Your users will make mistakes. It’s inevitable. That’s what error messages are for—but so many companies fail to follow best practices, and they’re pissing off potential customers in the process.
So, how can we better design error messages to improve the user experience and increase conversions?
Fear and greed are two of the three great forces in the world, according to Einstein (the third is stupidity).
They’re also two triggers that not only stock markets (in the form of the Fear & Greed index), but also marketers and copywriters have been well aware of for years.
That’s because they are powerful emotions that, when used properly, drive people to take action.
A large part of landing page optimization is focusing your visitors’ attention on what matters.
There are many design theories on how exactly to do that. Most will include using what is known as a visual cue to direct attention towards a desired object.
There’s a philosophical statistics debate in the A/B testing world: Bayesian vs. Frequentist.
This is not a new debate. Thomas Bayes wrote “An Essay towards solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances” in 1763, and it’s been an academic argument ever since.
Perception isn’t always the same thing as reality, even when it comes to something as “objective” as your product’s value.
In fact, the perceived value of your product is fairly malleable. There are countless studies, as well as anecdotes, that support the notion that you can tweak small things to increase your product’s value perception.
It’s a cultural trope to “want what you can’t have,” but it’s also a principle based in decades of psychological research. That principle, scarcity, is incredibly powerful in marketing, persuasion, and conversion optimization—when done right especially in a free market with limited resources.
A good user experience equals more money. But how do we measure user experience? How do we know if it’s getting better or worse?
One-tailed tests allow for the possibility of an effect in one direction. Two-tailed tests test for the possibility of an effect in two directions—positive and negative.
Simple as that concept may seem, there’s a lot of controversy around one-tailed vs. two-tailed testing. Articles like this one lambaste the shortcomings of one-tailed testing, saying that “unsophisticated users love them.”
On the flip side, some articles and discussions take a more balanced approach and say there’s a time and a place for both.
Let’s set the record straight.
When you first start doing conversion optimization, you think that the biggest hurdles are technical things: running an a/b test the right way, collecting data correctly, QA’ing tests.
These things are all important, of course. But the solutions are fairly straightforward, and when you reach a certain level of experience and skill, they tend to be a given.
No, the biggest obstacle to a testing program – even a mature program – tends to be human error and cognitive bias.
As much as we’d like to think that we’re rational, the reality is, we make many of our decisions emotionally.
Clicks, shares, purchases, comments, engagement are all subject to emotional decision making.
So how can you use this fact to your advantage?