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Pop Quiz: May 24, 2013

Syndicated Contributor — Fri, 24 May 2013 18:05:50 +0000

Which debugging tool(s) can view T&T data on secure web pages? Continue reading →

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UIE Book Corner: Russ Unger’s “Designing the Conversation”

Syndicated Contributor — Fri, 24 May 2013 16:07:06 +0000

In this latest installment of the UIE Book Corner, we catch up with Russ Unger to chat about the book he co-wrote with Dan Willis and Brad Nunnally, Designing the Conversation: Techniques for Successful Facilitation. Russ is a Senior UX Leader at GE Capital along with being a well regarded author and speaker.

In an increasingly distributed workforce world, collaborating with design teams becomes much trickier. It’s not without it’s benefits. It opens your team to talent that may not otherwise have been available. Simply hopping on a Skype chat or GotoMeeting can be a solution, but often facilitation is the missing piece to the puzzle.

Facilitation is an important skill, whether with collocated or remote teams. It drives conversation and collaboration. The ability to facilitate well is integral when conducting participatory design activities, giving a presentation, or even giving a virtual seminar. Russ joins Adam Churchill to discuss the book and the various types of facilitation in this podcast.

Recorded: May, 2013
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Full Transcript.

Adam Churchill: We’re continuing what we’re calling the UIE Book Corner series, with a look at “Designing the Conversation,” co-authored by Russ Unger, Brad Nunnally, and Dan Willis. The book was published earlier this year, and one of the things we like to do is take a look at the Amazon reviews and see what folks are saying. Among some of the things that we saw, “It’s a great book for anyone presenting, moderating, or facilitating.”, “The book offers lots of great insights into improving the conversation surrounding design with your teams and within our organization.”, “If you ever have to run a meeting, make a presentation, or even just ask your boss for a raise.”

We’re thrilled to have Russ Unger join us to discuss the book and its important concept. Russ also co-authored “A Project Guide to UX Design.” We’re recording this so you can listen in to what he has to say.

Hey, Russ.

Russ Unger: Hey, Adam. Thanks for having me.

Adam: Yourself, Brad, and Dan, that’s quite a lineup. Tell us a little bit about how the idea for this book came about.

Russ: You mentioned my first book that I wrote with Carolyn Chandler, called “A Project Guide to UX Design”. When the first edition came out, we got a one-star review on Amazon, and we got criticized for having a chapter that was called “Facilitating.” Now, the funny thing about that is there was no chapter in there, but it really kind of got me thinking about it. When it came time to write our second edition, I had earmarked facilitation as a chapter. I’d been pretty fortunate to take part in Cranky Talk Workshops that Dan Willis had put together, and facilitation was really on my mind. Especially since I’d been working with Todd Zaki Warfel on a book called “Guerilla Design and Research Methods” that’s still somewhere in the ether, and seems to remain almost finished.

Well, to make a long story short, I couldn’t find a way to fit worthwhile content about facilitation into about 10 or so pages of the second edition of “Project Guide.” Fortunately, we could put those pages to better use, and my wheels were really in motion. While we were doing this “Tweak Your Talk” session at South by Southwest last year, I started talking to Dan and Brad about the idea. Before long, we pulled together a proposal, and we found that there was a whole lot to talk about. In fact, I think about 240 pages of it, all on facilitation.

Adam: Alright, cool. Let’s jump into the book, taking a look at the way the book is structured. Section two is on group facilitation, section three is on one-on-one facilitation, and section four is called “One-on-Many Facilitation.” I’m just wondering if you can help folks understand, what’s the difference between group facilitation and one-on-many facilitation? What do folks need to understand there?

Russ: That’s a really great question. The biggest difference is that group facilitation is focused on working with groups of people who are essentially activity-based. By that, I mean that they’re engaged in workshops or brainstorming activities, focus groups, participatory design activities, and things like that. The group is essentially working toward a goal and an outcome, and they’re really setting out to achieve something. When you get into one-on-many, it’s more about a person, or a group of persons. People who are being the point of focus for a group of people, who are interested in their content. Kind of like your own virtual seminars or a presentation.

It’s those scenarios where there’s a lot of sharing, storytelling of information to a group of people, who are fairly limited in the way that they are responding or reacting, and even in how they contribute. In that section on one on many or one to many, its things like conference presentations, virtual seminars, like I just mentioned, lectures, which then all have their own set of challenges. Given the way technology and connectivity are moving along, these are becoming more and more important to know about. Particularly as we start seeing more and more distributed teams in content.

I myself work in an office in Chicago, but I’ve got teammates who are in Michigan, Connecticut and Minneapolis. This, to me, is a really important section to understand.

Adam: The book has lots of voices. That is, experts in our field weighing in on the concept, in that structure. I guess we’ll call them sidebars. You’ve got people like Dana Chisnell, Richard Dalton, and Kevin Hoffman. Super folks that we’re fortunate to work with, voicing their opinions on topics within the book. Besides the fact that it’s an all-star lineup of user experience design, how are those going to add value for anyone who’s going to pick up a copy of this book?

Russ: One of the things that Dan, Brad and I all know is that you don’t know everything about all of these topics. Frankly, there’s always more than one way to do things, too. You can look at just about anything you do, and somebody’s hacked a different version of it. We’re all pretty confident that we could be dropped into just about any scenario in the book, and we could likely pull that off. When it comes to sharing expertise and putting it in someone else’s hands to learn from, we wanted to make sure that our voices were helping to provide a great starting point. A core foundation for the activity, if you will.

And then, provide perspectives of others who are pretty deep into the topic areas. So for example, we have a chapter on practicing that gets input on about 20 different people, including myself, about how they practice before they get into a live scenario. The more I work with other people in facilitation activities, the more that I learn we’ve all got different flavors of approaches. For example, if I practice presenting something, I’ve got this crazy method to my own madness here. I start out with pencil and paper and doing outlines two or three times. Then, I get to something that’s digital. Then I will go back to note cards, and I may sketch on them. I design slides, if I need to. Then I will get into a digital tool, and start pulling that content all in place, making that its own entity. It may seem like that’s all part of the research and information gathering aspect of things.

But for me, it’s also designing and refining the content. Learning how to kill some of my darlings, and get familiar with the points that I want to drive home. After I get slides together, I will find different opportunities to go through that content. Frequently Brad and I will do Skype, and JoinMe sessions where we’re looking at content. Walking through it, and finding out where I’ve missed a beat or something.

I’ll do that with a local guild that we have in Chicago. Fortunately, for my kids, sometimes it’s with them. So they can see, and I can see where I’m tripping up. The thing of it is, that’s just my way of doing it. The more I do things like read Scott Berkun’s book, “Confessions of a Public Speaker”, he’s got his own method for doing these things. Then you look and you’ve got people like Eric Reis, Cennydd Bowles, Margot Bloomstein, Andy Budd in there.

Who all have different approaches. The idea is, we want to give you this core foundation. Here’s a really basic way to get started. But now go, and learn from these other people. It’s not just Russ, Dan and Brad say, “This is the right way.” They say, “This is a great starting point. Now you can learn from some of these other folks and tailor your approach.” I don’t really see that there’s an exact formula for practicing, as an example.

This is a great way to show that and help others. And also get some of our super talented friends into the mix, to help people along.

Adam: I’m going to be selfish for just a moment, but my goal here is to extract some nuggets of wisdom, to pass along to folks that I work with. I, of course, run the UIE virtual seminar program. Chapter 16, in your book, speaks to the challenges of virtual seminars and how to maximize the opportunity. What would you say the key take away is, for someone that’s planning to facilitate one on many, in this case, through that means?

Russ: For starters, chapter 16, Dan wrote that and he did a phenomenal job on that. What I think is, you have to get comfortable with that absence of feedback. You and I are having a conversation here, and so there’s a little bit of back-and-forth. In general, I’m the type of person who, I don’t know, I struggle with silence. I’ve really been working on taking a breath, having strategic pauses and the like. You already know this, I’m a really fast talker. I’m trying to read an audience and be measured. I also play to them and get a sense of what parts of the content are hitting home, and what parts I need to tailor or adjust for depending on my audience.

When you’re in a virtual seminar, there’s a lot of things that can go wrong, too. I do these things in Chicago called ChicagoCamps. They’re day conferences. You guys are always super sponsors. Shay and Brad, who I do these with, we always try to do things a little bit different. We did remote sessions the last time, and they’re pretty similar to a virtual seminar. While we pulled them off and expected some glitches. That’s just it, right? There’s glitches, so much can happen; an Internet connection can go down, the software you’re presenting through can crash, hardware can have its own set of gremlins, so on and so forth.

In fact, I think you guys did a virtual seminar with Todd Zaki Warfel. It was at his old office in Philadelphia, and you could hear the trains going by. [laughs]

Adam: Yeah, that’s right.

