The default answer has been A/B testing. But while A/B testing remains the gold standard for high-stakes decisions, it’s not always the right tool for every design change. Many teams have fallen into the trap of either testing everything (creating bottlenecks and slowing innovation) or testing nothing (making changes based purely on intuition).

There’s a better way. By understanding when different validation* methods are most appropriate, SaaS teams can make faster, more confident design decisions while maintaining the rigor needed for their most critical changes.

*Note: We know validation is a bad word in the research community because it implies “proving you’re right,” but we feel it’s easier to read and more quickly comprehensible for those not in research disciplines. We’re using “validation” in this article, but “evaluation” or “confirm or disconfirm” would be more acute in other settings.

The real cost of a bad experimentation strategy

When teams lack a clear strategy for validating decisions, they create what researcher Jared Spool calls “Experience Rot” – the gradual deterioration of user experience quality from moving too slowly or focusing solely on economic outcomes rather than user needs.

The costs manifest in several ways:

• Opportunity cost: Market opportunities disappear while waiting for test results that may not even be necessary
• Resource waste: Development time gets tied up in prolonged testing initiatives for low-risk changes
• Analysis paralysis: Teams debate endlessly about what to test next instead of making decisions
• Competitive disadvantage: Competitors gain ground while you’re stuck in lengthy validation cycles

The key is matching your experimentation method to the decision you’re making, rather than forcing every design change through the same validation process.

A framework for design validation decisions

The path to better validation starts with two fundamental questions about any proposed design change:

1. Is this strategically important? Does this change significantly impact key business metrics or user experience?
2. What’s the potential risk? What happens if this change performs worse than expected?

Using these dimensions, you can map any design change into one of four validation approaches:

High Strategic Importance + Low Risk = Just ship it

If you can’t explain meaningful downsides to a design change but know it’s strategically important, you probably don’t need to validate it at all. These are your quick wins.

Examples for SaaS teams:

• Adding customer testimonials to your pricing page
• Improving mobile responsiveness
• Fixing broken links or outdated screenshots
• Adding clearer error messages in your product

Why this works: The upside is clear, the downside is minimal, and the time spent testing could be better invested elsewhere.

Low Strategic Importance = Deprioritize

Not every design change needs validation because not every change is worth making. Some modifications simply aren’t worth the time and resources, regardless of the validation method you might use.

Examples of low-impact changes:

• Minor color adjustments to non-critical elements
• Changing footer layouts
• Tweaking secondary page designs that get little traffic
• Adjusting spacing that doesn’t affect usability

When to reconsider: If data later shows these areas are creating friction, they can move up in priority.

High Strategic Importance + High Risk = Validation territory

This is where both A/B testing and rapid testing methods become valuable. The critical next decision becomes: can you reach statistical significance within an acceptable timeframe, and are you technically capable of running the experiment?

When to use A/B testing vs rapid testing

When to use A/B testing for design changes

A/B testing remains your best option for design changes when:

• You have sufficient traffic on the experience: Generally, you need 1,000+ visitors per week to the page being tested
• The change is reversible: You can easily switch back if the results are negative
• You need statistical confidence: Stakes are high enough to justify the time investment
• Technical capability exists: Your team can implement and track the test properly

Examples of SaaS use cases for A/B testing:

• Complete homepage redesigns
• Pricing page layouts and messaging
• Sign-up flow modifications
• Core product onboarding changes
• High-traffic landing page variations

When to use rapid testing for design changes

When A/B testing isn’t right due to traffic constraints, technical limitations, or time pressures, rapid testing provides a faster path to validation.

Rapid testing methods work particularly well for SaaS design validation because they can:

• Validate concepts before development: Test wireframes and mockups before building
• Narrow down options: Compare multiple design variations quickly
• Identify usability issues: Spot problems before they reach real users
• Provide qualitative insights: Understand the “why” behind user preferences

Examples of SaaS use cases for rapid testing:

• New feature naming and messaging
• Dashboard navigation restructuring
• Enterprise sales page designs (low traffic)
• Value proposition clarity testing
• Multi-option comparisons (6-8 variations)

The natural next question might be “which rapid testing method should I use?” Here is another decision tree framework to help answer that.

Incorporate your experimentation strategy into your design process

With a decision-making strategy for how and what to test, you’ll need to incorporate the strategy into your design process. The most successful SaaS teams don’t treat validation as an afterthought. They build it into their process from the beginning:

• During ideation: Use rapid testing to validate concepts and narrow options before detailed design work
• During design: Test wireframes and mockups to identify issues before development
• Before launch: Use A/B testing for high-stakes changes, rapid testing for others
• After launch: Continue testing iterations based on user feedback and performance data

The compounding benefits of a sound experimentation strategy

The goal isn’t to replace A/B testing with rapid methods or vice versa. Both have their place in a mature experimentation strategy. The key is understanding when each approach provides the most value for your specific situation and constraints.

Teams that master this balanced approach to validation see remarkable improvement, including:

• 50% better A/B test win rates (because rapid testing helps identify winning concepts)
• Faster time-to-market for design improvements
• More confident decision-making across the organization
• Better team morale from seeing results from their work more quickly

Perhaps most importantly, they avoid the extremes of either testing nothing (high risk) or testing everything (slow progress).

