6. The dial won’t turn anymore
With thanks to @morys
PPC SEO
@OptimiseOrDie
7. Books, Research, The Web
@OptimiseOrDie
• We‟re still learning a lot more about the brain
• It‟s still very early days yet – and lots of big data involved
• More and more EEG (electrical) and MRI (scans) testing
• The US military plans to use MRI to recruit dogs – optimising for
fast & loyal learners(1)
• Usability testers now using multiple sensors during tests : EEG
headsets, Heart rate, Blood pressure, Skin conductivity,
temperature and even salivary hormones(2)
• You can even buy „Mind Control‟ games and toys now! (3)
• And just as this is all happening
• We get an explosion in new devices, contexts and ways of
interacting with brands and each other
• So the Psychological landscape of consumer emotions is being
better understood, whilst also being disrupted
• This is why I love my job!
8. Books, Research, The Web
@OptimiseOrDie
Whichtestwon.com
Unbounce.com
Kissmetrics.com
Uxmatters.com
RogerDooley.com
PhotoUX.com
TheTeamW.com
Baymard.com
Lukew.com
PRWD.com
15. Feedback / VOC tools
• Anything that allows immediate realtime onpage feedback
• Comments on elements, pages and overall site & service
• Can be used for behavioural triggered feedback
Kampyle
www.kampyle.com
Qualaroo
www.qualaroo.com
4Q
4q.iperceptions.com
Usabilla
www.usabilla.com
15
@OptimiseOrDie
16. Surveys & Forms Optimisation
Surveymonkey www.surveymonkey.com
Zoomerang www.zoomerang.com
SurveyGizmo www.surveygizmo.com
• If you do surveys or FORMS – checkouts, signups, lead
generation, read:
Caroline Jarrett : @cjforms
Luke Wroblewski : @lukew
• Informed by their work and with copywriting from
@stickycontent, we crafted a survey for Autoglass.
• We got a 35% clickthrough rate and a whopping 94%
form completion rate. 9 pages long. Sweet.
• Luke Wroblewski‟s work on Forms, Psychology, UX and
Design is the best in the world – and essential for anyone
working on a website.
@OptimiseOrDie
18. Guerrilla UX testing
• Mobile can be lots of fun
• Some low budget stuff you may know about already:
CamStudio (free)
www.camstudio.org
Mediacam AV (cheap)
www.netu2.co.uk
Silverback (Mac)
www.silverbackapp.com
Screenflow (Mac)
www.telestream.net
UX Recorder (iOS), Skype Hugging, Reflection
www.uxrecorder.com & bit.ly/tesTfm & bit.ly/GZMgxR 18
19. Som, feedbackRemote UX tools (P=Panel, S=Site recruited, B=Both)
Usertesting (B) www.usertesting.com
Userlytics (B) www.userlytics.com
Userzoom (S) www.userzoom.com
Intuition HQ (S) www.intuitionhq.com
Mechanical turk (S) www.mechanicalturk.com
Loop11 (S) www.loop11.com
Open Hallway (S) www.openhallway.com
What Users Do (P) www.whatusersdo.com
Feedback army (P) www.feedbackarmy.com
User feel (P) www.userfeel.com
Ethnio (For Recruiting) www.ethnio.com
Feedback on Prototypes / Mockups
Pidoco www.pidoco.com
Verify from Zurb www.verifyapp.com
Five second test www.fivesecondtest.com
Conceptshare www.conceptshare.com
UX Crowd tools
19
21. • People
• Products
• Businesses
• Organisations
• Recipes
• Events
• Music
• Local
• Video
• Reviews!
Huge increases in
CTR and Conversion
Microdata – Landing Page Zero
@OptimiseOrDie
22. • There are many split test examples of
review creative driving trust and sales
• Social signals increasingly important
• From hand picked
• To user driven
• To socially driven
• You must get a reviews infrastructure to
collect, respond to and use them on
other customers!