Russ: That’s one of those things that’s really hard to do. Even when we do different things, where there’s people presenting to a very large, disparate group. Again, it’s so challenging to gauge that audience and feedback. You’ve got people on mute, and sometimes you’ve got those phones that beep when somebody gets off the line. There’s always that one person who’s driving with their car window down, or your Comcast connection dies — sorry, Comcast — or whatever it is. Something seems to always be a challenge. There’s something that can always go wrong. That’s a strange sort of thing.

Samantha Starmer had a great quote in the book, and she says that once these can get to the point of being more interactive and engaging and not about someone presenting, and about the someones being presented to, that they’ll kind of level up.

I think it feels like we’re almost there. We’re in that phase that we really have to be doing these things and figuring out what’s wrong, and getting them right and how to make them better.

I also want to say that just the fact that we can do them at all is pretty amazing. I keep thinking about the Louis CK bit, when he says, “Everything’s amazing and everybody’s unhappy…”

[laughter]

How truly awesome it is that we can have people all over the planet sitting down in a comfortable office somewhere, trying not to crush their lunch bag with too much noise. Then getting to listen to the brilliance of a Stephen Anderson, or a Karen McGrane, or Adam Connor, and so on. While 100 other people all over the planet are doing it at the same time.

While they’re not without fault, they’re amazing. I really can’t wait until they’re, I guess, amazing-er.

You had asked about a key takeaway, and I know I took a long, winding road to get there. My key takeaway from all of this is, to really practice and know your content, and your timing. I tend to be loose as a presenter, but when it comes to doing a virtual seminar, I think you’ve really got to be that confident presenter. You’ve really got to know your timing and your beats. Once you have all of that down, and you’ve gotten all the hardware and software parts figured out, it frees you up to stress on the important things. Like, “Ooh, did that content land like it should’ve?”, and “Next time I’ll remove all of my jokes”. Because it’s hard to tell a joke to a deadpan audience when you don’t know if they’re laughing in a room in Philadelphia, or if they’re going, “Wow, this guy’s a dork.”

I think that’s one of the key takeaways, is really know your content and understand that the audience is there listening and taking notes, even if you can’t see them.

Adam: I think that’s really important. Because whether you are a new presenter, somebody that’s just at the beginnings of thinking something through, and finding out your way of communicating it to an audience. Or somebody like Jared, who’s spoken in front of thousands of people, that lack of interaction really is the trick. I think you’re right, being comfortable and getting confident in your delivery, regardless of the lack of interaction, is important.

Russ: My virtual seminar, I wouldn’t make that my first speaking gig, ever. [laughs] I would be really nervous about that. Unfortunately, I just said that and probably just made a whole bunch of people nervous. Unfortunately, you come out of college and you work for these locations with very large, spread-out teams. That could be your first speaking opportunity. I think it’s everything we just said, you’ve got to really know your content. Practice is what’s going to make you confident, and make you less afraid of that lack of reaction.

Adam: I’m sure you have lots of folks coming up to you and saying, “Hey. Got the book, loved it.” What are they telling you they love about it?

Russ: What’s been really great to hear is that people are seeing facilitation as one of those parts of design that is being a bit under-served. It’s kind of a core to what we do. I’m continually adding to my own facilitation toolkit, and learning from others.

I get to work with Josie Scott. She was somebody who contributed a chapter on focus groups. It’s really awesome to get to talk to her. In learning from her, one of the things that I got was, that being a good facilitator is kind of like being that really amazing drummer who can also sing. It’s all the limbs are going at once. There’s a lot of moving parts, and there’s a lot of things to consider. It’s really been great to hear that we’ve been able to provide some strong content to help people upgrade those softer skills.

They also tell us, by the way, how fantastic Dan’s illustrations are. I mean, those things are gorgeous, and he was nothing less than brilliant. Brad and I would write notes about the intro to the chapter and say, “This is what we’re trying to convey. In words, this is what I’m trying to get to you.” Then, Dan would show up with this magical pen, and — I’m not kidding you — every single time, he nailed it. There was no, “Go back, this idea isn’t good enough.” It was amazing. I think people are really enjoying that because it’s a great complement to the material. Mostly, it’s also been great to hear that we’ve been providing a starting point for people who are interested in facilitation.

It also helps to erase some of those lonely late nights of writing. I think as you know, I have a couple of kids, and so I tend to write from 10 at night till about 2 in the morning. Every time you’d get one of those nice-starred reviews on Amazon, it makes you kind of go, “OK, good. This wasn’t so bad. Maybe I’ll do another one sometime.”

The other thing is there’s a lot of texts out there that tell you about all of these different activities that you can perform. That’s just one part of it. In many cases, there’s an assumption that you’ve been setting up an event or that you’ve set these events up before that need to be facilitated, and you can more or less just drop in and do the task and activity. The reality is, there’s a lot to consider when it comes to being a facilitator. I mean, Adam, you had to set up the questions here. You had to get Skype set up for us and had to arrange the time.

We have to do small things for a conversation like this. When you get into groups of people, you start looking at things like, “Here’s the agenda. Here’s the supplies. Here’s the technology I have to manage. Here’s all the people I have to get into the right place at the right time, manage their expectations, manage the expectations that you’re putting upon them, including their personalities.” Sometimes you may even have to feed them. Then, you’ve got to get to know all about these things, all about your equipment, your supplies, the timing, and all about the place that you’re doing it in. I’ve been saying it a lot more and more lately, but it feels to me like we’re all event planners now, because of what it takes to plan facilitation activities.

I mentioned Kevin before, Kevin Hoffman’s been doing amazing work solely around meetings. That’s just one aspect of facilitation. There’s so much to consider when stepping up to the plate. We’re hearing that we’ve been helping people with that and that we’ve been doing a good job. That’s really awesome to know that part’s been really paying off.

Adam: You mentioned juggling your crazy life with the kids and finding time to write. I know you speak a ton at design conferences. You also do great design work. I’m curious as to when you’re going in talking to those clients and you’re armed with a copy of “Designing the Conversation,” when they’re talking about their challenges, what chapter do you find yourself turning to most often?

Russ: I hate that the only thing that comes to mind here is, “it depends”.

[laughter]

Russ: Because it does though, right? It depends on what the problems is, what we’re trying to solve. One of the great things about writing with Dan and Brad is that we were all our first-pass editors. I’ve probably read this book three to four times from cover to cover. There’s so much that sticks with me from taking that approach. I’m going to say we applied a lot of tough love when it came to writing the book, so we beat each other up pretty hard. We, at the same time, really respected and cared about each other and the content enough that we read it very meticulously.

It’s kind of funny, I can walk into a situation, and I can instantly think, “Wow, I wrote this,” or, “Dan or Brad wrote something Great,” and I can reference it pretty quickly. When you write it, there’s that quote that says, “When you write, you learn twice,” so I’ve got the benefit of more memory on the stuff. I think what I would say, I personally revisited workshops, participatory design, interviews, and focus groups the most. I say focus groups because my opinion, humbly, is that a lot of people are trying to use them wrong. I don’t think they’re successful when it comes to usability testing, and a lot of people think that focus groups can get you that. There’s some learning, relearning, unlearning that needs to happen around that activity. It really does depend on the kind of problem you’re trying to solve and what kind of access and availability you have from other people.

I did, just so you know, recently check out the “Virtual Seminars” chapter because we’re doing some distributed team training sessions at work. It’s always nice to have that book to look at what Dan, Brad, or I have written, to be able to use that as reference material quite a bit. It’s really nice to have a full paragraph that you can lift and put into an email for somebody, to give them some insight about what you’re trying to get across.

Adam: Very cool. The book is awesome. Thanks for spending some time with us.

Russ: Thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity.

Adam: To our audience, thanks for listening, and coming to hang out in the UIE Book Corner.

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How Persuasive Are Your Product Pages?

(author unknown) — Fri, 24 May 2013 13:00:00 +0000

Your homepage — as much as you love it — is basically a glorified street sign. Consumers don't read it so much as glance at it in the hopes that it's clear where they should go. Its job is to get people out of there, into whatever it is they're looking for. And often what they're looking for on your site isn't your categories, deals, and certainly not news releases about you or your awards — it's your products.

And boy, are there references out there about your products. If you're looking to review specific elements, there are plenty of great resources about your calls to action, the information expected in them, and any number of good sample reviews or general usability references.

But what is it that makes a product page successful?

Obviously, focus helps, but how come Amazon.com's product pages — where it's normal to have several hundred links, a ton of clutter and useful features buried several screens below the fold — survive years of tests and tuning? Evidently, putting useful information about the product helps, but how come large companies like Wal-Mart get away with putting so little information about the product?

Hopes, Fears and Your Product Page

B.J. Fogg, author of "Persuasive Technology," might have part of the answer. His research into motivation sheds some light on technology, in this case, the product page. He organizes motivation this way: pleasure and pain, hopes and fears, social acceptance and rejection. Obviously, that's useful for the product page, the last point before the purchase, the point where you convince your visitor to shake on the deal.

