You’d like to think that you’re a completely rational person making completely rational decisions, right? It’s nice to believe that you haven’t made major life decisions based on how you were feeling.
Well, you have. Many times.
Why spend hours and thousands of dollars redesigning your website from scratch when someone has already done the work for you?
Millions of businesses turn to website templates to make the design process more efficient. But there’s something almost no one is talking about and it’s a big problem.
Website templates are not optimized for conversions.
In 1999, David Weinberger, a technologist and co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, wrote, “Personalization: the automatic tailoring of sites and messages to the individuals viewing them so that we can feel that somewhere there’s a piece of software that loves us for who we are.”
Two decades later, ironically, personalization is being used by companies attempting to make the online experience more human.
Personalization has grown rapidly since David’s statement. So much so that personalized experiences have become the norm, not an option. [Tweet it!]
Every once in a while a big debate comes along in the conversion optimization industry. There was the carousel debate, the hamburger menu debate, the above the fold debate, etc.
Optimizers have been debating another question: Which mobile design is best for optimizers?
Is it m(Dot) design, responsive design, or adaptive design? All three options have their unique pros and cons as far as UX and SEO go, but which is most suitable for someone running experiments and tests on the regular?
Ghost buttons are transparent calls to action that appear on websites and in apps. They tend to have a thin border and a text label that sits within the transparent body of the button.
The use of this type of button reached its peak a few years ago, but can still be seen across a wide range of websites. They’re generally used more on websites that use a minimalist or flat design.
There’s a reason why people say “the first impression is the last impression.” Some 51% of customers never approach a business again after one bad experience. That puts pressure on every interaction—and every missed opportunity—with potential customers, recent purchasers, and long-time users.
Web chat is often the first impression for customer service interactions. While chat services initially connected consumers with real customer service staff, chatbots have become increasingly common—for obvious reasons and with obvious limitations.
Designing your website requires a studied understanding of human behavior if you want to increase your conversions. Using psychological tactics, such as the dual process theory, in your design to appeal to potential customers can help do this, but you must first know how users’ decisions are made.
Daniel Kahneman presents two thought systems that can give marketers a framework for how to target their ideal clients through site design and get a major uplift in conversions.
What if you found out you are, at best, only optimizing your site for 81% of the people who might possibly visit it?
Whether you’ve spent years perfecting your site’s usability or are just getting started, you’d want to know about that other 19%, right? That 19% represents millions and millions of people with disabilities who can’t access or engage with sites in the traditional way.
That’s where web accessibility comes in, opening you up to conversion opportunities you didn’t even know you were missing out on.
Every company wants their visitors (i.e. potential customers) and customers to leave their site with a lasting positive memory. Of course, that’s much easier said than done when you consider technical issues, copy confusion, price barriers and the like.
If you want to bring a smile to people’s faces when they hear your company name, you’ll need to understand how memory works and how you can design for it.
As an optimizer, you might be thinking that user interviews fall outside your role. Or, perhaps, that they are a “nice to have” on the qualitative conversion research checklist. Worse, you might not be asking good survey questions because you’re rolling with an “I’ll just wing it” mindset.
User interviews are more complex and important than most optimizers realize.