Author: Brad Johnson

https://conversionsciences.com/best-definition-of-conversion-rate-optimization/

Having trouble viewing the text? You can always read the original article here: The Best Definition of Conversion Rate Optimization Ever Written

Who better than a scientist to come up with the best definition of conversion rate optimization ever? Read on. Be the Judge. What exactly is conversion rate optimization? You’ve read about it over and over, but you may not have a proper understanding of how to apply it to your ecommerce store or to your […]

The post The Best Definition of Conversion Rate Optimization Ever Written appeared first on Conversion Sciences.

https://conversionsciences.com/best-definition-of-conversion-rate-optimization/

Having trouble viewing the text? You can always read the original article here: The Best Definition of Conversion Rate Optimization Ever Written

Who better than a scientist to come up with the best definition of conversion rate optimization ever? Read on. Be the Judge. What exactly is conversion rate optimization? You’ve read about it over and over, but you may not have a proper understanding of how to apply it to your ecommerce store or to your […]

The post The Best Definition of Conversion Rate Optimization Ever Written appeared first on Conversion Sciences.

https://econsultancy.com/five-key-psychological-principles-of-ux-ui-design/

User experience (UX) is the most important aspect of any product. Well-designed UX drives user engagement. But badly designed UX doesn’t just cause app abandonment. It’s also been proven to damage your overall brand, making users less likely to engage with you in the future.

How can you avoid this? By considering the science and psychology behind your product’s UX and UI design.

What separates good and bad product design is understanding. Considering the motivations, goals and frustrations of your users gives you a deep understanding of how they’ll perceive and interact with your product.

The aesthetic-usability effect

UX design and psychology are closely related. There’s a great comparison from Joe Leech who likens a designer who doesn’t understand psychology to an architect who doesn’t understand physics. They’re that intertwined.

Aesthetics are, of course, an important element of any product design. But without an understanding of the social, behavioural and cognitive psychologies that drive your users’ decisions, great aesthetics can actually end up damaging your user experience.

Why? Because expectations are so much higher. It’s called the aesthetic-usability effect. People automatically assume that a great-looking product must be more intuitive. So, if it isn’t, users end up blaming themselves. This leads to frustration and, ultimately, app abandonment.

It’s principles like these that separate top-ranking apps from the rest of the market. They divide the internal apps that engage employees from the ones that alienate them.

In this article, I’ll break down five psychological principles you need to consider in your product design to delight users and ensure a return on your investment.

1. Keep choices simple

There’s a reason why it takes you longer to pick from a restaurant menu with 100 different options. It’s called Hick’s Law. The more choices you offer users, the longer it’ll take them to arrive at a decision.

Hick’s Law plays a fundamental role in how we approach digital product design. When you’re trying to help your user achieve a goal or solve a challenge, speed is paramount. The more elements you show them, the longer it’ll take for them to achieve their goal and the more frustrated they’ll become.

Instead of offering users every possible option at once, the design should prioritise the key elements. Choices should be limited to as few as possible and long, complicated processes need to be broken down into simpler steps.

Meanwhile, less common in-app actions need to be grouped together under menus or clearly defined sub-category sections. And any unnecessary items should, of course, be removed completely.

All of this reduces the amount of time it takes for users to arrive at a decision, helping them achieve their goal faster with less friction.

2. Make important actions easy to reach

The further away your thumb or mouse is from the element you want to interact with, and the smaller that element is, the longer it takes to complete the action. This is called Fitts’ Law and it’s a fundamental principle of good UI design.

The longer an interaction takes, the higher the chance that users give up. To combat this, every interactable element should be big enough for users to know what it is and to select it with ease.

The highest accuracy for buttons, for example, is between 42 and 72 pixels wide. So making high-priority, frequently used actions 72 pixels allows users to hit their target even when their finger or cursor is slightly off.

The final component of Fitts’ Law is distance. In the era of super-sized screens, this is becoming increasingly important. Stretching to reach a hamburger menu in the top left hand of my S10+ screen feels like fighting someone in a thumb war.