Let's start with Amazon. The online giant has tons of usability issues. It's difficult to cite a better example of clutter than over a dozen pages worth of scrolling on one page, especially when research says that about 80 percent of visitors never see anything below the fold.

And yet Amazon delivers just that. For a Nexus 7 page, the site has 17 pages worth of scrolls.

So is it a bad product page? It certainly deprioritizes useful features like "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought," for starters. It also looks like it takes the spaghetti-to-the-wall approach to web design.

But let's take a look at the elements above the fold:

The higher price is there so the visitor can see the reward of purchasing. It's available, so there's hope of acquiring the item, but you can clearly see (in prominent text) that there are only eight left, so you better act soon. It has social trust elements, it states the reward and has a prominent, established call to action.

What Amazon is using above the fold is rooted heavily in persuasive design; e-commerce product pages use this to varying degrees of effectiveness.

Rewards, Anchoring and the Use of Free

If you search for a Nexus 7 on HSN or Staples, you'll encounter many of the same elements, although neither one has the entire set.

Anchoring is prescribed for product pages because we have an irrational brain. We perceive the first thing we're shown and we anchor expectations against that. It's a reflex, we hardly think about doing it. That's very useful when showing price points.

Free items like shipping further capitalize on that work on pleasure and delight.

Social Proof

If you have pleasure and pain taken care of, if you have hopes and fears down, that just leaves social acceptance and rejection on the Fogg model for motivation.

If you've ever taken a look at Wal-Mart's product pages and wondered how it can get away with putting so little information about the product off the bat, this partly explains why. For the same product, here's what Walmart has:

Now try and answer these questions: What's the resolution of the product? How much does it weigh? How powerful is the processor?

If you can't answer any of that with a quick glance, that's evidently an issue. But that's the trade-off Wal-Mart is making. The price, call to action and store availability are focused on, and the other elements except for social proof are de-emphasized.

Getting it Right

The examples here, without exception, have serious usability flaws. None of them can answer everything you need about the product at a glance, while working with pleasures and hopes, pain and fears, social acceptance and rejection. But it's a difficult balance to strike.

If you use anchoring, rewards and scarcity while keeping the high-level information available and the call to action clear, you're that much closer to having not just a great, but persuasive, product page.

And boy, are there references out there about your products. If you're looking to review specific elements, there are plenty of great resources about your calls to action, information expected in them, and any number of good sample reviews or general usability references.

But what is it that makes a product page successful?

Hopes, Fears and Your Product Page

B.J. Fogg, author of "Persuasive Technology,"Persuasive Technology," might have part of the answer. His research into motivation sheds some light on technology, in this case, the product page. He organizes motivation this way: pleasure and pain, hopes and fears, social acceptance and rejection. Obviously, that's useful for the product page, the last point before the purchase, the point where you convince your visitor to shake on the deal.

And yet Amazon delivers just that. For a Nexus 7 page, the site has 17 pages worth of scrolls.

But let's take a look at the elements above the fold:

What Amazon is using above the fold is rooted heavily in persuasive design; e-commerce product pages use this to varying degrees of effectiveness.

Rewards, Anchoring and the Use of Free

If you search for a Nexus 7 on HSN or Staples, you'll encounter many of the same elements, although neither one has the entire set.

Free items like shipping further capitalize on that work on pleasure and delight.

Social Proof

If you have pleasure and pain taken care of, if you have hopes and fears down, that just leaves social acceptance and rejection on the Fogg model for motivation.

Now try and answer these questions: What's the resolution of the product? How much does it weigh? How powerful is the processor?

Getting it Right

____________________________________________________________________________________________

This article originally appeared in Tim's Retail Online Integration column May 2, 2013

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Control and Transparency:What users want for their personal information

Syndicated Contributor — Fri, 24 May 2013 12:58:52 +0000

Control of personal information in the digital space, and particularly on mobile devices, presents a unique design challenge.

Most people aren’t aware that their personal data is being collected and shared. Many users don’t take the time to validate their expectations and most never read privacy policies.

People only seem to become aware of such concerns when something happens that doesn’t meet their expectations, such as seeing their friend’s picture in a Facebook ad or seeing banner ads that match their most recent purchase. And when people do become aware and their expectations are violated, trust in the brand is eroded.

People want transparency and control, but they want it on their...read more
By Ilana Westerman

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This week’s finest digital marketing infographic

Syndicated Contributor — Fri, 24 May 2013 11:35:21 +0000

Furthermore, almost two-thirds (63%) of consumers make travel purchases using their laptop compared to just 39% on tablet and 27% on smartphone.

So, here’s the infographic...

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Vine and You

Syndicated Contributor — Fri, 24 May 2013 10:30:00 +0000

Why businesses should really jump on the Vine bandwagon. Continue reading →

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Beyond The Button: Embracing The Gesture-Driven Interface

Syndicated Contributor — Fri, 24 May 2013 09:00:41 +0000

As a mobile UI or UX designer, you probably remember the launch of Apple’s first iPhone as if it was yesterday. Among other things, it introduced a completely touchscreen-centered interaction to a individual’s most private and personal device. It was a game-changer.

Today, kids grow up with touchscreen experiences like it’s the most natural thing. Parents are amazed by how fast their children understand how a tablet or smartphone works. This shows that touch and gesture interactions have a lot of potential to make mobile experiences easier and more fun to use.

Challenging Bars And Buttons

The introduction of “Human Interface Guidelines” and Apple’s App Review Board had a great impact on the quality of mobile applications. It helped a lot of designers and developers understand the core mobile UI elements and interactions. One of Apple’s popular suggestions, for instance, is to use UITabBar and UINavigationBar components — a guideline that many of us have followed, including me.

In fact, if you can honestly say that the first iPhone application you designed didn’t have any top or bottom bar elements, get in touch and send over a screenshot. I will buy you a beer and gladly tweet that you were ahead of your time.

My issue with the top and bottom bars is that they fill almost 20% of the screen. When designing for a tiny canvas, we should use every available pixel to focus on the content. In the end, that’s what really matters.

In this innovative industry, mobile designers need some time to explore how to design more creative and original interfaces. Add to that Apple’s frustrating rejection of apps that “think outside the box,” it is no surprise that experimental UI and UX designs such as Clear and Rise took a while to see the light of day. But they are here now. And while they might be quite extreme and focused on high-brow users and early adopters, they show us the great creative potential of gesture-driven interfaces.

Pulling to refresh feels very intuitive.

The Power Of Gesture-Driven Interfaces

For over two years now, I’ve been exploring the ways in which gestures add value to the user experience of a mobile application. The most important criterion for me is that these interactions feel very intuitive. This is why creative interactions such as Loren Brichter’s “Pull to Refresh” have become a standard in no time. Brichter’s interaction, introduced in Tweetie for iPhone, feels so intuitive that countless list-based applications suddenly adopted the gesture upon its appearance.

Removing UI Clutter

A great way to start designing a more gesture-driven interface is to use your main screen only as a viewport to the main content. Don’t feel obliged to make important navigation always visible on the main screen. Rather, consider giving it a place of its own. Speaking in terms of a virtual 2-D or 3-D environment, you could design the navigation somewhere next to, below, behind, in front of, above or hidden on top of the main view. A dragging or swiping gesture is a great way to lead the user to this UI element. It’s up to you to define and design the app.

What I like about Facebook and Gmail on iOS, for instance, is their implementation of a “side-swiping” menu. This trending UI concept is very easy to use. Users swipe the viewport to the right to reveal navigation elements. Not only does this make the app very content-focused, but accessing any section of the application takes only two to three touch interactions. A lot of apps do far worse than that!

Facebook and Gmail’s side-swiping menu

In addition to the UI navigation, your app probably also supports contextual interactions, too. Adding the same two or three buttons below every content item will certainly clutter the UI! While buttons might seem to be useful triggers, gestures have great potential to make interaction with content more intuitive and fun. Don’t hesitate to integrate simple gestures such as tapping, double-tapping and tapping-and-holding to trigger important interactions. Instagram supports a simple double-tap to perform one of its key features, liking and unliking a content item. I would not be surprised to see other apps integrate this shortcut in the near future.

An Interface That Fits

When designing an innovative mobile product, predicting user behavior can be very difficult. When we worked with Belgium’s Public Radio, my team really struggled with the UI balance between music visualization and real-time news. The sheer number of contextual scenarios and preferences made it very hard to come up with the perfect UI. So, we decided to integrate a simple dragging gesture to enable users to adjust the balance themselves.

By dragging, users can balance music-related content and live news.

This gesture adds a creative contextual dimension to the application. The dragging gesture does not take the user from one section (news or music) to another. Rather, it enables the user to focus on the type of content they are most interested in, without missing out on the other.

Think in Terms of Time, Dimension and Animation

What action is triggered when the user taps an item? And how do you visualize that it has actually happened? How fast does a particular UI element animate into the viewport? Does it automatically go off-screen after five seconds of no interaction?

