Identifying conversion issues

According to user experience consulting firm Nielsen Norman Group, a well-designed interface in an e-commerce is able to increase the conversion rate by up to 83%. As you saw in, Chapter 1, Understanding UX and Its Importance, a simple change in a button can increase sales by up to $300 million, as proved by Jared Spool. 

In another example, travel company Expedia managed to earn an additional $12m in profit thanks to a small UX change in one of its forms. The original version included an optional field that asked users to input their company name, which caused confusion for the users. Simply by removing the optional field, Expedia managed to increase conversions to the point that it achieved $12m in additional profit. 

By using UX techniques, designers around the world have been facilitating user's steps in order to drive them to complete a specific task or even take them to a specific place on their websites or apps. In one of the articles for the User Testing Blog, the UX specialist Jennifer Winter highlighted that:

She uses a good analogy to highlight how important it is to consider the user perspective as we think about conversion. If you were a horse and there is a place to have water nearby, what exactly would drive your decision to go there and check it out? What would make you think that maybe there might be someplace better only two farms from there? As she suggests, we should think about the whole user experience when they are interacting with a company; if not, we cannot motivate them in the right way to make it possible that they will take the actions that we expect. 

Through this analogy, she highlights that you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.

To create a great experience for the users, we should consider different aspects that will drive them to conversion. We can use Peter Morville's UX honeycomb to understand the aspects of an ideal user experience:

The following is an explanation of each of the hive combs:

• Useful: We should not be content with coloring the design proposed by the client. As professionals, we need to have the courage and creativity to question the usefulness of the products we design and apply our knowledge to define innovative solutions.
• Usable: Ease of use is nevertheless essential, but an interface focused simply on good human-computer interaction does not address all users' needs. In short, usability is necessary, but not sufficient.
• Desirable: Our pursuit of efficiency must be balanced by appreciation of the power and value of an image, identity, brand, and other elements of emotional design.
• Findable: We must strive to create a good navigation, where the contents are easily located so that users can always find what they need.
• Accessible: Just as there are buildings with elevators and ramps, our sites should be accessible to people with disabilities or with some special needs (more than 10% of the population).
• Credible: Thanks to the web credibility project, we can better understand which elements of the design influence the credibility of our project in the eyes of the user.
• Valuable: Our sites should add value to stakeholders. For nonprofits, the user experience must advance the mission. For profit-oriented organizations, it must contribute to meeting needs and optimizing consumer satisfaction.

If we keep in mind the horse's needs as given as an example by Jennifer, the diagram made by Morville helps us to think from the horse's perspective, and these would be the questions that we should be able to answer:

• Can the horse find water?
• Does the horse actually need water, or even want it?
• Can the horse physically get to the water easily?

To answer those questions based on Morville's honeycomb, we can use a few UX techniques.

One of the first things that we should do, as we saw in Chapter 2, Identifying UX Issues – UX Methodologies, is definitely to understand our users and their motivations to be on our website or app, using our service or product. As we saw in the previous chapters, for this mission, we have different methodologies to be used. For each project, we can use a combination of them, as we discussed before. The idea here is not only to know about demographics from a marketing perspective, but deeply understand the whole user journey and their real needs and thoughts related to your service or product.

If we go back to Jennifer Winter's horse analogy, our goal should be understanding the horse's feelings:

• Is the horse thirsty?
• Does the horse feel safe?
• Does the water look drinkable to the horse?
• Is the water conveniently located and easy to reach?
• Is there another trough closer to the horse?
• Have the horse's friends tried this water?
• What did they think?

We will keep questions like that in mind, in order to help us to understand better the  motivations behind the user's actions on your website/app or their use of your service/product. By understanding your user better, you will be able to understand what they need to do (and how easy it is to do it) in order to complete a task and accomplish their goal (buy something? Read an article? Engage with your brand? Download an app or a file? Complete a form? Subscribe a service?).