That’s why, at Sonin, we wireframe with reachability heatmaps. This way, we’re able to ensure that all the most important components and common actions are in the most easy-to-reach places. This lets users achieve their desired outcome much, much faster.

3. Prioritise positioning

Take a look at the list of words below. If I gave you a few minutes to memorise as many as you could, how would you fare?

• Emphasis
• Medicine
• Prosper
• Climb
• Theft
• Retailer
• Warn
• Captivate
• Integration
• Background
• Potential
• Order
• Lost
• Art
• Party

When presented with this challenge, most people will have trouble recalling any of the words from the middle. But they often have a much easier time remembering words that are either early on in the list or towards the end.

Why? Because of the serial position effect which we can use to improve our digital product design. Take the navigation bar, for example. There’s a reason why Home is almost always on the far left. And it’s the same reason why the far-right is commonly reserved for profiles or inboxes.

Putting your most important items in the easiest-to-remember positions will limit the amount of recall required from users. By considering the serial position effect, you’ll be able to make your product more intuitive and your users more adept.

4. Be wary of selective disregard

Today, we’re all experienced products users. And with that experience comes learnings that shape the way we interact with products. In the digital world, there are few learnings more important than the ability to ignore irrelevant information.

It’s impossible for users to give attention to every single digital stimulus that they see. So instead, they use selective attention to pinpoint what’s important. We call this phenomenon selective disregard. And it’s the reason that you’re more likely to get hit by lightning 237 times than you are to click on a banner advert.

But selective disregard doesn’t just apply to advertising. If an element isn’t clearly related to their task, users will ignore it without even thinking. Every element should be designed with selective disregard and users’ expectations in mind to ensure ease-of-use.

5. Finally, don’t be evil

In recent years, and after a fair amount of backlash, LinkedIn has updated its on-boarding but beforehand it was one company notorious for employing dark patterns. This is a practice where companies carefully craft a user interface with the intention of tricking users into doing things they didn’t mean to.

The technique is often used to trick people into buying unnecessary insurance for their purchases or unwittingly signing up for recurring subscriptions.

To do this, dark patterns often take advantage of the built-in expectations we all have as users. Brightly coloured buttons mean positive confirmation. A right-facing arrow means moving forward. Left takes you back.

Right?

Wrong. Dark patterns pray upon these expectations and play on people’s fears. They prioritise business goals over users. Every business has desired outcomes they want to achieve through their product. But there are ways of achieving them without damaging the trust people have in your brand.

Begin by pinpointing the opportunities where you can provide real value for your users. Once you’ve done this, you can find where your users’ goals intersect with your business strategies. This approach ensures your product design provides value for everyone involved.

Three dark patterns used by brands and why they should be avoided

Final thoughts

The psychology principles we’ve covered here impact how users interact with your product from before they even launch it. They’re also present all the way through the discovery and decision process. It’s clear then that none of these principles should be an afterthought. They have to be carefully considered and thoroughly researched before you even begin the build.

Accounting for the psychology of your users during product design ensures that their experience is frictionless from the first time they launch your app. With just a couple of screens to delight your users, understanding their psychology will reduce abandonment and drive engagement across-the-board.

The post Five key psychological principles of UX & UI design appeared first on Econsultancy.

https://www.rohitbhargava.com/2020/02/best-worst-super-bowl-marketing-ads-strategy-2020.html

Can a Super Bowl ad that costs nearly $6 million be worth it?

That’s a question worth debating if you’re in marketing, so let’s take a look at some of the Super Bowl marketing strategies behind the ads from this year’s big game and see which ones were the biggest winners and losers. For longtime readers, you know I’ve done this before but in past years when I was working at a large agency, I would tread carefully when doing my Super Bowl recaps to make sure I didn’t accidentally mention a client.