The rise of touch and gesture-driven devices dramatically changes the way we design interaction. Instead of thinking in terms of screens and pages, we are thinking more in terms of time, dimension and animation. You’ve probably noticed that fine-tuning user interactions and demonstrating them to colleagues and clients with static wireframe screenshots is not easy. You don’t fully see, understand and feel what will happen when you touch, hold, drag and swipe items.

Certain prototyping tools, including Pop and Invision, can help bring wireframes to life. They are very useful for testing an application’s flow and for pinpointing where and when a user might get stuck. Your application has a lot more going on than simple back-and-forth navigation, so you need to detect interface bugs and potential sources of confusion as soon as possible. You wouldn’t want your development team to point them out to you now, would you?

Invision enables you to import and link your digital wireframes.

To be more innovative and experimental, get together with your client first and explain that a traditional wireframe is not the UX deliverable that they need. Show the value of interactive wireframes and encourage them to include this in the process. It might increase the timeline and budget, but if they are expecting you to go the extra mile, it shouldn’t be a problem.

I even offer to produce a conceptual interface video for my clients as well, because once they’ve worked with the interactive wireframes and sorted out the details, my clients will often need something sexier to present to their internal stakeholders.

The Learning Curve

When designing gesture-based interactions, be aware that every time you remove UI clutter, the application’s learning curve goes up. Without visual cues, users could get confused about how to interact with the application. A bit of exploration is no problem, but users should know where to begin. Many apps show a UI walkthrough when first launched, and I agree with Max Rudberg that walkthroughs should explain only the most important interactions. Don’t explain everything at once. If it’s too explicit and long, users will skip it.

Why not challenge yourself and gradually introduce creative UI hints as the user uses the application? This pattern is often referred to as progressive disclosure and is a great way to show only the information that is relevant to the user’s current activity. YouTube’s Capture application, for instance, tells the user to rotate the device to landscape orientation just as the user is about to open the camera for the first time.

Fight the learning curve with a UI walkthrough and/or visual hints.

Adding visual cues to the UI is not the only option. In the Sparrow app, the search bar appears for a few seconds, before animating upwards and going off screen, a subtle way to say that it’s waiting to be pulled down.

Stop Talking, Start Making

The iPhone ushered in a revolution in interactive communication. Only five years later, touchscreen devices are all around us, and interaction designers are redefining the ways people use digital content.

We need to explore and understand the potential of touch and gesture-based interfaces and start thinking more in terms of time, dimension and animation. As demonstrated by several innovative applications, gestures are a great way to make an app more content-focused, original and fun. And many gesture-based interactions that seem too experimental at first come to be seen as very intuitive.

For a complete overview of the opportunities for gestures on all major mobile platforms, check out Luke Wroblewski’s “Touch Gesture Reference Overview.” I hope you’re inspired to explore gesture-based interaction and intensify your adventures in mobile interfaces. Don’t be afraid to go the extra mile. With interactive wireframes, you can iterate your way to the best possible experience. So, let’s stop talking and start making.

(al) (il)

Continue reading →

The post Beyond The Button: Embracing The Gesture-Driven Interface appeared first on VisitorCentric.

How to Build a Strong A/B Testing Plan That Gets Results

Syndicated Contributor — Fri, 24 May 2013 08:07:55 +0000

A strong A/B testing plan will allow you to increase your revenue. You will also learn valuable insights about your customers, because you will know their preferences instead of guessing what your customer may want.

A/B testing produces concrete evidence of what actually works in your marketing. Continuously testing your hypotheses will not only yield good results for conversion rates, but will also give you a better understanding of your customers. Having a clear idea of what your customers actually like and prefer can do wonders for your branding and marketing in other channels as well.

In its core, A/B testing belongs to a category of Scientific Optimization techniques, where statistics is used to increase the odds that your site visitors will see the best-performing version.

By levels of sophistication, scientific optimization can be broken down into three categories:

A/B Split Testing – Simple testing of a page’s one element against another to see which element results in better performance.
Multivariate Testing – Testing several elements at a time. The goal is to get an idea of which elements work together on a page and play the biggest role in achieving the objective.
Experimental Design – Developing your own research method for an in-depth analysis of a specific element.

This post is about A/B testing, since this technique produces the fastest gains and has lower chances of error through misuse. But we will also delve into the differences between A/B testing and Multivariate testing.

Let’s start from a clear definition of what A/B testing actually is:

A/B testing, or split testing, is a process where we are running a simultaneous experiment between two pages to see which performs better. It is a method for validating that any new addition or change to your webpage will actually improve it’s conversion rate. An A/B test consists of creating alternative pages for a specific page, showing each of them to a predetermined percentage of visitors. In a classic A/B test, we test two versions – Version A is commonly the existing design (the “control”) and version B is the “challenger”.

An A/B test is the easiest and most common type of landing page test to conduct. Testing is also done between several versions of a page (A/B/C/D testing), but often still called A/B testing.

This is how the process works:

A/B tests are often used to experiment with page design options that vary dramatically, including position of text and pictures, background colors, number of pictures on the page, use of icons and navigation structure. The tests usually involve fewer combinations with more extreme changes.

A/B testing should be a part of a structured approach for improving your conversion rates. In a survey done by Econsultancy and RedEye, 74% of the survey respondents who reported having a structured approach to conversion also stated they had improved their sales.

A structured A/B split testing process for better conversion rates

A/B testing is a part of a wider, holistic conversion rate optimization process and should always be viewed as such. Doing A/B testing without thinking about your online goals and user behavior in general will lead to ineffective testing. When done correctly, you can achieve good, measurable results in a short timeframe.

A structured approach to improving your conversion rates needs to be a continuous process of improvement. It is a cycle of Measurement, Prioritization, and Testing. Each of these stages of the cycle have a goal and a purpose, leading to the next stage. So for your A/B testing to be successful, we will have to start from the beginning.

Step 1) Measure your website’s performance

To continually improve your conversion rates, start by properly measuring your website’s performance. We want to know what is happening and why it’s happening.

What is happening: Make sure you are getting actionable data from Google Analytics

1) Define your business objectives

This is the answer to the question: “Why does your website exist?” Make your objectives DUMB – Doable, Understandable, Manageable, Beneficial. Companies often fail in web analytics because their objectives are not simple to understand or measure.

Example: A business objective for an online flower store is to “Increase our sales by receiving online orders for our bouquets.”

2) Define your website goals

Goals come from your business objectives and are mostly strategic in nature. So if we were to continue with the business objective example of increasing our bouquet sales, we would have to:

1) Do x – Add better product images
2) Increase y – Increase clickthrough rates
3) Reduce z – Reduce our shopping cart abandonment rate

Goals are your priorities, expressed as simply as possible. Before you start working on your data, make sure you have them defined and properly set up in Google Analytics.

3) Define your Key Performance Indicators

KPIs are metrics (numbers).

“A key performance indicator (KPI) is a metric that helps you understand how you are doing against your objectives.” – Avinash Kaushik

A metric becomes a KPI only when it is measuring something connected to your objectives.

Example: Our flower store’s business objective is to sell bouquets. Our KPI could be number of bouquets sold online.

This is the reason why you need to have your business objectives clearly defined – without them, you will be unable to identify your KPI’s. If you have proper KPIs and look at them periodically, you will keep your strategy on track.

4) Define your target metrics

Our flower store sold 57 bouquets last month. Is that good? Or devastatingly bad? For your KPIs to mean something for you, they need target metrics. Define a target for every KPI that is important to you. For our imaginary flower store, we can define a monthly target of 175 bouquets sold.

Now you have a framework which will help you insure that the work you will be doing is relevant to your business goals.

Why is it happening: Talk to your visitors

Getting real feedback from your visitors is invaluable. Use surveys to discover your visitors’ objectives. Set up entry surveys to find out why they are visiting your site and exit surveys to find out if their goals were fulfilled.

You can find what is happening on your site by using Google Analytics – What features they use, where they exit and who is profitable. But Analytics doesn’t tell you the why behind this. This is where qualitative data comes in. Qualitative data is perfect for finding out why problems occur.

The best way to get qualitative data from your visitors is through surveys. Your goal is to find out why visitors buy and why they leave without purchasing.

Here are some ideas for gathering qualitative data:

Add an exit survey on your site, asking why your visitors didnt complete the goal of the site
Add an exit survey on your thank-you pages for finding out why your visitors converted
Perform usability testing with members of your target group
Send out a feedback surveys to your clients to find out more about them and their motives

If a large amount of people click on your e-book ad, but only a few people actually buy after seeing the price, you will want to dig deeper into the problem. In this example, you could put up a survey, asking people if they have any questions that the page doesn’t answer. You can also survey people who have already bought your book, to see what made them buy.

To find out what could bring the biggest gains, look for trends in your customer feedback

You will start noticing trends in people’s responses after you’ve collected over 50 of them. Often times, we find that the site hasn’t addressed an important objection of your client. The main take-away is, that qualitative data will help you understand which elements will have the highest impact when running an A/B test.

