Don't Design for Yourself

It's important to accept that there is no one way to convert a click. This is because people are unique and unpredictable. Well, unique at least. After years of studying humans and computers, and human behavior and the Web, we may have figured out some common denominators.

For example, how we learn has a direct influence on how we search, browse, and make decisions online.

How customers purchase from one company may not be how customers buy from others. One retailer may find that their customers require many design ideas that require shipping free samples first, while another one has so many five‐star ratings that customer confidence is already a sure thing.

What persuades one online visitor may not work for the next one. The worst approach to conversions design is designing for yourself.

Many companies do it anyway.

Study User Behavior

I'm a visual learner. I didn't know that until I needed to learn how to design a property we moved to into a small horse stable for my retired racehorse.

For starters, we had woods and a house. No barn. No pasture. One horse. One husband and a pile of contractors.

The only way any of them could communicate to me where the electric, water, fences, and barn would go was to make drawings. And even with that, I still had my horse friends review the layout.

Could we expand to get another horse? Was there room for a riding ring? Can we get water out to the new barn before winter comes?

• There was the immediate need.
• There was the future need.

There was me not wanting to carry buckets in knee‐deep snow. It didn't take long for the contractors to know that to persuade me to agree to anything required knowing the following:

• Cost. How much will it cost? (Cost matters for conversions.)
• Time. How long will it take? (Amazon learned this early on.)
• Security. Will the fencing be secure? (Privacy and security for transactions and data can make or break conversions.)
• Brand loyalty. When can I add another horse? (Scheduled shipments, upsell, future enhancement discounts, dreamer enablement tactic.)

There are other key areas important to conversions:

• Relevancy
• Trust
• Customer service
• Ease of use
• Competitive pricing
• Brand reputation
• User interface design

Determine Who Performs Conversion Optimization

Companies develop methodologies that work within their vertical and business culture. A team approach delivers the most chance for success because frankly there's much to explore and understand.

Stakeholders answer to someone, and usually they want to know how much to invest to improve revenue opportunities.

Stakeholders rely on marketers, who may be responsible for writing content. I discuss this later, but for now, let me assure you that every conversion is tied to words. Those words must be in the right place at the right time, say the right thing to the right person, and be accessible to anyone who wants to know what the content is. This is one of the areas for web and mobile conversions where failures are high.

Like I said, communication is the key to conversion survival.

Usability and user experience (UX) designers must understand conversion design. This is everything from color use and button placement to patterns and designing for cognition.

Mobile developers have a similar path as UX, but the code is different. Mobile devices manage user experiences differently depending on the operating system. Downloadable mobile apps render on small screens, requiring innovative designs to make call‐to‐action prompts visible and tappable.

Anyone with a title that includes analyzing data produces spreadsheets and tracking information that help gauge performance. When they meet with marketing people, they help devise or revise game plans.

Instant Feedback

If you are using a keyboard, press the Tab key. Do it several times. What do you see? If the page you are clicking on was designed to provide instant feedback on sense of place, each link reached with the Tab key would be highlighted upon activation.

Sometimes the designer will put a border around the link and a colored background. If it is a button, the colors may switch. If a screen reader is being used, the words are highlighted to help with orientation for sight‐impaired people. On a mobile phone, accessibility settings can indicate wherever the cursor is by highlighting it and adding audio.

In other words, we create these design touches because we want to know where we are, where we're going, and hey, is there anything else cool in here?

Being Responsive Is About Meeting Expectations

A polished, functioning, successful website supports your marketing investment and so it is important to focus on increasing user engagement and flow by making your pages responsive to your site visitors.

Make every task easy to find and use, provide feedback, create a clear information architecture using terms your target users understand, and minimize distractions.

Calls to action, tasks, navigation, content, images, page layout, and forms design lead visitors to interact with the web page. Success or failure impacts ROI (return on investment) and KPIs.

Before you design for conversions, take a look under the hood for the parts you should focus on:

• Calls to action, also known as CTAs, are the points in your content where you invite a website visitor to take action. This may be in the form of a button or a text link. For mobile apps, sometimes filling out a form field activates something. Typically, CTAs stand out visually so that they capture attention. For people using a screen reader, there is no visual prompt, making the text itself more important.
• Leading tasks are often the main actions on a page. There can be several, from finding a contact page to searching for a product. The “moneymaker” tasks should be easy to find and follow to avoid user frustration.
• Desirability and momentum are critical, coveted human responses to every web page that contains a task, even if that task is to simply provide content to read or listen to. The goal is to create reasons to read and inspire the need to want more. These responses are tied to persuasion and incorporated into what is known as persuasive design.
• Information architecture works in tandem with search engine optimization and site structure for web and mobile applications. It's so important that journey mapping is recommended as part of the mockup and design process.

For navigation and conversions to function and grow over time, the crucial element is understanding how your users think. Couple that with how you know they behave online when searching, purchasing, and using their devices. To ignore anyone is to lose potential revenue.

Information architecture supports revenue tasks.

