Conversion Rate Optimization Review — Week 10
So this past week I was actually helping out my sister with Google Analytics and actually going through Conversion Rate Optimization with her
Best practices do have their place: as starting points.
When doubting how to solve a particular design issue, draw from the experience of others’ use of best practices. Use this experience as input to your design hypotheses. Beyond that, the rest of your design choices should be driven by data.
It’s critical to understand that there is no single best layout for a product page, checkout page, etc. There are an infinite number of ways to execute a checkout page, all following the exact same principles.
There’s room for interpretation and experimentation when implementing any best practice, and you’ll always need a great designer to make the implementation a success. Amateur designers can screw up even the best layouts.
Then I went through the product pages and cart pages with her as I am actually in the middle of designing a website
What should a cart addition look like?
When people add something to the cart on your product pages, what should happen?
Most importantly: it should be stupidly obvious that they added something to the cart. Clear confirmation. It’s ridiculous how many sites screw this up either by not displaying a proper confirmation or showing a tiny animation, or small confirmation text that’s hard to notice.
The product is in the cart, now what?
There are 2 main approaches here.
- Show ‘cart add’ confirmation and remain on the same page. Pros: people didn’t ask to move to another page, so there are no surprises and thus good experiences. They might also consider adding more items to the cart before checking out. Cons: they already have the product they’re now staring at in the cart. It would be way more useful to you if they’d look at something else they might want to buy!
- Transfer the user onto the cart page. The advantage here is that you’re taking them one step closer to making a payment. This is also a great opportunity to upsell. Cons: you might be losing out on “items per cart”.
and strategy, and you definitely will want to test this.
Metrics to keep in mind here:
- Average transaction value
- Average quantity per transaction
We don’t want to just increase the number of transactions, but also the amount spent for each transaction.
Displaying cart contents well
Two key principles for displaying cart contents are clarity and control
Clarity: It’s easy and obvious to understand what’s in the cart and the total cost, including shipping and taxes. Surprise costs down the line make people abandon carts.
Control: It’s easy to make changes (update quantity, remove products, edit shipping information).
Get the visual hierarchy right
The number one thing in the visual hierarchy should be the “Continue to checkout” button (test different CTAs), and you should have two of them: one above and one below the cart.
It’s also a good idea to show all possible payment options in the cart already. While most people prefer to pay with a credit card, offering 1–2 alternative payment methods (PayPal, Amazon etc.) is a good idea and has shown to help conversions along. Too many choices are hurtful, though.
Don’t make coupons prominent
When people see a “Enter coupon code here” field, they feel less special. “How come I don’t have one?” Many will go to Google to find one. Many will never return. Leaving the site in search for coupons is a common reason for shopping cart abandonment.
Remind them about shipping and security
When will they get the goods? How much is the shipping, is it free? Will the transaction be secure? Remind people.
Persistent cart
When people add something to the cart, don’t let the cart contents expire. Have people come back next week or next month and continue where they left off!
A few best practices to help you create a better checkout page:
1. Leave credit card info for last
Have people complete shipping information before they get to billing. The ideas behind this best practice are commitment and consistency. Once people start doing something, they feel compelled to finish.
It’s also easier to make small commitments — like name, email, and address — first. The big stuff — credit card information — comes last. You wouldn’t get married before a first date, would you?
Another advantage of saving payment information for last: Plenty of information like address and name have already been entered and can be suggested for these same fields, making the form a bit easier to complete.
2. Design a payment form that looks like an actual credit card
3. Make it look secure
Security is a serious concern for most online shoppers. Of course you should make payments secure by using SSL. But it won’t do much good unless you tell people about it.
4. Store credit cards in your system
Sure, you have to deal with PCI compliance and there’s the risk of getting hacked, but you will make so much more money from returning users. When people don’t need to enter their billing info anymore, buying becomes a 1-click move.