Think about how you could spot emerging trends with your customer feedback. When something pops up, you can dive deeper to find out exactly what is going on.

Use segmentation to get actionable data

The problem with using site averages in your testing is that you are missing out on what is going on inside the average (the segments).

An experiment that seemed to be performing poorly might have actually been successful, but only for a certain segment. For example, our experiment may have shown that a variation of our mobile landing page is not performing well. When looking into the segments though, we may see that it is performing exceptionally well for Android users, but badly for iPhone users. When not looking at segments, you can miss this detail.

Never report a metric (even the most hyped or your favorite KPI) without segmenting it a few levels deep. That is the only way to get deep insights into what that metric is really hiding or to see what valuable information you can use.” – Avinash Kaushik

To understand segments, we need to understand dimensions. A dimension is any attribute of a visitor to your website. A dimension can be a source where they came from (a country, URL, etc.) , technical information like the browser they are using or their activity on the site (pages they looked at, images they opened). A segment is made up of a group of rows from one or more dimensions.

By default, a lot of the data you get is useless in reality. The number of visits to your site doesnt really give you any actionable information. To get actionable data for testing, you need to segment the data you have, using dimensions. You can also split test for single segments of your traffic, which is a part of Behavioural targeting.

Three good segmentation strategies to focus on

Avinash Kaushik has outlined a simple strategy for segmenting your traffic. Best ideas for taking action come from segmentation.

Segment by source - Separate people who arrive on your website from e-mail campaigns, google, twitter, youtube, etc. Find answers to questions like: Is there a difference between bounce rates for those segments? Is there a difference in Visitor Loyalty between those who came from Youtube versus those who came from Twitter? What products do people who come from Youtube care about more than people who come from Google?

Segment by behavior - Different groups of people behave differently on a website, because they have different needs or goals. For example, on an e-commerce store, you can separate out people who visit more than ten times a month versus those that visit only twice. Do these people look for products in different price ranges? Are they from different regions?

Segment by outcome - Separate people out by the products they purchase, by order size, by people who have signed up, etc. Focus on groups of people who have delivered similar outcomes and ask questions like the ones above.

When you have found your most profitable segments, you can keep them in mind when doing split testing. It’s good to know who your most profitable visitors are, before you start split testing.

Step 2) Prioritize your testing opportunities

Once you have your metrics in place and you know your goals, the next step is to prioritize what to test. Essentially, you could test anything, but everyone needs a place to start from. Google Analytics will give you a lot of data, but often it makes sense to start from split testing opportunities that promise the biggest gains.

Prioritize tests based on data – it will be your most valuable resource for prioritizing your tests.

Your homepage may not be the most important area of your site

See your “top landing pages” report from Google Analytics – You will likely see many different pages getting entrances, some even more than your home page.

Look at data on a page template level

When you add together the traffic from all of your pages that use the same template, you may see that they get a lot more traffic than your homepage. Do this when you need to determine opportunities for testing site-wide template layouts.

Prioritize pages with high potential for improvement

Look for pages that are not performing well. Your Analytics data can show some clearly problematic pages, like landing pages with high bounce rates, but some other areas may not be so obvious. If your problem is a high shopping-cart abandonment rate in the checkout process, Google Analytics will not be able to tell you that your visitors are finding it difficult to find shipping information from other pages, so they will go to the checkout process just to see that information. If you only work on optimizing your shopping cart views, you may not be able to fix the problem – you need to be also looking at your product and category pages.

When looked at separately, none of your information sources will perfectly identify split testing opportunities. You need to look at several pages together.

Top exit pages - This is the last page that someone sees before leaving your site. Labeled “% Exit” in Google Analytics, it will show you the percentage of visitors who leave your site immediately after viewing the page. Top exit-rate pages can identify problem areas.

A conversion funnel consists of two parts: The persuasive end (top of the funnel) and the transactional end (bottom of the funnel). The persuasive end includes the most-viewed areas of you site like your homepage, category pages, product pages. These are the areas of your site where you are getting the visitor interested in your product or service. The bottom end of your funnel is where conversion happens – Visitors buy the product, sign up or contact you. Most of the data we have looked at so far has been focused on the persuasive end of the funnel, but we also need to look at the bottom of the funnel.

Look at funnel drop-off rates

A funnel in Google Analytics focuses on the bottom end of the funnel. If you have your funnels correctly set up, you can gain valuable split testing information from it. Look for sudden drop-off rates in the funnel – for example if only 18% of the traffic proceeds from step 2 to step 3 in the checkout area, you have a problem in step 2. If you’ve identified a drop-off step in your transactional funnel, you should ask yourself why the problem is happening:

What information were they looking for?
Is anything stopping them from taking action on the page?
What were they expecting to see on the page?
Where are the visitors coming from?
Are they not motivated enough to proceed?

Answers to these questions should give a good amount of ideas for split testing.

Prioritize tests based on value and cost

Start with high-value, low-cost testing ideas. An example of this can be testing variations in a checkout process step that is showing significant abandoment rates compared to previous steps. Widerfunnel’s PIE Framework is great for prioritizing:

Potential – How much potential for a conversion rate increase does this testing opportunity have?
Importance - How important is this page? How many visitors will be impacted from the test? What is the traffic volume? What is the cost of the traffic? What is the quality of the traffic? What is the impact on ROI?
Ease - How easy is it to test on the identified page? What are the barriers, both technical and political, to testing that surround this page.

Quantify your opportunities based on this criteria in a scale from 1 to 10. This will give you a good test priority list. You can use the PIE Framework table to get a good overview:

Framework table image from Widerfunnel

Prioritize pages that are important

Pages that have the highest volume should be the most important ones for testing. You have probably identified many pages that perform worse than you would like them to, but if they don’t have a high volume of expensive traffic, you should not count them as priorities.

Pages with a high volume of traffic are more important

You need pages with high traffic for completing your experiments within a reasonable timeframe. Pages with more than 30,000-monthly, unique visitors can reach statistical significance in a few weeks. With a lower level of traffic, you need to run them over a longer period of time. Because tests on high-traffic pages finish sooner, you can move on to the next tests faster, which will speed up your optimization process.

Look for:

Most-visited pages – Look for information on unique visitors. When looking at the number of overall pageviews, your conversion data will get skewed.
Top landing (entry) pages – When looking at the most-visited pages, you will see the most popular pages on your site. You also need to look at the most visited pages that people see when they first arrive on your site.
Pages with expensive visits – When choosing between two pages with similar traffic and conversion rates, pick the one with a higher cost of traffic for a better split-testing ROI.

Step 3) Testing

The reason for the in-depth analysis techniques described above is to get a clear understanding about what is happening on your website and find areas where A/B testing can bring the best results. Now let’s start with setting up your test:

1) Form a clear hypothesis for your test

A hypothesis will define why you believe a problem occurs. If your problem is high abandonment rate in your checkout process, your hypothesis for the reason of that occurring may be that “People start questioning our worth after seeing grammar mistakes ”.

After you have defined your problem and articulated your hypothesis, you can start to come up with specific split-testing variations. Clearly defining your hypothesis will help you come up with testing variations that give meaningful results.

An example of a hypothesis in action:

Problem: Less than one percent of visitors sign up for our newsletter.

Hypothesis: “Visitors don’t see the value in signing up for our newsletter. Adding three bullet points about the benefits will increase signup rates.”

In this case, we would try placing a good summary of benefits the newsletter member would get from joining the newsletter. Even if the original version works better in your A/B test, you learned something about your visitors. You clearly defined why you did the test and can draw conclusions based on the outcome.

A good hypothesis:

Is testable – Your hypothesis is measurable, so that it can be used in testing
Has a goal of solving conversion problems – Split testing is done to solve specific conversion problems
Gains market insights – Besides increasing your conversion rates, split testing will give you information about your clients. A well-articulated hypothesis will let your split testing results give you information about your customers.

2) The importance of testing to statistical relevance

Ignoring statistical confidence while running an A/B test is worse than not running a test at all. The results will give you confidence that you know what works for your site, when in reality, you don’t know more than before running the test.

You need to have sufficient volume in test groups, results and the differences between them. If we were to toss a coin 1,000 times, we would reduce the influence of chance, but still get slightly different results with each trial.

The statistical significance of your experiment should be over 95%. This way you can be sure that your results are valid and not based on chance. It is a measure of confidence.

Testing to statistical relevance is an important subject. Read more about this here

Test for revenue

At the end of the day, revenue is what matters. An increase in conversion rates may sometimes mean a decrease in revenue, if you are not tracking the correct indicators. Let’s imagine that you are selling watches online and suddenly increased your prices by 25%. Your conversion rates will probably drop, but your overall revenue may increase, if the demand for your product is high enough for people to still be buy.