Thankfully, being out on my own means I don’t have to measure my words, so what follows is entirely my unfiltered opinion about the ads that worked and the ones that didn’t. Let’s start with the worst strategies of the big game …

Worst Strategy: Discover Card

Doubling down with two ads focusing on two features of credit cards most people take for granted would probably be more meaningful if people ever thought about these two things. There are dozens of credit cards with no annual fees and most people never even consider their card might not be accepted everywhere. Unless they have a Discover card apparently, in which case both of those things must be a big deal.

Worst Strategy: Planters

Relying on people watching a pre-game ad in order to have the storyline for your in-game ad make sense isn’t a good bet. Neither is hoping people still have an emotional attachment to a long-forgotten monocle-wearing mascot from 1916.

Worst Strategy: Facebook

One of the richest companies in the world that has daily issues with ethics, privacy and morality chooses to run an ad reminding us all that there are Facebook groups for people who have niche interests? We need this platform to do a lot more in the world than this. Focusing on promoting groups while ignoring their many issues was weak and just plain disappointing.

Worst Strategy: Pepsi

While rival Coke used their Super Bowl spot to strategically and entertainingly introduce their new energy drink, this Pepsi spot was a forgettable song remake that shows a red can inexplicably being painted black because … well, just because. This is all to introduce Pepsi Zero Sugar – but unfortunately it makes zero sense too.

Worst Strategy: Walmart

I’m not sure why any brand would pay more money to take a pretty good creative concept they already used last year and remake it to be worse and more confusing … but that’s exactly what Walmart managed to do this year. The spot from last year was clever and original to introduce their grocery pickup feature using many different cars. This year’s remake using spaceships was a sad and less effective redo that should never have been approved.

Best Strategy: Dashlane

I am a HUGE fan of using the platform of the Super Bowl to introduce people to a new product or service they haven’t heard of yet. This one for Dashlane does it in a clever, funny and totally relatable way.

Best Strategy: P&G

This ad was so clever I was envious. I mean, using one spot to feature at least half a dozen different brands, including the branded campaign icons for each was just so smart. I counted Troy Polamalu for Head & Shoulders, the Old Spice guy, Mr. Clean, the Charmin bear, a weird appearance by Rob Riggle for Bounce, a product shot for Fabreze and an Olay reference. This was probably the strategy winner of the night for me.

Best Strategy: Microsoft

The brand already provides the sideline technology for the NFL, so it was a masterful move to do something that just about any other brand could have done … celebrate the first woman to coach in an NFL team in the Super Bowl. This spot was on trend, emotionally powerful and (unlike the entertaining but unstrategic spot from Olay), it was also right on brand.

Best Strategy: Google

The storytelling in this spot was probably the best of the night for me, reminding people of the vital connection between technology and humans. Ironically, Google was promoting the same idea as Facebook … yet unlike Facebook, their spot managed to be human, emotional, real and not vaguely self-promotional.

Best Strategy: Hyundai

I loved the idea of introducing the “Smaht Pahk” feature by using a collection of actors with the New England accent. It was a fun and memorable way to introduce a great feature of the new Hyundai Sonata, and a gag that carried through even to the brand’s tagline: “Bettah Drives Us.” Nice idea and great execution.

Best Strategy: Reese’s Take 5 Bar

Similar to the upside for Dashlane of introducing a new product, this spot made the idea of a bar you’ve never heard of fun and helped get the point across that there’s a new candy bar you should know about and might want to try. Unless you have your head up your own ass, of course.

Want to read the full list of my Super Bowl Marketing strategy recaps from previous years?

• 2019 Best and Worst of Super Bowl Marketing Strategy
• 2018 Best and Worst of Super Bowl Marketing Strategy
• 2017 Best and Worst of Super Bowl Marketing Strategy
• 2016 Best and Worst of Super Bowl Marketing Strategy
• 2015 Best and Worst of Super Bowl Marketing Strategy
• 2014 Best and Worst of Super Bowl Marketing Strategy 
• 2013 Best and Worst of Super Bowl Marketing Strategy 
• 2012 Best and Worst of Super Bowl Marketing Strategy 
• 2011 Best and Worst of Super Bowl Marketing Strategy 
• 2010 Best and Worst of Super Bowl Marketing Strategy