Design has a huge impact on your conversions, that’s no surprise. It can be the cornerstone of all your marketing, your key differentiator. Several companies outcompete their competition solely because they have a superior user experience.
Two facts about humans:
- We’re visual: most of what we process is through our eyes.
- We’re quick to judge.
If your design sucks, people will instantly trust you less. You’re already facing an uphill battle within a matter of milliseconds.
In my experience with testing design, I’ve seen great design convert better than amateur design time after time. Whoever says “bad design converts better” (yes, there are some of these people) doesn’t really know what they’re talking about.
Of course, great design and bad design can be subjective. Also, when I talk about great design some people immediately assume I’m talking about sliders and animations and what not. That’s not what great design, that’s trend.
It’s difficult to talk about design in objective terms. Everyone has opinions and biases.
Here are some critical, objective, aspects of design that you need to know about:
1. People judge websites in less than 50 milliseconds
People make snap judgments. It takes only 1/10th of a second to form a first impression about a person, and websites are no different. It takes about 50 milliseconds (that’s 0.05 seconds) for users to form an opinion about your website, ultimately determining whether they like your site or not, aka whether they’ll stay or leave.
This number comes from specific studies. In the first study, participants twice rated the visual appeal of web homepages presented for 500 ms each. In a follow-up study they reduced the exposure time to 50 ms. Throughout, visual appeal ratings were highly correlated from one phase to the next as were the correlations between the 50 ms and 500 ms conditions. Thus, visual appeal can be assessed within 50 ms, suggesting that web designers have about 50 ms to make a good first impression.
Google also confirmed the 50 ms number in their own research. In fact, according to their study some opinions develop even within 17 ms (though the effect was less pronounced on some design factors).
This first impression depends on many factors: structure, colors, spacing, symmetry, amount of text, fonts, and more.
2. First impressions are 94% design related
Missouri University of Science & Technology conducted an eye-tracking study, examining which aspects of a website have the strongest influence on first impressions.
The study showed clearly that the look and feel of the website is the main driver of first impressions.
Visual design elements took the cake. Design elements with the biggest influence on first impressions included the logo, main images, colors, and the navigation menu. Unfavorable opinions of these elements led to unfavorable opinions of the entire site.
Similar results were found in research for Consumer WebWatch, conducted by Stanford University credibility experts. They found that what people say about how they evaluate trust of a website and how they really do it are two different things.
The data also revealed that the average consumer paid far more attention to the superficial aspects of a site, such as visual cues, than to its content. For example, nearly half of all consumers (or 46.1%) in the study assessed the credibility of sites based in part on the appeal of the overall visual design of a site, including layout, typography, font size and color schemes.
Key takeaway: Great design gets people to trust you and to stick around. Poor design creates mistrust and makes people leave.
3. Inspiration drives better first impressions
A study looking into the role of first impressions in tourism websites found that inspiration-related elements had the greatest impact on first-impression formation. This suggests that visually appealing stimuli are an important tool for getting people to stay longer on the site, thus converting more visitors into buyers.
Usability was the second-most significant driver of first impression formation, followed by credibility.
All in all, this tells us that travelers want to get inspired about a destination (inspiring imagery), they don’t want to waste mental energy on figuring stuff out (usability — don’t make me think) and they want to be sure this travel provider is legit (credibility).
Key takeaway: Using larger than life photography can really help. I’ve personally seen lots of gains from using large background photos, and this trend was also noticed by WhichTestWon crew.
4. Two key ingredients of web design people like: simplicity and prototypicality
In a study by Google in August of 2012, researchers found that “visually complex” websites are consistently rated as less beautiful than their simpler counterparts. Moreover, “highly prototypical” sites — those with layouts commonly associated with sites of its category — with simple visual design rated as the most beautiful across the board.
In other words, the study found the simpler and more familiar the design, the better.
So my whole week was spent on basically equipping her with the tools and techniques to get started
Thanks for reading,
Rashad