What to test – the low-hanging fruit

You should always see your own analytics and get customer feedback for any hypotheses you test. But for a general guideline, here are some of the elements that have historically given good results:

Call-To-Actions – Placement, wording, size
Copywriting – Value propositions, product descriptions
Forms – Their length, field types, text on the forms.
Layout – Homepage, content pages, landing pages
Product pricing – Try testing for revenue by testing your prices
Images – Their placement, content and size
Amount of content on the page (short vs. long).

4) Learn from your results and start over

“Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.” – David Ogilvy

This is the one rule of marketing that surpasses all others. No matter how well your landing pages or e-mails may be doing, they can always be doing better. By not having a goal for constant improvement, you’re leaving money on the table and letting your competition get ahead of you.

Not all split tests will be successful. You are doing well if one in five split tests will improve your conversion rates. Split-testing will simply give you a new baseline to improve upon. You will start seeing considerable website performance improvements after a number of different split tests.

Considering how competitive today’s online market is, if you are not constantly tracking and optimizing, you are going to get left behind, and outsold, by people who are.

A/B testing considerations

Be aware of the local maximum

Most A/B testing is done one variable at a time. You would test headlines, button text, images etc. These variables are simple to test, your results will be clear and your next step will be obvious. By using only one isolated variable, you can be more confident in your results. There’s a downside though.

The argument against only testing single variables is that if you continue to do this for a longer period of time, it will be impossible for you to arrive to a much better design. Instead, you will be improving your existing design in small increments and get stuck in what is called the Local Maximum. This means that you hit a glass ceiling in your design and without a big change, you will be unable have larger gains.

SEO considerations

Google openly endorses split testing, because the goal is to come up with site versions that most accurately reflect what your visitors are seeking, this makes sense. But there are a couple of things you should consider:

Don’t run your experiments longer than needed
If your experiment has been running longer than what Google would normally expect from a split test, it may penalize your site. The general rule is to update your site with the winning variation as soon as you are sure of the statistical significance of the test. Google wants to prevent people from deceiving the search engines with duplicate content.

Use rel=”canonical”
Instead of using a noindex meta tag on your variation page, use rel=canonical. If you are testing two different variations of your homepage, you don’t want the search engines to not index them. You just need the search engines to understand that your variations are what they are – variations of the original URL. Using noindex in a situation like this may create problems later.

Use 302 instead of 301
When you need to redirect a visitor to one of you variations, use a 302 temporary redirection method instead of the permanent 301 version. You want Google to keep the original URL in its index.

Forget about A/A testing

A/A testing is used to validate your test setup – if your variations display correctly and your software is reporting the right numbers. The biggest problem with A/A testing is that both setting it up and running it takes time, which could be used instead for doing more split testing.

“The volume of tests you start is important but even more so, is how many you finish every month.” – Craig Sullivan

It will be quicker for you to just properly test your experiments before going live. To make sure your variations are displaying as they should in different browsers, use cross-browser testing. For checking the numbers, use your split-testing and analytics packages together on every test.

If, for whatever reason, you still need to do an A/A test, consider an A/B/A test, or 25/50/25 split, instead. There is a better way though – segmentation.

For more on this issue, see this great post from Craig Sullivan

Avoid the percentage confusion

Besides significance, the other common problem A/B tests have is quoting the percentages. Since conversion is measured in percentages, there are two ways to be quoting them:

1) Change as the numerical difference between the two variations
2) Change as the amount by which one variation is larger than the other

Normally, version 2 is used when quoting conversion rate improvements, but make sure you know this for sure before deciding anything based on the numbers.

Integrate your A/B testing process with Conversion Rate Optimization methodologies

Your A/B testing efforts will bring better returns when you execute them within a CRO framework. Different agencies have come up with different versions for this. Here are some of them:

The Conversion Rate Experts Methodology

The CRE Methodology™

Conversion Rate Experts have developed a systematic process for guiding a business through a series of steps towards better conversion rates.

Building To The Ultimate Yes by MEClabs

Building To The Ultimate Yes by MECLABS

MEClabs has created a funnel that represents a series of decisions taken by the prospective customer. The idea revolves around the customer taking small decisions step by step, “micro-yeses”, which will ultimately lead towards the Ultimate Yes, or the sale.

The Kaizen Plan by Widerfunnel

The Kaizen Plan by Widerfunnel

The idea is to prioritize conversion testing opportunities and implement the right experiments, which will drive the most impact-filled results. This will help you to maximize your conversion rate improvement.

A Structured Approach to Conversion Rate Optimization by RedEye

A Structured Approach to Conversion Rate Optimization

Together with eConsultancy, RedEye has used findings from three years of research to produce a structure which should help marketers understand what actions will have the greatest improvement on website conversion rates.

Mobile considerations

Visitors interact with their mobile devices through tapping, so their ability to quickly locate and hit these tapping areas is key to satisfying mobile conversion rates. When testing on mobile screens, make an effort to begin testing elements related to the user experience and design of the site, a.k.a. the navigational elements.

Mobile analytics generally fall into two categories – 1) Tracking how people interact with websites through a mobile browser; 2) In-app analytics. Let’s briefly touch on both of these categories:

1) Testing in a mobile browser

If your site’s mobile version has enough traffic going through it, run an A/B test on it. The smaller sized screen forces users to focus more on what is relevant, giving you ample opportunities in the conversion area. In 2012, nearly 34% of US consumers purchased from a mobile phone and these numbers are increasing everyday.

What to test on a mobile site:

Call-To-Action buttons – You may see results way more successful than on a desktop version here. On a desktop screen, the CTA button will not take more than 2% of the screen real-estate. On a mobile device you have the opportunity to make your CTA button take 25-50% of the screen real estate. You can test any standard property on your button size, copy and visual design.
Navigation – You will need to change the site navigation anyway for your mobile views. This is a good opportunity to direct visitors directly to the most important page content. Think of mobile navigation as a tool for helping your visitors achieve their goal and remove anything that can get in the way.
Copywriting – Since the screen real estate of mobile devices is small, you will have a chance to momentarily focus your visitor’s full attention on your value proposition. Test the wording carefully.
Forms – You can experiment with the design and amount of fields, dropdowns and error messaging.

Google Analytics for mobile tracking

Google Analytics has a mobile section, but it includes both mobile phones and tablets. Accessing a website on a tablet is a different experience from a mobile phone, so make sure you use extra filters for cleaner data.

Compare your site performance (visit duration, bounce rate, conversion rate, etc) for mobile visitors vs. desktop visitors for insights into areas that may cause trouble for your visitors.

PS: Google Analytics only tracks visitors from browsers that support javascript. There are additional analytics solutions available for tracking traffic from non-supporting browsers.

Give your mobile visitors the content they prefer

Use a previously-set advanced segment (where you have filtered out any non-mobile traffic) and apply that to your All Pages report. You will get a good overview on what pages your mobile visitors are most likely to look at. You may find that your mobile visitors are looking for a different type of content than your desktop visitors.

This information can be helpful in testing your mobile menus – You can bring out the content your mobile visitors want to see the most, creating a navigation menu different from your desktop version. Test this to see if you can achieve higher conversion rates.

For more information about Google Analytics for mobile platforms, see this thorough post by Bridget Randolph.

2) Testing in applications

Google Analytics has a separate tool for measuring and testing variations in your mobile applications. The main difference from testing in a browser is that without putting in some thought, you will have a slower reiteration cycle. You need to upload every test to the app store and wait for your users to update their apps. This means you should carefully think through what you want to track and test in your application before you release it. It will be more difficult to change this after your app has been downloaded.

How is Multivariate Testing different?

When you perform a multivariate test, you are not testing a different version of a web page like you are with an A/B test. You are performing a far more subtle test of the elements inside one web page .

A/B tests are often used to experiment page design options that vary dramatically, including position of text and pictures, background colors, number of pictures on the page, use of icons and navigation structure. Implementing such tests using the multivariate technique is possible, but it is technically challenging.

A/B tests usually involve fewer combinations with more extreme changes; multivariate tests involve many more combinations and variations.

A/B testing is a great testing method if you need meaningful results fast. Because the changes from page to page are so stark, it will be easier to tell which page is most effective. It is also the right method to choose if you don’t have a ton of traffic to your site. Because of the multiple variables being tested in a multivariate test, you’ll need a highly trafficked site to get meaningful results with MVT.

The point of the multivariate test is to give you an idea of which elements on a web page play the biggest role in letting you achieve the objective of that page. Multivariate tests are more complicated and best suited for more advanced marketing testers, as it tests multiple variables and how they interact with one another, giving far more possible combinations for the site visitor to experience. It is not uncommon for a multivariate test to exceed 50 or more combinations.

Case studies for inspiration

Value Proposition:

Citycliq increased their conversion rates by 90% after experimenting with Value Propositions

Citycliq was testing their value propositions to see what converts the best. Eventually, they concluded that the value proposition with the “Purest, most direct representation of their product” was the winner.