• Reviews are useful – they also SELL
“blah blah” Mrs S. Smith
“blah blah” Mrs S. Smith, Lee
“blah blah” Mrs S. Smith, Lee (read more)
“made up crap” – in quote marks
Reviews infrastructure
“Amazing Service…”
24. Photo UX
24 Jan 2012
• Persuasion / Influence /
Direction / Explanation
• Helps people process
information and stories
• Vital to sell an „experience‟
• Helps people recognise and
discriminate between things
• Supports Scanning Visitors
• Drives emotional response
short.cx/YrBczl
25. • Very powerful and under-estimated area
• I‟ve done over 20M visitor tests with people
images for a service industry – some tips:
• The person, pose, eye gaze, facial
expressions and body language – cause
visceral emotional reactions and big changes
in behaviour
• Eye gaze crucial – to engage you or to „point‟
Photo UX
24 Jan 2012@OptimiseOrDie
26. • Negative body language is a turnoff
• Uniforms and branding a positive (ball cap)
• Hands are hard to handle – use a prop to help
• For Ecommerce – tip! test bigger images!
• Autoglass and Belron always use real people
• In most countries (out of 33) with strong female
and male images in test, female wins
• Smile and authenticity in these examples is
absolutely vital
• So, I have a question for you
Photo UX
@OptimiseOrDie
36. Nudge Unit – Car Tax Renewals
• ANPR snap taken, reminder sent = 11% conversion
Add "Pay your tax or lose your [make of car]“
• Rises to 22% conversion
Add Photo from number plate camera?
• Rises to 33% conversion
Read More :
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/may/02/nudge-unit-has-it-worked
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/may/01/policy-francismaude
37. FREE Keyword Level Call Tracking?
Step 1 : Add a unique phone number on ALL channels
(or insert your own dynamic number)
Step 2 : For phones, add “Tap to Call” or “Click to Call”
• Add Analytics event or tag for phone calls!
• Very reliable data, easy & cheap to do
• What did they do before calling?
• Which page did they call you from?
• What PPC or SEO keyword did they use?
• Incredibly useful – this keyword level call data
• What are you over or underbidding for?
• Will help you shave 10, 20%+ off PPC
• Which online marketing really sucks?
37
@OptimiseOrDie
39. Desktops?
Step 1 : Add ‘Click to reveal’
• Can be a link, button or a collapsed section
• Add to your analytics software
• This is a great budget option!
Step 2 : Invest in call analytics
• Unique visitor tracking for desktop
• Gives you that detailed marketing data
• Easy to implement
• Integrates with your web analytics
• Let me explain…
39
40. So what does phone tracking get you?
• You can do it for free on your online channels
• If you’ve got any phone sales or contact operation, this will
change the game for you
• For the first time, analytics for PHONE for web to claim
• Optimise your PPC spend
• Track and Test stuff on phones, using web technology
• The two best phone A/B tests? You’ll laugh!
40
@OptimiseOrDie
41. Who?Company Website Coverage
Mongoose Metrics* www.mongoosemetrics.com UK, USA, Canada
Ifbyphone* www.ifbyphone.com USA
TheCallR* www.thecallr.com USA, Canada, UK, IT, FR, BE, ES, NL
Call tracking metrics www.calltrackingmetrics.com USA
Hosted Numbers www.hostednumbers.com USA
Callcap www.callcap.com USA
Freespee* www.freespee.com
UK, SE, FI, NO, DK, LT, PL, IE, CZ,
SI, AT, NL, DE
Adinsight* www.adinsight.co.uk UK
Infinity tracking* www.infinity-tracking.com UK
Optilead* www.optilead.co.uk UK
Switchboard free www.switchboardfree.co.uk UK
Freshegg www.freshegg.co.uk UK
Avanser www.avanser.com.au AUS
Jet Interactive* www.jetinteractive.com.au AUS
* I read up on these or talked to them. These are my picks.
41
42. • Optimisation can be used for evil!
