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Shanelle Mullin

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Shanelle Mullin previously did content and growth at CXL. She’s a jill-of-all-trades marketer with a 12-year background in growth and content marketing.

Social proof

Ever think you’d pay a stranger to stay in their home when they’re not there? Airbnb realized that convincing people of this would be challenging when they first started out. 

As a relatively unknown platform, it needed to gain the trust of users who were skeptical about staying in strangers’ homes. To overcome this, Airbnb emphasized user reviews and host ratings. As the reviews grew, so did the platform’s popularity, ultimately transforming it into a global giant. 

This is social proof in action.

At its core, social proof is the psychological phenomenon where people look to the actions and opinions of others to guide their own behavior, especially when unsure about a choice. It‘s a powerful tool for anyone looking to influence decisions, build trust, and grow their brand or business.

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Tabbed navigation

One of my favorite UX quotes comes from Chikezie Ejiasi, Head of Studio and Design Systems at Google.

He wrote: “Life is conversational. Web design should be the same way. On the web, you’re talking to someone you’ve probably never met—so it’s important to be clear and precise. Thus, well-structured navigation and content organization goes hand in hand with having a good conversation.”

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Science of familiarity

Do you remember when Slack launched? At the time, I was a diehard HipChat fan. Needless to say, I wasn’t interested in trying Slack.

I considered it nothing more than a passing trend. Now? I use it for an average of 10 hours a day for personal and professional reasons. (Sorry, HipChat.)

What’s going on here? How’d I go from loathing something to using it daily in the span of just 3-4 weeks? It’s called the mere-exposure effect, which means we tend to develop a preference for things just because we’re familiar with them.

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Website QA

Sites that don’t work, don’t convert.

That’s why optimizers conduct quality assurance on sites, landing pages, test treatments, email campaigns, you name it—to make sure they work the way they’re supposed to.

While it’s common knowledge that quality assurance is something you should do, not enough optimizers complete it properly. If they did, there wouldn’t be so many sites that just plain don’t work.

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Backfiring

You’ve read about color psychology, system one and two, emotional persuasion, etc. I know you have because it’s everywhere. It’s on Forbes, Entrepreneur, Inc., HelpScout, HubSpot… you name it. Hell, we’ve covered some of these topics ourselves.

Why? Well, because many psychological triggers do, in fact work.

But there’s another side to using psychology online that almost no one is talking about: backfiring.

Psychology isn’t a magic formula that can be applied to optimization seamlessly in all scenarios, despite what many self-identified experts are preaching today. [Tweet It!]

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Smoke tests

Think you’re sitting on the next big idea for a product or a product feature? Before you spend dozens of hours and tens of thousands of dollars on the idea, you need to validate it.

In other words, you need to make sure your audience is just as excited about the idea as you are.

So, how can you validate the ideas sitting in your startup notebook or your product feature backlog without wasting resources? By running a smoke test.

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Propensity modeling

Propensity modeling lets us look at what people are likely to do—in the future.

My interest is in the future because I am going to spend the rest of my life there.

C.F. Kettering

When we look at data and analytics, we’re focused on the past. How did we do last quarter? What happened H1 2019? And how does that compare to H1 2018? How well did landing pages X, Y, and Z convert last Monday at 1:03 p.m.? (I’m kidding, I’m kidding.)

Data becomes more valuable when we use it to predict the future instead of just analyzing the past. That’s where propensity modeling comes in.

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