Taxonomies are simply the words chosen for a specific type of website. For example, you are familiar with “About,” “Contact,” and “Blog.” Everyone understands what they refer to and what happens if they go there. The challenge is giving a tour of your particular place online. Do you sell fitness or exercise equipment? If you sell boots, where are the clearance men's boots in width EEE?

Do you know how to structure the navigation for the guy with big feet? What else is he looking for? Do you have related items? A newsletter? Maybe Mr. EEE has a favorite brand, and the only reason he found your shoes is because the others were sold out.

Findability is your friend.

Structure is related to navigation. Having each page layout be consistent helps reduce pain points. Headings structure is an accessibility guideline recommendation because of how screen readers can be asked to sort through content. Both search engines and assistive devices are programmed to place higher importance on H1 headings because they are used for page titles, followed by H2, H3, and so on, with keywords for easy subject scanning.

Desirability, Momentum, and Conversions

What makes people stay on your website has everything to do with how they feel when they get there. Proper navigation means that users can move forward and backward and side to side with ease, always knowing where they are within the site. For mobile apps, this design approach is sometimes ignored, making it difficult for mobile users to complete tasks.

Avoid High Bounce Rates

From the perspective of the user experience and conversions, issues can be traced to the lack of a guidance system. When there is no sense of place built into the navigation, and it's built for forward momentum only, one page at a time, browsing and item searches are the first casualties.

Whether the page appears as an embedded text link or is located in a navigation menu, the task is to go to a page and read or perform a task. For many users, the activity stops there for the following reasons:

• There is no incentive to conduct a task.
• The page opened a new window, and they are lost. (New windows are a risk on mobile devices and screen readers.)
• There is no sense of place, and they are lost within the website. Where was that cool discount code?
• There are too many choices (too much content, too many links, and so on), and they are overwhelmed. If you want to kill conversions, overwhelm and overstimulate your visitors.
• Related content is not found.
• Pages are too long to read.
• There is redundant information.
• There is no incentive provided to create momentum to “click for more.”

Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action

I'll let you in a secret. There is one sure way to convert anyone on a web page to act. When you present your amazing solution or product, introduce it, and get out of their way.

Copywriters often follow a particular pattern:

1. Introduce new product or service in the first sentence of a paragraph.
2. Describe a benefit or drop a juicy morsel about it in the next sentence.
3. Link to the product or service in the next sentence, so that the sentence literally cradles the object you want them to do something about. (The anchor text is important here.)
4. Continue to throw out juicy morsels and teasers in the next sentence or two, then end the paragraph.
5. Continue with a new heading for different content.
6. Hope they clicked the link in the previous paragraph.

So, what's wrong with this approach? Most notably, there is too much information surrounding the linked text. That link is the conversion sweet spot, but what often occurs is contrary to what you want:

• It does not contain action‐oriented anchor text. (Think verbs.)
• It contains a product name that is new and unfamiliar. (No confidence.)
• It cannot be easily seen.
• Too much distracting information surrounds it, so the reader literally jumps over the call to action to continue reading so they don't miss the content after the link.
• Some readers scan the entire page's content first. They take it all in and may not return to the paragraph with the link.
• Unconsidered cognitive behaviors might interfere with the click response you're looking for. Memory, cognitive impairment, emotional distress, and age are several factors to consider.

For awareness, interest, desire, and action to activate into a strong conversion point, less is more.

Advocating for Your Website Visitors

Business owners know their products or services inside and out. They created them. They built something from scratch and watched it grow. They hire creatives and marketers and follow every SEO technique recommended to them. What they don't fully understand is who their customers are. They believe they do. (They truly do!) Remember: never assume to know what your website visitors are looking for.

Understanding Customer Intent

When considering a digital marketing strategy, the most successful results occur when everyone agrees on whom they are marketing to. The other agreement must be what the look and feel of the website or mobile app will be.

Creating User Personas

User personas are a technique developed in the early days that was used to help understand target markets. The goal is always about learning human behavior as it relates to websites since this is how we reach people in today's information age. A tremendous volume of research and data are used to create them.

Could you be a user persona? What is your story?

Today, user testing in person or with software applications developed for interviews provides better accuracy. We can interview customers. We can use video interviews combined with user testing software to go through web pages or test software during the development phases. Some companies use focus groups.

The first personas I worked with were printed booklets containing imaginary stories of pretend people. I referred to them as “user characters” because when I put them to use, it was like acting in a play.

An exercise in persona creation is simply an aid used by design and marketing teams to ask questions and sort out practical solutions.

Nothing beats true user testing, but defining certain human characteristics, considering how people use computers, and understanding user behavior in various circumstances is valuable for user experience design and writing marketing content.

The Willow Harrington sidebar is one example to start you thinking about conversion optimizations for a specific set of people.

If you were to sit down with Willow and ask her to shop for clothes for herself, and then shop for clothes for her daughter, you might learn there are differences in her choices.

Would she purchase for herself and a child from one store? Does she search with a cell phone or a laptop? Is she super‐organized while job hunting online? How does she research career options?

What if Willow is living at home because she depends on a wheelchair to get around sometimes?