• Either by accident (just stupid)
• Or by design, to trick people
wiki.darkpatterns.org/wiki/Home
Dark Persuasion
@OptimiseOrDie
46. Agile, Lean, Split Testing – need UX
@OptimiseOrDie
1. Disruption or continual product improvement needs the
customer at the heart of everything, even though the
landscape is often changing.
2. Although we try to use these techniques, they‟re sometimes
levers we pull without understanding why they work or how we
can best exploit them
3. Even new disruptive businesses like Uber and Airbnb – rely on
one thing – a brilliant experience that glues all parties together
in a delightful and carefully crafted messaging and feedback
loops.
4. Airbnb – Device, context, messaging, privacy, disputes
5. Mobile contextual experiences are our design future – get
used to understanding how context and device can shape the
psychology of the consumer
6. Companies without the test / measure / feedback / learn cycle
are vulnerable to leaner competition
47. The future of testing?
@OptimiseOrDie
Better inputs – tools, data
Social & Behaviour
Segmentation
Persona driven
Machine Learning
Growing research body
Deeper brain understanding
48. How is it working out for Craig?
• Methodologies are not Real Life ™
• It’s about the mindset of the team and
managers, not the tools or methodologies they
play with
• Not all my clients have all the working parts
• You should not be a methodology slave – feel free
to roll your own
• Use some, any techniques instead of ‘guessing’
• Blending Lean and Agile UX with conversion
optimisation techniques is my critical insight from
the last 5 years:
Belron World Conversion Rate Increase:
2009 +5%, 2010 +10%, 2011 +15%, 2012 +25%
Rush Hair (Within 3 months)
Bookings +77% and Phone +33%
• Don’t over complicate it. JFDI.
48
49. “Shut the fuck up and listen.
Listen some more.
Ask good questions.
Repeat.” Anonymous
“Changing behaviour is not as
complicated or as hard as you
think. Once you understand
human nature, it gets
surprisingly easy” Brian Solis
“I am not a number
I‟m a free man”
52. Photography Guidelines - Belron
• Groups, vans, stores, head
office, corporate guff = NO
• Single person – not groups or
even person + customer (ignoring
you)
• Open, Friendly, Natural, Smiling, E
ngaged, Alert = YES
• Smile best with eye crinkles
• Uniform – has huge effect, even
wearing branded hat improves
conversion
• Look straight at viewer or slightly
towards CTA
• No folded arms, arms on
hips, pointing, scowling, cheesy
smiles, hands behind
back, hanging useless by the
side, clasped by groin, fiddling with
hands
• Plain backgrounds only or free of
distractions
• Arms with prop instead – hold a
clipboard, rag, tool – I‟m working for
*you*
• Female images work best in almost
every country – they slay the guys
• Natural, authentic and not „model‟ or
„stock‟ image types work best for
people
• Some of our best performing images
would be rejected by advertisers as
„too ugly.
• Want to know more? Contact me or
check out the @brainlady
• Check out the Photo UX book
Notas do Editor
No – this isn’t me playing with your mind or winding you up before I start. It’s also not a request – it’s a plea, which I’ll be explaining today.
A small change to the programme today. I haven’t yet finished the materials for the top 30 questions and they’re taking a lot longer to explain than 1 hour! So – today you get two resources – this presentation and also access to all 30 questions as I record them. There’s brilliant stuff today about the principles and mechanics of how you can persuade, influence or shift emotions with customers. I’m going to explaining how you can start turning this into an optimisation programme. What tools, techniques, ways of thinking and customer data will you need to get the biggest shifts in behaviour?
And here’s a boring slide about me – and where I’ve been driving over 400M of additional revenue in the last few years. In two months this year alone, I’ve found an additional ¾ M pounds annual profit for clients. For the sharp eyed amongst you, you’ll see that Lean UX hasn’t been around since 2008. Many startups and teams were doing this stuff before it got a new name, even if the approach was slightly different. For the last 4 years, I’ve been optimising sites using the combination of techniques I’ll show you today.
