Conversion & User Research inc. Rigorous User Personas Review
Part 7 of 12 of the Conversion Optimisation series
This is the seventh in a series of twelve blog posts about conversion optimisation, as I review the minidegree of the same name by CXL Institute.
This instalment 7 of 12 is all about Google Tag Manager and Auditing GA!
Look out! 👀 for these:
🔑🥡 = Key takeaways
…your opinions don’t matter
They don’t, it’s true (your personal preferences and bias get in the way)! Would you rather have a doctor operate on you based on opinion or careful examination and tests?
Every optimisation project must start with Conversion Research
Conversion Research is where you diagnose a website to figure out where and how it’s leaking money, so that you can start plugging the holes.
What Conversion Research (CR) consists of
Categorised into 3 parts:
Experience based assessment
Site walkthroughs
Heuristic analysis
Usability analysis
Qualitative research
Online surveys with recent customers
On-site polls
Phone interviews
Live chat transcripts
Customer support insight
User testing
Quantitative research
Web analytics analysis (e.g. Google Analytics and other quantified data tools like Adobe Analytics, KISSMetrics, MixPanel, Heap Analytics)
Mouse tracking analysis
🔑🥡 Most businesses fail because they build something that no one wants.
“There are no facts inside your building, so get outside”
CR helps once you have traffic, but before you have that you must talk to people and focus on Customer Development.
Check out Steve Blank, the father of CD.
ResarchXL Model
6 Step Framework that assess:
Heuristic Analysis to assess user experience
Digital Analysis to identify problem areas
Technical Analysis to identify functional problems
Qualitative Research to draw insights
Step 1: Heuristic Analysis
An experience-based assessment of your website.
4 features to consider to when auditing a website for experience:
Clarity
Friction
Anxiety
Distraction
Step 2: Technical Analysis
A technical assessment of your website.
Cross Browser Testing
Cross Device Testing
Site Speed Analysis
Step 3: Digital Analytics
Learn to set up measurements that will provide insights which will instruct you which areas you should spend the majority of your time optimising.
Identify Drop-off Points
Correlate Behaviours with Outcomes
Fix Measurements & Verify Data
Step 4: Qualitative Research
By collecting qualitative data you can more personally understand your users’ experience and pinpoint areas of friction to work on.
Surveys
On-site polls
Follow-up surveys
User Testing (next step)
Step 5: User testing
Recruit people who represent your actual target audience. Ideally, your actual target audience, but anybody's better than nobody, so your mom and your grandma also matter.
Have these people use your website and go through your it.
Give them certain tasks and see how they go about it:
Broad task: “It's your birthday coming up, find something you like in this storeand see how they go about it.”
Very specific task: “You need to find a pair of dark jeans in size 34 under 50 quid.”
While they use the site, they talk out loud sharing their thoughts, but, more important observe what they do. What people say and do might not overlap, so pay more attention to what people do.
Step 6: Mouse Tracking Analysis
Mouse tracking can provide valuable insights into viewing and information processing patterns.
When people browse a site, you can track where users are clicking, their scrolling behaviour, and their tapping behaviour on a mobile phone.
You can also track where they hover with their mouse. However, this is not very useful. Where people look and where they hover the mouse is not very correlated. Imagine you're reading an article. Do you move your mouse cursor along as you read? Probably not.
Site Walkthroughs
Questions we’re trying to answer here:
Does the site work with every major browser?
Does the site work with every device?
What’s the user experience like with every device?
🔑🥡 Desktop only journeys often fail mobile and tablets. Just because the site works well on your laptop, doesn’t much for mobile devices.
Heuristic Analysis
🔑🥡 There’s no such thing as an objective point of view.
Biases to be aware of:
Bias blind spot – the tendency to see oneself as less biased than other people, or to be able to identify more cognitive biases in others than in oneself.
Confirmation bias: a tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs.
Evaluating a site is a process
There’s no one best process or methodology. Here are some established frameworks that can be used as a starting point:
The 7 Levels of Conversion by Web Arts
Web Arts uses 7 levels to assess each page:
Relevance. Does my perception fit my expectations?
Trust. Can I trust this provider?
Orientation. Where should I click? What do I have to do?
Stimulance. Why should I do it right here and right now?
Security. Is it secure here? What if…?
Convenience. How complicated will it be?
Confirmation. Did I do the right thing?
