MiniDegree Review CXL 8

Because all processes are connected, and I mean, all of them: Research, Strategy, Ideas, UX & UI Design, Experiments, Testings, Implementation, Investment, Communication, Branding and so on, we need to know more information about our target and our goal is to understand why they decided to not buy our product or service or whatever it 's that we are trying to sell. 

For that, we will run a test and start to make questions and focus on the “why”. The main thing we want to learn is whether there’s any friction in the product selection or buying process – something that stops them or slows them down when they want to give us money. We need to observe: How well people understand what the site is about? Which path will they go down once on the site? How easy is it for them to find a product (a specific product and browsing, both) How easy is it to compare and choose a product (if the website sells many) Will they encounter any issues during the checkout / signup process?

What do we ask them? Well, we should start with a mindset: Before we give the task, state the mindset they should be in: one that reflects the mindset of the bulk of our visitors. So these are some tasks that we need to customize to our particular business.

• What is this website about as far as you can tell? This is about the clarity of the value proposition. If they don’t understand (or take a long time), we have a problem.
• Shop around for a dress you like. This type of question gives them free space to go about the task. Evaluate how they do it, if there are any tedious repetitive tasks that could be optimized, any difficulty they experience. Is it easy to find a product they like? What’s missing?
• Find a pair of green pants in size 36, under $50. Give some highly specific tasks to see whether people are able to use filters, search, and other features. We can apply the same concept for our own business and products.
• Find 3 suitable air purifiers. Evaluate them and “pick the best one for you”. How do users compare items? How hard is it to compare items? Do users find important product information easily?
• Find the product Canon EOS 5D Mark II 21.1MP. How do they go about finding it? Via search, product categories, etc? Any challenges?
• Start and complete the checkout process. Is there any friction in the checkout process? Users should go through the entire checkout process – no stopping at the payment screen. It’s a critical page and we need to observe if there’s any friction.
• We can provide testers with dummy credit card numbers, 100% off coupons ,or use real credit cards if there’s no other option and refund later.

So, if we see this through a brief reflection we should ask: What was your overall experience like? Their perception is a reflection of their reality. What was the best part of the experience?” Understand what they liked. What was the worst part, what would you change?” Insights into how they’d like to buy. 

Nevertheless, what should we be aware of? Only ask questions we can learn from. That's why we should avoid yes/no questions like “do you like it?”, the goal is to get insights.

Because for us these testers are not buyers. When people are testing our site, they know full well that they are testing it. They’re not in the same mindset as actual visitors who have to spend actual money. So we have to take everything you hear with a grain of salt.

This kind of user tests are usually done with 5 to 10 people. We can’t make any final conclusions about our site, but we will get additional ideas and identify more scientific questions that will make good tests. We always have to conduct actual split testing to validate the hypotheses.Then, please don’t jump into conclusions. It's not about who is right or not or who has the best knowledge. We don't care about that. Put egos outside the table! But, it's about people and their behavior. People are different and unique in their own way. It’s essential to keep that mind when doing user testing – just because one or two participants had trouble with something doesn’t mean that we should jump into changing everything.

We should make changes only when there is a clear trend among testers, and put their challenges in context (who these people were, skill level etc).

Can we record our testing sessions? Yes mate! There is so much we can write down at any one time, so having a recording of the session is a godsend.

And obviously, we need to be open-minded. We should not go into user testing expecting a specific outcome, and only looking for evidence that supports our hypothesis. Try to keep an open mind, and listen to your users’ feedback. See what the results say, do your best to learn from them, and your site will be that much better for it. That's why feedback is everything to get progress. We need feedback from our testings, our meetings, our workflow, our business relationships. I mean, everything that we could manage better, we should receive feedback. And if we don't receive any of them, what are we waiting for to ask? We need to improve ourselves and our business. That's also growth marketing. If we work blinded how can we improve and develop our skills? Something to reflex. So, please welcome ROAR: Risk, Optimization, Automation, Re-Think.

Something important DATA: If we have below 1,000 conversions per month, don't do A/B testing. And conversion can be like transaction, leads, clicks, whatever goal we're trying to optimize, so it doesn't really have to be final transactions. If we have 1,000 conversions, our challenger needs to beat the control, in reality with 15 percent. Our challenger needs to make 115 conversions. A 15 percent uplift to be able to be recognized as a winner in A/B tests.

If it's above four weeks like 25 weeks,that's way too long this is a lean approach. We want to optimize stuff and if we need 25 weeks to be able to detect a winner, the uplift is probably not giving us enough money to have an uplift compared to the cost we were making running this A/B test. This is some tough info, but we can use this to compare our percentage of conversions and revenue.