Woohoo – this stuff is really popular – Derren brown’s been doing lots of interesting experiments recently, one of which I’ll touch on later. <click>And there are some great TV series around <click> which are great entertainment but probably make real psychologists cringe <click>This guy is new – so not watched him yet <click> Four Rooms is an excellent piece that brims with psychology, negotiating tactics and greed – wonderful <click>And a personal favourite – The Real Hustle – which shows how you can trick people very easily – fascinating collection of drinking tricks too <click>And last but not least – This isn’t a psychological programme but it’s like cock fighting for psychologists. Putting together completely incompatible and bitchy people, to pick around their homes whilst they get dinner cooked for them. It’s hilarious, cringe worthy, fascinating and repulsive – all at the same time. I can’t stop watching it <click>
So – what’s driving this change then? Well there have been great books on selling and persuading people – all the way back to ‘Scientific Advertising’ in 1923.And my favourite here is the Cialdini work – simply because it’s a great help for people to find practical uses for these techniques.I’ve also included some analytics and testing books here – primarily because they help so MUCH in augmenting our customer insight, testing and measurement efforts.There are lots of books with really cool examples, great stories and absolutely no fucking useful information you can use on your website – if you’ve read some of these, you’ll know exactly what I mean. These are the tomes I got most practical use from and I’d recommend you buy the whole lot – worth every penny.
And here are the most useful resources I regularly use or share with people. They have the best and most practical advice – cool insights but with practical applications.A special mention here to my friends at PRWD, who are one of the few companies blending Psychology, Split Testing and UX for superb gains in rapid time. Check out their resources section on their website.
These are all people on twitter who cover hybrid stuff – where usability, psychology, analytics and persuasive writing collide. If you follow this lot, you’ll be much smarter within a month, guaranteed.
But one of the biggest drivers has been with Toolkits. The investment made by Google in their Analytics product alone has transformed my life.I’m now able to very accurately measure and understand what might be driving losses, lack of engagement or inability to use a product.I can quantify it – not just in terms of potential gains or losses – but in actual revenue and profit numbers, based on the actual baskets.With multiple toolsets, I’m not reliant on one set of data – I can triangulate multiple sources to firm up or challenge my hypothesesAnd with the better numbers, I can prioritise – based on what sort of return we’ll get from fixing or testing stuffAnd that’s the critical point – these tools get you in a position to know more, in near realtime – that allows you to use the JFDI method – Just Fucking Do It.
On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog? Or do they? These session replay tools are interesting because they can take a good guess at where you’re looking on the screen – even whether you are male or female – based on tracking your display, mouse and keyboard entry. It’s like watching a video of their screen.You can then pull out recordings for people that behave or do things in a particular way and watch them. I like to watch them at 5 or 10 x speed – as I can get through hundreds in one day.What do you get then? Well – a very good sense for where people are struggling – but we also get a bit of the mind too.A lot of recordings show a strong correlation between where I expect eye gaze to be and where the mouse cursor is moving. It isn’t precise but it helps to see where people are jumping, scanning and scrolling around. A lot of people – 30-50% - display the ‘Karaoke Bouncing ball’ when reading text. They ‘bounce’ the mouse along the line of text, as they’re reading it. This happens on important stuff that gets noticed.You also get some other stuff – where people click that doesn’t do anything – people clicking on a picture, for example – but nothing happens.When I worked at Autoglass, I kept seeing people go to fill out a form and give up after scrolling up down up down, looking at the size of information they were looking at. During tests, I asked people about what they were doing – and they said ‘weighing up how much boring crap there was to fill in’. I simply reduced the form size in steps and watched the recordings. Bingo – we split the form into two pieces and got much higher conversion – it just looked too daunting.
And you’ve probably heard of the ‘fold line’ – well it’s bullshit because everyone has a setup. Screens are actually shrinking on desktop sites so you need to watch this, otherwise you’ll alter behaviour in some surprising ways. This screen shows that 99.2% of visitors can see the big fucking button. When it was lower due to page design, people missed it due to the white space around it.There are subtle clues you can give the user so they know to scroll – but avoiding the problem entirely is the best option. In this case, paying attention to the REAL screen sizes of visitors was easily 20% of the entire lift I got from this funnel.