Call To Action:

Barack Obama raised 60 million dollars by running an A/B test

During the election period, the Obama team ran several A/B tests on the campaign’s landing page. The goal was to get people to sign up with their e-mail addresses. A/B testing generated additional 2,880,000 e-mail addresses, which translated to an extra 60 million dollars in donations.

Images:

DHL achieved a 98% conversion rate increase

The challenger page increased the size of the contact form. They also replaced a general logistics image with the image of an actual DHL emplyee.

A/B testing resources

Testing tools:

Free

Google Content Experiments
Formerly known as Google Website Optimizer, which will be discontinued from August 1. It is a robust and free testing platform integrated directly into Google Analytics. Be sure to check out the Multi-Armed Bandit option for an interesting alternative to classic split testing.

Modesty
You need programming skills for setting it up. A robust, basic A/B testing tool.

Paid

Visual Website Optimizer
A simple to use A/B testing tool, used by businesses and agencies. Besides having more complex tools and advanced testing, it lets you set up simpler variations (copywriting changes) without needing to create a new page. Clickmaps and visitor segmentation capabilities are built in. It has good mobile A/B testing abilities and a free trial.

Optimizely
Lets you track visitor engagement, clicks, conversions and any other metric that’s important for your website. Has a nice custom goal tracking option built in. Free trial.

Convert.com
New kid in the block, looks very proimising.

Unbounce
Specialized landing page creator with built-in A/B testing.

For large businesses

Adobe Test&Target
Enterprise-level testing tool from Adobe. Integrated into the larger Marketing Cloud pakcage. Has automated personalization options for behavioral targeting.

Maximyser
Has a plethora of options for split testing, multivariate testing, segmentation, behavioral targeting, personalization. Separate options for Mobile and Social platforms.

Supporting tools

A/B Split Test Significance Calculator by VWO
A widely used tool for calculating the significance of your A/B testing results.

A/B Split and Multivariate Test Duration Calculator by VWO
The calculator allows you to calculate maximum duration for which your test should run.

Crazyegg, Inspectlet, Clicktale and Mouseflow
Heatmap software for tracking your visitor’s behavior on your site. You can get good data for hypotheses generation.

Showcase of A/B tests

Which Test Won
Guess which variation has been more successful and see an archive of A/B tests. Can be used for getting A/B testing ideas.

Surveys

Qualaroo
This is for surveying visitors that are currently surfing your site. We use this in our agency. Allows you to set up behavior-triggered surveys to find out why your customers are behaving the way they do.

Fluidsurveys
A great tool for getting feedback from your visitors – both when abandoning the shopping cart and also when completing a purchase. A lot of extra tools for analyzing responses. Works well on mobile browsers.

Surveymonkey
Surveymonkey has been around for a long time and offers a stable experience. Has good analytical tools for analyzing your responses.

Google Docs
Free and easy to use. Data is collected into spreadsheets which makes the data easy to analyze.

Typeform
The prettiest survey tool of all.

In Summary

A/B testing is about knowing your visitors. You will learn valuable insights, because you will “know” instead of “thinking” about their preferences. You should always integrate A/B testing into a larger conversion optimization framework for good results. In the end, the testing is all about knowing if your hypotheses are right, and if your conversion plan is on the right course.

The main reason for doing split testing is to maximize the conversion potential of your website. It makes sense to invest in conversion rate optimization before spending money on large-scale advertising campaigns. After a while your conversion funnel will be effective enough that you can transfer your winning campaigns to other media. Because your core is optimized so well, by the time you go to offline media, your campaigns will convert well enough to pay off.

Key Takeaways

Make sure you are getting actionable data from Google Analytics – To make use of data, you need to have goals first. Define your target metrics.
Use qualitative surveys – Besides knowing what is going on, you also need to know why.
Segment – It’s the only way to get information that is actually valuable.
Prioritize – Test pages with higher potential first.
Form a hypothesis – A/B testing has to start from a clearly defined hypothesis.
Statistical relevance – Never stop split testing before reaching a significance percentage of at least 95%.
Never stop testing – No matter how well your landing pages or e-mails may be doing, they can always do better.
A/B testing is part of a conversion rate optimization framework – Pick a framework and work on it constantly to maximize your site’s potential.

Continue reading →

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Social Commerce Revenue By Industry [Infographic]

Linda Bustos — Fri, 24 May 2013 08:05:49 +0000

There’s a lot of mystery around the revenue driving potential of social media marketing. This week’s infographic comes from AddShoppers, which keeps tabs on social conversion data across networks for over 10,000 online retailers. The data can also be segmented by industry, cool stuff.

Do the numbers surprise you? They did me. Please chime in in the comments what you think, and tweet your favorite stats.

Tweetables

The average social share for commercial products produces $2.04 in value Tweet this

The average email share (friend to friend) is worth $17.93 in revenue Tweet this

The average Google+ share is worth $10.78 in revenue Tweet this

The average Facebook share is worth $2.35 in revenue Tweet this

The average Twitter share is worth $1.62 in revenue Tweet this

The average Pinterest share is worth $1.25 in revenue Tweet this

Facebook accounts for 39% of social revenue vs 20% Twitter, 16% email Tweet this

Apparel is the most social-shared retail category followed by general stores and electronics Tweet this

Cameras are the least socially shared consumer product but has the highest per-share value at $19.75 Tweet this

Tumblr beats Facebook, Google+ and Twitter in social AOV at $200.33. Google+ next at $192.77 Tweet this

Continue reading →

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10 Killer Posts on Conversion and Design

Syndicated Contributor — Fri, 24 May 2013 06:30:45 +0000

Where would Bonnie be without Clyde? Where would conversion be without Design? (Image source)

This is the final and last day of our Conversion Centered Design week. Check out the great posts from earlier in the week (and remember to download the ebook for the full scoop on how design and psychology can be used to increase your conversion rates.)

Monday: A free ebook “The Ultimate Guide to Conversion Centered Design” – (68 page PDF)

Tuesday: 5 Tested Conversion Design Tactics You Should Put to Work. Right Now.

Wednesday: 36 Creative Landing Page Design Examples – A Showcase and Conversion Critique

Thursday: How To Design Call-to-Action Buttons That Convert

Friday (today) : 10 Killer Posts on Conversion and Design

Like Bonnie & Clyde, conversion and design are a legendary pair. These 10 posts on the dynamic duo – conversion and design, not Bonnie & Clyde – will make killer conversions (pun intended). And let’s be honest, there aren’t too many (awesome) conversion centered design posts out there, so when you find 10 that are this good, they’re going to make your day.

Let’s get to it. Here are the 10 design for conversion posts that will go down in history.

1. How to Write a Landing Page for Readers, Scanners, and Bottom-Line Viewers

Post by Kathryn Aragon

Fact: if nobody’s reading your landing pages, your conversions will always fall flat. You need to make sure that you leverage your design to reach all types of people — “readers, scanners, and bottom-line viewers.” What’s key is that you tell your story in five different places: in the heading, subtitle, body, subheads and close. P.S. Conversion-centered design should be integrated with your brand story.

2. 40 Checkout Page Strategies to Improve Conversion Rates

Post by Sherice Jacob

If you run an ecommerce business, you’ve probably been dealing with shopping cart abandonment and conversion rate drops at checkout. Don’t just sit there and watch your company miss out on sales. Instead, empower your shoppers with the knowledge they need to make a buying decision that they feel good about. Here’s a checklist of everything you can possibly do to rock your ecommerce strategy from design and layout to optimizing product details, rewards, special offers, payment systems, and shipping information.

3. Is There a Science to Picking the Colors that Work Well Together?

Post by Quora

Should psychology underscore your color scheme? You bet. This Quora discussion thread will introduce you to everything you want to know (and more) about color. You’ll learn: whether to chose a pure color, tint or shade; how to align your color palette with the emotions you need to drive sales; and how to improve readability.

4. How to Create Irresistible Calls to Action

Post by Renee Warren

When was the last time you gave your flat ‘click here’ buttons a good look? Onboardly co-founder, Renee Warren, explains that it’s the little things that give CTAs their conversion-centered edge. Pay attention to your colors, shape, placement, and core messaging. Most of all, remember that your buyers come to you with a range of tastes, perspectives, and values. Good design will empower you to become a master of persuasion.

5. [How to] Use Design Principles to Increase Conversions

Post by Oli Gardner

When in doubt, turn to your basics for guidance. Fundamental design principles (yes, the old-school ones) are essential for boosting conversions. This guide will walk you through the design concepts you wish you’d learned — from encapsulation to color and contrast, directional cues, and whitespace. What’s key is that you develop a design strategy that is equally persuasive and aesthetically pleasing.

6. Before & After: How to Fix 3 Egregious Website Design Error

Post by Rebecca Churt

Poor design has the potential to completely ruin your website’s potential. #truth. A disjointed site structure, for instance, is a user experience disaster waiting to happen. What good is information if there is no clear CTA or logical flow? Next, there are content-crammed websites that transform good information into chaotic overload. And then, there are the generic-looking website templates that scream ‘I’m gonna spam you’ to your visitors. Luckily these problems have quick fixes and straightforward solutions — Churt provides a super clear picture of what you need to do.

