UX for conversion: Understand your user
A few months ago I was invited to write a chapter for a Brazilian book about Digital Marketing focused on High Performance. Professionals from different fields would write about different topics. My mission was to write about how UX can help improve conversion. The book was launched a few weeks ago and because of it, I was invited to talk about this topic to Brazilian entrepreneurs in an online conference. And I would like to share with you a few tips and tools from it, hoping it can help you to improve your conversion.
The U$300 million button
You might have already heard about the $300 million button. A small adjustment suggested by UX specialist Jared Spool to a major e-commerce website, in 2009, increased the revenue of a major e-commerce website in 45%, which represented that time an amount of about $300 million.
Spool in an article published in 2009 for the UserTesting website:
"It’s hard to imagine a form that could be simpler: two fields (email and password), two buttons (Login and Register), and one link (Forgot Password). Yet, it turns out this form was preventing customers from purchasing products from a major e-commerce site, to the tune of $300,000,000 a year. What was even worse: the designers of the site had no clue there was even a problem,"
After conducting Usability Tests, Spool and his team realised that the issue was not exactly about the design itself or the form's layout, but what it represented to the users. New customers were suspicious of the registration form. For them, this was a way for the site to increase their e-mail marketing basis. A great number of the returning customers, didn't remember their login/password. They either gave up purchasing or ended up creating a new account. Which could explain the number of 45% of users with multiple accounts on theirs user basis.
The suggested solution was simple: taking away the "Register" button and, in its place, putting a "Continue" button with a simple message: "You do not need to create an account to make purchases on our site. Simply click Continue to proceed to checkout. To make your future purchases even faster, you can create an account during checkout".
"The results: The number of customers purchasing went up by 45%. The extra purchases resulted in an extra $15 million the first month. For the first year, the site saw an additional $300,000,000", said Spool in conclusion.
Since then the "$300 million button" has been been one of the best illustrative cases to convince sceptical clients that UX can definitely improve conversion.
UX for conversion
Designers around the world have been using UX techniques to drive the user to a specific place on their websites or apps, by facilitating their steps until there. But as UX specialist Jennifer Winter reminded us in her article for the User Testing Blog, "you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink". Her analogy is interesting to remind us what exactly conversion means:
"Conversion isn’t about making someone do something, it’s about providing an environment that makes doing that thing irresistible."
According to her, we UX Designers should think about what would be the horse’s perspective.
"Imagine you’re a horse, and there’s a big trough of water nearby. What would drive your decision to go check it out? What would convince you there was something better two farms down the road? If we don’t pay enough attention to the entire experience a user has when interacting with a company, we can’t motivate them to the action we want."
Different aspects should be considered to create a great experience for the users which will drive them to a conversion. To help us with this mission, reminds Jenifer, we have the greatPeter Morville's UX honeycomb, which illustrates the facets of user experience:
Looking at this diagram made by Mr Morville, drives us to think of other horse's questions that we should be able to answer:
- Can he find the water?
- Does he need it, or even want it?
- Can he physically get to the water?
To help us answer those questions and understand and make better use of Morville's diagram, we can use a few UX techniques. Check out the full post on FluidUI Blog.