And these tools are great – because they let us ask the customer in context for their feedback. You can even trigger feedback when people exhibit specific behaviour or don’t generate the outcome you desire. This lets you target and find out more from these segments – by analysing responses and verbatim feedback.There is NO excuse not to have these on your site – as 4Q is completely free (for 100 responses a month) and the rest are very reasonably priced. Check them out – it’s called asking people shit, and it works. Shut the fuck up and listen – involves asking stuff.
And these are the three survey tools I’d recommend. Surveymonkey for rapid build and deployment but not for the UI. Zoomerang is one of my faves as the cross tabulated reporting (analysing say age group versus responses in a survey) – is seamless and easily exported - very nice reporting for management without effort (milk it for all it’s worth – ha!). SurveyGizmo has every feature you’d ever need from a survey tool. I haven’t found a barrier yet to producing high quality, on-brand, easy to use surveys. It even hassles people to fill out their surveys, if you want it to – a piece of software that helps you? Wonderful.
An there are 3 tools here that let you wear the magical slippers of real customer experience. See it how they actually see it for yourself.Many of my clients have 50% or more of their emails opened on mobiles and tablets. Have you ever looked at how your nice snazzy email looks on mobile mail clients? Well that’s why your clickthrough rate really sucks – it doesn’t work. Looks nice in your office, not so good in the field. These will help you fix that – as they show you exactly how it looks in real customer inboxes. You know when an email looks really shit when you open it? Don’t laugh – that might be yours.Browser testing is one of the easiest ways to make money on a site. In 45 sites I’ve checked, I’ve now found over 30 that had serious browser issues. What do I mean? Well – it works on Internet Explorer fine but the buy button is missing in Google Chrome, for example. Nobody will complain, call up or tell you about the problem. Your analytics will tell you if this is happening and a bit of testing will fix it. Don’t trust your developers when they say ‘we test the most popular stuff’ – they may have missed the money. I had an interview once with someone and he said “People who use IE7 or 8 are fucking stupid” - I was really taken aback and quizzed him more. In the end, I knew he had two children so posed a story “Your wife goes to the department store in town with your two kids in a double buggy. When she arrives, the buggy won’t fit through the door – so the shop loses a sale that day. The conversation I’d have love to have heard would be you telling your wife she was fucking stupid for buying such a wide buggy”. Didn’t get the job!Lastly – you can now rent real phones in the cloud. If I want an iPhone that’s in Silicon valley, running on a Sprint 4G network, I can dial one up and rent it remotely for an hour, for $40. This way I can install apps, send texts, browse the web – like a real person. I also get access to a huge range of devices for testing, that I’d never be able to afford to buy. Very neat services.
And the tools have never been cheaper for doing your own usability testing. And with the growth of mobile, the audience you can test with their ‘computer’ has grown. You’ll find them in pubs, clubs, coffee shops, bookstores and more. You can take your prototype to the streets, get feedback and be back at the office in time to leave for home <grin> The last bit of this slide covers mobile recording and the others are for desktop or laptop computers with a webcam.
Too many tools to go through. But these tap into the power of the crowd – your own site visitors or the wider public – in novel and insightful ways. From running usability tests to trying new features, prototypes or mockups – you can get instant and high volume feedback on what you’ve got – or what you’re building. And these crowd collaborations also work with widely spread teams – allowing people across the globe to get involved in critiquing, fixing or improving something.
And now split testing is available for free to everyone – via Google Content Experiments. This even includes a clever piece of software that works out what’s converting best and diverts site traffic to that version. Very clever and if you’re interested, there’s an explanation on the slides.The last two are the testing rigs that most decent practitioners are using. The days of forking out several thousands a month for testing tools are gone.