7. 28 Nice Landing Page Designs

Post by Brant Wilson

Even the most creative designers could benefit from a little inspiration. Here’s a roundup of some of the coolest landing page designs out there (although some of them are homepages, but they will give you inspiration none-the-less). The mix features a collection of startups, B2B focused brands, and consumer-driven social media tools. Learn from the best to give your conversion centered design an edge.

8. How to Optimize Responsive Design for Conversions

Post by Neil Patel

This meaty post is all about conversion-focused, responsive design. Don’t know what that is? It’s okay Neil explains in the post. He also highlights what conversion elements you should keep and shouldn’t keep when scaling for mobile and tablets. When it comes down to it, the most important thing you should do to increase conversion using mobile responsive design is to uncover what features your visitors consider to be vital.

9. Six Ways Marketers Can Get an Edge with Usability Testing

Post by UserTesting.com

“In order to market a product or service, you have to understand what people want.” Context is a key ingredient for your conversion and design strategies. It’s important that you look beyond the ‘what’ of your analytics to the ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ behind your customers’ key decisions. Testing is invaluable to the success of your conversion centered design strategy — so start testing early. Focus on several strategically selected personas, test your shopping cart, and test your competitors too. When it comes to testing, don’t hold back.

10. Beauty Pays: Beautiful Websites (and People) Get Better Results

Post by Peep Laja

Conversion optimization is a discipline that transcends form and function. Your marketing needs to be more than practical — it needs to be beautiful. People will judge your business by how your website (or landing page) looks. If you’re not putting your company’s best face forward, you could be missing out on key sales opportunities. Can you guess what one study pinpointed as the most common reason for mistrusting or rejecting a website? Web design. Conversion experts can’t escape the power of looks.

Your Turn

Jump right on into the conversation! What are the most valuable lessons you’ve learned about designing for conversion?

– Ritika Puri

Continue reading →

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Design For Engagement Live Video event

Syndicated Contributor — Fri, 24 May 2013 03:30:42 +0000

Join me on June 5th at 12 noon EDT for a FREE live video event via Livestream.

Design for Engagement Live Website Critiques

Wed Jun 5, 2013 12:00pm — 1:00pm EDT

Come join me in a free live online video event. I’ll be taking website suggestions from the audience and then discussing–on the spot–how to improve the persuasion and engagement of the various websites. While I’m reviewing and discussing each website, you’ll be participating through chat that all participants can see and respond to. We’ll review as many websites as we can get to 20 minutes and then we’ll have lots of time for Q&A. Email your suggestions to me (susan@theteamw) for websites you’d like to see reviewed ahead of time or put them in the comments here, and don’t miss this fun and educational opportunity.

To join the free Livestream event all you have to do is go to the Livestream event page on June 5th, at 12 noon Eastern US time. That’s it! No registration is necessary.

In the meantime, go to the event page now and you can click a link to put the event in your calendar, or follow the event for updates.

I hope you will join me, and don’t forget to submit ideas for the websites that will get the engagement critique, either here in the comments or email me at susan@theteamw.com

Continue reading →

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The Opportunity in ‘Magnificent White Spaces’

Syndicated Contributor — Fri, 24 May 2013 02:06:54 +0000

Research in the latest Ecommerce Quarterly (EQ1 2013) emphasizes the need to figure out how channels work together to engage and convert consumers. Continue reading →

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What to Test on an Ecommerce Site

Syndicated Contributor — Fri, 24 May 2013 01:10:59 +0000

In "19 Tools to Test your Site for Mobile Devices" and "23 Tools to Test your Ecommerce Site," we listed options to test an ecommerce site for mobile compatibility, usability, and performance. Ecommerce merchants should continually test their website... Continue reading →

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Web Site Reviews with Tim Ash and Charles Nicholls

(author unknown) — Thu, 23 May 2013 19:39:37 +0000

In a recent webinar, SiteTuners CEO Tim Ash and SeeWhy.com Founder Charles Nicholls reviewed web sites selling products like computer hardware and software, travel tours, and clothes. Among those critiqued was Zales's site, an online jewellery store. Here are their thoughts from the homepage to the company's remarketing campaign - some of these are general enough to be useful for most sites.

1. Entry Pop-up offer. Charles thinks this is good as even without an incentive, pop-ups can up to 3% subscription, compared to about 1% to1.5% subscription rate without the pop-up. However, Tim, although not necessarily against collecting information early in the process, is wary of anything that blocks customer on the way to the website or interrupts the experience. He advises to test if having customers give out information early on will not cause an increase in the bounce rate. He says exit pop-ups are okay since customers are about to bail anyway.

2. Subscription box. On the homepage, the subscription box is at the bottom. If the company is not going to use an e-mail collection pop-up, then the box should be at the top. Zales does a good job of indicating beside the subscription box why the customer needs to give out the e-mail address – to get offers, promotions, and discounts.

3. Product details page. The headline is small and is on the right. It should be placed in the middle of the page because it’s what the whole page is about. . The call-to-action should also be changed from “Add to Bag” to “Add to Cart.” The former, although clever, veers away from convention and will require the customer to go through the whole mental process of figuring out what the metaphor means.Tim also pointed out that as the product only has three Facebook likes, the likes should not be advertised next to the CTA.

4. Shopping cart summary page. The page's color theme is pretty bland with shades of gray, black, and white. They also use red, and that's a dangerous color to use because it usually signals an error. “Free Shipping” shouldn't be in red as it's a great benefit. Also, “Free FedEx Express Saver Shipping on orders $149 or more,” which is buried deep in the site, should be brought up higher and be made prominent.

The page also has a lot of calls-to-action, and that does not help the customer prioritize. Others should be demoted to text links. Tim and Charles also pointed out that upselling of higher priced earrings on the shopping cart summary page is not advisable because it will make the customer wander instead of completing the checkout process. The same is true with the promotional code text input field. Asking for a promotional code at this point will make the customer go find one (the company might also end up paying an affiliate fee if the customer looks and finds a code elsewhere). It should instead be made more discreet -- a text link that opens a text input field.

Shopping cart summary page above the fold

Shopping cart summary page below the fold

At the bottom of the page, it has “Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode” logos. This may sound positive, but according to Charles, his team did a consumer research that showed that 10% of consumers will bail once they see these logos. These logos tell the customer that there's an extra step which will require them to key in a password which they can never remember.

5. Remarketing e-mail. When a customer bails, Zales automatically subscribes the customer to their newsletter and sends a welcome e-mail. Charles points out that this - a commonly used remarketing technique by the Internet Retailers 250- is okay, because it means you’re not ignoring the customer. The downside is that the e-mail is in no way related to the customer’s purchase.

Companies should work on a more personalized remarketing campaign especially since it really works well for high ticket items. Tim and Charles agree that e-mails should even be gender-targeted. In Zales's case, their e-mail could say “Imagine these earrings on her” if it's for a male buyer. A big picture of the item on the cart should also be included to create a sense of continuity of desire.

Tim is doing live landing page reviews on the second day of Conversion Conference in Chicago. Make sure you save your seat now.

eadline (name of the product) is small. Should be placed in the center of the page because it’s what the whole page is about. Product name feels weird being on the right.

• Usability: CTA on the product detail page is “Add to Bag” instead of “Add to Cart” – should use convention, veering away from convention makes the customer think. “Add to Cart” is the correct metaphor. “Add to Bag” makes the customer go through the whole mental process to figure out what it means.

• http://www.zales.com/product/index.jsp?productId=13315578 – product only has 3 facebook likes, should not be advertised next to the CTA

Continue reading →

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Prototyping To Discover Who Should Be Involved

Syndicated Contributor — Thu, 23 May 2013 17:28:48 +0000

When you prototype, you can learn a ton of things about what you’re building and how you should build it. Prototyping is an exploratory process, revealing details and ideas that only emerge once you have something in front of you.

There’s one thing you can learn while prototyping that nobody ever talks about: Who should be involved in this project?

Design is a team sport. Building and supporting a product or service will need the assistance of others.

The traditional approach to involving these other folks is to hand them a requirements document and say, “Here. Build this.” The hardcore traditionalists spend weeks or even months describing every mind-numbing detail in the document, pretending the people they hand it to won’t have anything useful to contribute. Then the tradidtionalists wonder why these folks are pissed for treating them like they are idiot savants.

Using a prototyping alternative, we can show what we’re doing to those folks who will be helping us get it out the door and supporting it once it’s out in the world. We can ask them questions like, “Is this the best way to get these results?”

More importantly, we can ask these folks, “Who else should we be talking to? What might those folks tell us about what we’re trying to do?” Suddenly, we’re building a team of collaborators instead of trying to mimic a poorly-constructed factory assembly line.

If you’re prototyping, are you asking, “who else should be looking at this? Who else should be playing with us as we try out these ideas?”

Continue reading →

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