Here’s a more detailed slide deck: https://cxl.com/institute/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/7-Levels-of-Conversion-Framework-english.pdf
Invesp Conversion Framework
Build buyer personas and focus on a few select personas when designing your layout, writing copy etc.
Build user confidence, make them trust you.
Engagement. Entice visitors to stay longer, return more frequently, bookmark you, and refer your site.
Understand the impact of buying stages. Build appropriate sales funnels and capture leads sell visitors later that don’t buy on first visit—not all will/do.
Deal with fears, uncertainties, and doubts (FUDs). Address concerns, hesitations, doubts.
Calm their concerns. Incentives are a great way to counter FUDs and relieve friction.
Test, Test, Test.
Implement in an iterative manner. Build smaller blocks, make smaller changes.
MarketingExperiments Methodology heuristic approach
Conversion formula developed by MarketingExperiments.
C = Probability of conversion
m = Motivation of user (when)
v = Clarity of the value proposition (why)
i = Incentive to take action
f = Friction elements of process
a = Anxiety about entering information
Probability of conversion depends on the match between the offer and visitor motivation + clarity of value proposition + (incentives to take action now – friction) – anxiety.
The numbers next to the characters are the weight they carry in the formula.
LIFT™
Landing Page Influence Function for Tests™ (or LIFT™), developed by WiderFunnel:
An interesting framework for analyzing web pages. This framework has the value proposition as the vehicle. Relevance and clarity boost conversions while anxiety and distraction kill it. Urgency is what propels people to take action.
Usability Evaluation
Usability guru Jakob Nielsen defines usability by 5 quality components:
Usability guidelines:
Guidelines for homepages: Nielsen Norman Group
🔑🥡 If you are not doing user research, you are failing your users!
What User Research (UR) is
About asking meaning questions and thinking critically about the answers
It’s Empathetical and Considerate
The above is an example of an Affordance — check out Don Norman, Design of Everyday Things
It recognises that we all have biases, beliefs, and assumptions—and takes none of them for granted!
It helps identify opportunities to delight customers.
Based on Maslow’s hierarchy the user hierarchy of needs shows how UR should move users up the pyramid:
It looks for patterns and create generalisations to influence feature/design decisions.
🔑🥡 In understanding [the above] we’re able to earlier circumvent bad (costly) decisions
What User Research (UR) is not
Always right
Prescriptive about how to acquire insights
Just for design/ers
🔑🥡 Research, when done well, can have an unpresidented impact across the entire business!
Market Research vs User Research
MR = Buy focused vs UR = User focused
MR = Larger, quantitative vs UR = Smaller, qualitative
MR = What people want vs UR = What addresses needs
Other overlaps
OXO Measuring Cup Case Study
OXO watched users in their own kitchen using measuring jugs (ethnographic study) and noticed them struggle to see where the liquid was from above. Users (me included) needed to lift the jugs up (or bend down) to see the line. So OXO invented the above jug, which is a dream UX!
I ordered one immediately! 👨🍳
UR Methods
Final 🔑🥡 Data != Insights
You hear the term data driven decision making a lot, but it’s a misnomer! What you want is insight driven decision making. Raw data that isn't contextualised/tied to any goal or outcome is useless!
User & Conversion Research Resources:
https://cxl.com/blog/how-to-come-up-with-more-winning-tests-using-data/
Internet, Phone, Mail, and Mixed-Mode Surveys – Dillman, Smyth, Christian (book)
ISO 9241-11: Ergonomics of human-system interaction: Usability
Usability Testing Of Mobile Applications: A Step-By-Step Guide
Practical Ethnography: A Guide to Conducting Ethnography in the Private Sector by Sam Ladner (book)
Quantifying the User Experience: Practical Statistics for User Research by Jeff Sauro (book)
Tools:
Typeform. Most beautiful surveys.
SessionCam (enterprise)
Tools that offer a pool of testers:
Supplemental reading:
Making the Most of Your Drip Email Campaign: Content, Length & Frequency
6 Ways To Re-Optimize Your Email Auto-responder Campaign To Improve Opens, Clicks, and Sales
7 Mistakes That Hurt Your Email Relationship Building Efforts
How Soylent Uses Zapier to Automatically Transcribe Phone Calls and Build a Database of Legal Advice
Remember: This was just 7 of 12 in my series on CRO. Make sure to check out the others coming each week!