A new battleground to grab attention and include powerful social signals has emerged – the search engines!This google example shows how more compelling a recipe listing is, simply because you have reviews, ratings, cooking times and calories. The picture might vary but the social proof is extremely powerful.And you can start feeding all this stuff on the right to google. Reviews are particularly important, as so many split tests show – the presence of these signals increases attention, trust and conversion – a triple whammy. Clickthrough rates on advertising are higher – so if you and your competitor are bidding the same price – who’s creative will win on the page? The one with Microdata!
***
This stuff is important. What do photographs do?Well they help me persuade people, influence their thinking, give them directions or cues and explain things – this is the scanning generation!And they’re very powerful when selling experiences, stories or using the power of social proofThey help people very quickly (more quickly than reading) discriminate, evaluate – work out what stuff is, how it’s organized, what the things are, what’s being shown to you.And most importantly, they drive emotional response in people. Whether you like being soggy, wet and without toilet paper for a 30 mile radius or not, a picture like this gets a RESPONSE! Work it!Lastly, a shout out to James Chudley, who’s book this example comes from.
So this is quite a powerful area – what about people images?I’ve tested quite a few of these – in over 20 countries and over 15 languages. What did I find?Well - the person, pose, eye gaze, facial expressions and body language – cause visceral emotional reactions and big changes in behaviour. The difference between a crappy image and one optimised to get the right response is huge.And one interesting thing Eye gaze is pretty crucial – to engage you, the viewer, or to ‘point’ or draw eye gaze and attention to a product. I’ve tested all angles of viewing and in these people images, the best view is straight at the viewer or slightly away. Any further and the conversion rate drops. It makes a difference I can count.
Create a suck index = pageviews * load time.
Here I show you some examples of well known brands, some of whom should know better. The larger the size of the page, the longer it will take to download and render on the device, especially when you don’t have perfect data conditions. The numberof requests also makes a difference, as it’s inefficient on mobile to open lots of connections like this. In short, the smaller the pagesize and number of requests you can aim for, the better. I’m patient with bad data connections but do people have the tolerance for 10-15 seconds on mobile? No – it has to happen much faster.
These are the results of a live test on a site, where an artificial delay is introduced in the performance testing. I’ve done some testing like this myself on desktop and mobile sites and confirm this is true – you’re increasing bounce rate, decreasing conversion, site engagement…It doesn’t matter what metric you use, performance equals MONEY or if not measured, a HUGE LOSS.
Performance also harms the lifeblood of e-commerce and revenue generating websites – repeat visitors! The gap here in one second of delay is enormous over time. You’re basically sucking a huge portion of potential business out of your site, with every additional bit of waiting time you add.
Add unique phone numbers to all your mobile sites and apps. That’s for starters.Then configure your analytics to collect data when people Click or Tap to make a phone call.Make sure you add other events like ringbacks, email, chat – any web forms or lead gen activity too.
So what does this graph say? That I have a long tail thing I want to talk to you about?No – this shows how much the ratio of phone to online conversion we have, by keyword.Some keywords generate nearly 25 times the call volume of others, which is a huge differential.This means that if you thought you got ‘roughly’ the same proportion of phone calls for different marketing activity, you are wrong.What this graph tells me is that the last 2 years of my stats are basically a big dog poo.
Add unique phone numbers to all your mobile sites and apps. That’s for starters.Then configure your analytics to collect data when people Click or Tap to make a phone call.Make sure you add other events like ringbacks, email, chat – any web forms or lead gen activity too.
Phone tracking costs you nothing – you can add it in a few minutes to your app or mobile website, by changing your analytics tracking.Now you can see exactly which bits of inbound marketing are driving telephone and other contact channelsIf you have any sort of phone component in your service or support, the insight could be vitalYou can take traffic by keyword, source, campaign or advert creative and work out the TRUE mix of conversion activityAnd all this is also available on Desktop too – by using dynamic numbers, we can track exactly the same stuff.Talk to this company : www.infinity-tracking.com