in a readable format on both a desktop and a mobile device. If it looks great on one, but looks poor on another, then Google’s update tanked their search rankings.

Why the big change? Well, as we already know Google is all about a high-quality UX. Since most people are now browsing the web on mobile devices, this kind of check was logical. People should be able to have the same level of quality on their mobile devices, doubly so if they use them primarily.

Google’s update, when it was released, was referred to by many names including mobilegeddon, mobilepocalypse, or just mopocalypse. People were scared because without being mobile-responsive, their websites would fall through the rankings like a keyword stuffed turkey on thanksgiving.

Thankfully, Google released aMobile-Friendly Test tool to help you check and see if your website fits their standards. If you come back with a negative, don’t give up. There are several ways to make your site mobile friendly:

• If you’re using WordPress, there are a variety of mobile-ready responsive themes to choose from. Easy fix!
• For web developers, the use of CSS3 Media Queries will allow you to code the maximum width of the website on mobile devices.

Final Thoughts

SEO ranking factors and analytics like page views, bounce rate, and others all point towards the user experience. By improving the UX, you ultimately improve your SEO in the process. Focus on these major factors and you’ll see your website’s statistics improve to the point where you want them to be.

Thanks for reading and be sure to share your tips for maximizing the user experience in the comments below!

The post UX Factors That Affect Your Website’s SEO Rankings appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

But did you ever ask yourself how others know it?

Do you know what grabs most attention on your website according to its users? Do you know which part makes your visitors trust you? Do you know where they click to find the information they’re looking for?

If the answer is no, then you are in trouble. After all, it is impossible to improve your website and make it open and attractive for others if you have no idea how people perceive it. But the solution for this problem is basically one click away. It is an affordable and quick method to evaluate data about your users’ experience: I hereby present you screenshot click testing.

It is very simple to understand: users’ clicks on the website are being recorded, and later they are presented as a convenient heat map, available for further analysis. Based on the data you can basically check what works, and what fails.

The sooner you do the tests, the better – you can start optimizing your website right away. Screenshot click testing is an ideal solution to evaluate concepts at an early stage, after all you do not need to have a working website to verify your ideas. You can test prototypes, wireframes or even rough paper sketches.

The sketch and the wireframe from Balsamiq.

First of All: Prepare Yourself

Have a clear understanding of what you what to accomplish. You need to put yourself in a potential visitor’s shoes and think about why they visit your page. Do they look for information? Do they want to see the potential benefits of using your product? What are they looking for? These are the basic questions you need to find an answer for.

The following step is to think about your goals from a business perspective. You want to create particular quick user paths to give your potential customers what they look for as fast as possible, leaving customers satisfied with their decisions. You also want to maximize conversion rate at the same time.

According to a study by WebUsability, you should “work hard to ensure that the first click is a correct click”. They found a direct correlation between the success rate and the item the visitors clicked first. 36% of the users abandoned tasks if they chose the wrong item. What does that mean for your business? Well, if your potential customer doesn’t find the info they are looking for fast, they will leave and your business suffers.

Form Your Hypothesis

Once you are prepared, you need to form a list of hypotheses about your website. You, as an owner or creator, have a very good idea of your webpages inner workings because you’ve invested time and money to make it perfect. By forming a hypothesis you can narrow down the possible issues that you need to cover. Your hypothesis can be in a form of a short statement such as:

• Important information is easy to find for the user
• It’s clear for the visitor where should they click to buy the products
• The calls to actions are visible and direct

These are just examples to get you on the right track of thinking about hypotheses. After forming them it’s high time for you to test if your potential clients think the same (and chances are they don’t!)

Not all hypotheses are easy to test.

Screenshot Testing Tasks – Short and Snappy

Once you have the theories formed, you have to think about possible tasks for participants of your study. Your key goal is to make them short, snappy and to the point. No long descriptions. Be like Hemingway.

If you need to provide some background, put your user in a hypothetical situation: “You are waiting for your pizza, but it is taking too much time. Where would you click to check how long it takes for your order to arrive?” Don’t overdo it, though. Try to achieve the perfect balance between being informative, yet concise. If you need inspiration, here are some tasks which proved to be very effective over the years:

• Click on the first thing you noticed on this page
• Click on the element that you like the most
• Click on the most important element of this page
• Click on the element that you would remove from this page
• Where would you click to do X?

If you need more, check out a sample list here.

UsabilityHub’s quick study.

Choose Your Weapon

The next step in the process is to choose the right screenshot testing tool. You are lucky, because there are many useful solutions available on the market, and they will surely make your testing easier.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, as there are many other available tools – do your research and find out which one of them suits your needs best.

Once you’ve chosen your tool, it would be good to know how they work. Basically, the logic behind the tools and their steps is pretty clear:

• Upload the screenshots
• Set up tasks (that is why the list of tasks comes in handy, as you can simply start setting them up instead of figuring them out at this stage)
• Share a link to your test
• Analyze the full online report once you are satisfied with the number of answers

What you should focus on during the search for your perfect tool is the report part – that’s where the meat is. If you are new to the testing world, you should look for a tool which provides you not only with raw data but also with a coherent visualization to give you better understanding of how people handle the tasks.

A sample visualization from Optimal Workshop:

So much data you could go bananas.

You should brace yourself for the fact that each test will most probably reveal issues you didn’t expect. There is a possibility that you’ll learn that your hypotheses are true or that your assumptions and expectations are totally different from the ones your website visitors have. And that is completely normal – this is why tests are conducted, so you can learn about the users’ behavior, and you can decide what to do in order to improve the website.

Testing is not hard, but actual data interpretation and finding out what to do is. Your solutions could be ineffective, and will require even more testing. That is completely fine. You want to achieve the perfect design and solve the problems. You can be lucky and nail it at the first test or you can struggle for a while until you have that a-ha moment – you never know. But don’t worry, as you can ask specialists for help with interpreting the results. So, test away – the browser window is the limit.

Screenshot Click Testing – Wrap Up

1. Form hypotheses about your website
2. Create a list of short task for your users based on your hypotheses
3. Choose a right tool
4. Start testing:
   • Measure how long it takes to complete the task
   • Measure how many users finished the task
   • Ask how difficult or easy it was for the user to complete the task
   • Ask how confident the users felt when they were completing the task
5. Draw conclusions from the results and adjust your design accordingly
6. Test again!

…and finally…

See how click tests look in real time and help SpeckyBoy Design Magazine!

Now that you are acquainted with the idea of Screenshot Click Testing, it is time for you to see it for yourself. We’ve set up a short test on SpeckyBoy Design Magazine for you to try. Take part in it and see how it works, and how it feels to be a tested user! Start the test.

If you want the see how the results look like, click here.

The post Tips, Tricks and Tools of Screenshot Click Testing appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.