What has changed in your thought process? What did you miss? She asked about customer service. This is a good clue. She's independent and refuses to pity herself. (“Leave Tennessee to travel and explore the country.”)

She has a cradle for her mobile device attached to her wheelchair and sometimes can't access websites that are not designed to flip to landscape mode.

In fact, most of us never stop to consider how people use computers.

This is why creating personas contributes to gathering requirements for marketing and design. We are missing opportunities by not listening to customers or inviting them to ask us for help when they may require assistance.

Of course, Willow isn't real. I made her up based on what I see when conversions testing fails to pinpoint any obvious cause for low conversion rates.

It's always tied to simply being human.

Designing the Landing Page

For PPC projects, the landing page is the main moneymaker, and therefore the most scrutinized page to be designed. For that reason, there is rarely one design per campaign. There are several.

This is because of what Tim Ash introduced in his landmark book, Landing Page Optimization, as the four stages for decision‐making:

• Awareness (attention)
• Interested
• Desire (decision)
• Action

And then he added a fifth post‐sale stage called “Permanent Satisfaction,” which drives repeat sales.

Amazon figured out how to simplify repeat orders by creating the “Buy Again” filter, making it easier to search for an item that met with customer satisfaction. When you add in a “Buy Now” button, the entire process takes seconds because all of the information is already in the database.

What Makes a Great Landing Page?

Designing for today's landing page is trickier because computer devices come in all shapes and sizes. A laptop web page has more room to display content than a mobile device. Sidebars on larger monitors are stacked below on mobile or excluded.

What is it? Why is it for me? Take me there. What is the value you are offering?

In its most simple state, a landing page meets needs for a well‐structured value proposition. Figure 7.1 shows an example mockup landing page.

A few critical elements items should appear in the top third of your home page:

• Company name or product brand. Identify yourself right away. The number‐one error in page design is forgetting to put the name of the brand or company on the home‐page or landing page in text.
• Why choose us. State why your site visitor should choose your service or product. You have about 3 seconds to convince them to stay on the page.
• Why you're better for them. Clearly indicate that you understand who your visitor is and how you can meet their needs.
• How to start. Place your lead call to action task in this space. It can be a button (“download free trial”) or a short form (“get started now”). Avoid forcing anyone to scroll to complete the top user task.
• Here's how to buy. Start a conversion funnel here. Some visitors will have been to your site earlier. They want to get past the formalities and start a task.
• Emphasize the benefits, rather than the features. How does the product or service make a positive impact? This is often directly related to feelings and an immediate reward.

Creating Calls to Action

Nothing is more unmotivating than reading a “Click Here” or “Learn More” link. Did you know that it is against website accessibility guidelines to indicate text links solely by color? Figure 7.2 shows the value proposition order.

Here are ways to improve the design of your buttons and text links.

• Always choose foreground and background colors that pass accessibility color contrast tests when designing buttons. The outer border can be darker. Padding between text and sides matters too.
• Tap targets for mobile devices must meet specific size requirements. If the finger misses the arrow, that's a risk.
• Always describe the landing page. “Learn More” and “Click Here” are not descriptive enough. Learn more about what?
• When you present a new product offering, show your visitor what it is with a product image or name. Figure 7.3 shows a simple example.

When providing a call to action, it must be placed at the moment when you inspired your readers to leave their train of thought.

Writing for Screen Readers

Mobile apps and web pages are accessible with screen readers and other assistive technologies used to interpret content.

Android devices come with Talk Back, a free built‐in screen reader with settings to meet many preferences from font sizes and colors to listening speed.

Apple's iOS provides VoiceOver for free, the same as it provides for Macs. VoiceOver is a robust screen reader that provides audio. The Rotor command is used to sort content by headings and links content, making the use of keywords important for understanding content.

NVDA for Chrome and Firefox PCs provide audio for free. JAWS is popular but requires a fee for a license after a free trial.

The crux of writing for screen readers is that conversions are less likely to occur if the audio version is not precisely described. A button must be announced as a button and must also describe where clicking it will go. This includes warnings if a link or button takes the listener off the website. They do not have visual aids and require the added assistance.

Ableisms

We make choices every day. What influences those choices falls into human behavior research. We pull a tremendous amount of data and work it like putty in our hands to form new ways of saying the same things.

What we don't consider is who the reader may be when writing marketing copy. Trained to write for SEO? Most of us are. We're not trained to consider the meanings for words.

One example is the use of “Call Now.” This is not going to fly for people who require assistance to make a phone call.

Another example is “Tell Your Friends.” There is an assumption that talking is as simple as opening up a mouth to speak, but for people who are deaf or hard of hearing, “telling” is not a natural response.

With accessibility and design for people with disabilities growing as its own discipline, it's important to understand how to not offend people.

Ableism assumes that the physical, cognitive, and sensory differences with which disabled people live are deficits that need to be “fixed.” It's not hard to offend readers.

I've found that the best way for me to understand people who are different from myself is to listen to their stories and watch how they get through the day. I've taken these observations and researched more if I'm not sure how my own behavior should be.

Conversions are traced to empathy.