For SaaS teams serious about optimization, the question isn’t whether to validate design changes; it’s whether you’re using the right validation method for each decision.

Start by auditing your current design change process. Are you testing changes that should be implemented immediately? Are you implementing changes that should be tested? By aligning your validation approach with the strategic importance and risk level of each change, you can move faster without sacrificing confidence in your decisions.

And if you aren’t sure how to get started, our team can help.

The post How to Validate Website Design Changes: A Decision Framework appeared first on The Good.

I have no doubt that your SaaS product has countless things that make it great. But do users intuitively understand those benefits and unique selling points across your digital experience? Are you making sure they know exactly what sets you apart no matter where they are in their journey? 

If your answer is anything less than an enthusiastic “yes,” this article is for you. We’re sharing how you can identify and address the gaps in your benefits and unique selling points.

What is the benefits & unique selling points heuristic?

Benefits and unique selling points differentiate products/services by highlighting unique value promises. They show users why they should choose to purchase from you instead of elsewhere. 

Without clear benefits and unique selling points, you leave the user uncertain whether it is right for them. 

Digital experiences that adhere to this heuristic may apply a tactic like breaking down a differentiating feature in a demo video or building an interactive comparison chart that helps users clearly see the advantage of their service/product.

Benefits and unique selling points is one of the six Heuristics of Digital Experience Optimization developed by our team at The Good. The full list includes:

1. Priming & Expectation Setting
2. Trust & Authority
3. Ease
4. Benefits & Unique Selling Points
5. Directional Guidance
6. Incentives

These heuristics theme common optimization issues and opportunities. Optimizing your digital experience through the lens of heuristics keeps the user at the center of analyses. When done correctly, it will ensure your strategy creates journeys that feel familiar, do what they say, and function intuitively.

Knowing this heuristic is the first step. Now, let’s look at how to spot areas where you may be falling short.

Use research to understand where benefits & USPs are unclear 

It’s important to understand where and when users are missing the value promise of your product. 

A great way to deepen your understanding of the current experience is with user research. 

Research methods like session recordings, heatmap analysis, and user testing may indicate you are in violation of the benefits and unique selling points heuristic. Watch for these common signs that your benefits and USPs may not be coming across clearly:

Low Directness

• Research methodology: Session recordings
• How it manifests: Users can be seen scrolling through the site looking for specific content and struggling to find items of interest, possibly hesitating on the site, suggesting uncertainty.
• What it means: If you’re noticing patterns of users hesitating to click when looking at the menu or visiting several pages before finally lingering on a page, they may need support in wayfinding. 
• What to do about it: Take low directness as a sign that users need a little directional guidance and use it as a jumping-off point to further evaluate your navigation, labels, and page nesting. If you have a flagship use case that regular customers swear by, try to get users to see it (and its value) earlier, and don’t make them dig for it. 

Attentive/Intentional Reading

• Research methodology: Session recordings
• How it manifests: When a user slowly scrolls over content on a desktop, their mouse hovers over text, and when they are intensely reading, you might even see them go line-by-line.
• What it means: When users demonstrate a detailed reading of the fine print, it may indicate that they are looking for something they simply can’t find or trying to determine if the product fits their use case.  
• What to do about it: Keep an eye out for sessions that include intense reading and try to determine what content the user was looking for (and not finding) so you can serve that up more prominently in the user experience. For consumable products, that might mean clearer nutritional benefits. For a digital product, it might mean showcasing compatibility or use cases. 

Positive Sentiment or Negative Sentiment

• Research methodology: User testing
• How it manifests: User expresses positive or negative emotions towards the site/brand or an element of the site/brand.
• What it means: If, in early testing, users aren’t connecting to your product, you might hear subtle hints like “I would want to go back and make sure to evaluate the alternatives.” When users don’t clearly understand your unique value proposition, they’ll fail to connect and indicate they’re not sold. 
• What to do about it: Use those blasé moments to fine-tune your messaging until it starts to click. Make sure you’re articulating who your product is best for in the language of your users. 

5 Examples of SaaS companies that leverage the benefits and unique selling points heuristic 

Once you’ve identified the areas in your site or app that are in violation of the benefits and unique selling points heuristic, you can address them. 

The goal is to help users make their decisions faster and with ease. As a starting point for inspiration, here are five SaaS companies that showcase the effective use of benefits and USPs, each helping users make confident decisions more easily.

Give a holistic breakdown by value theme like DocuSign

DocuSign breaks down the security benefits holistically, reassuring security-conscious users about important benefits and unique selling points.

List features in a comparison chart like Indicative

Indicative adds CTA buttons to their comparison chart so that as they highlight core capabilities, users have quick-access entry points to get the offer.

Leverage guided tours like Outreach

Sales platform Outreach has use case-specific interactive demos on the website so prospects can see why the tool could be a good fit for them. 

Lead with core benefits like PandaDoc’s feature announcement pop-up

PandaDoc‘s pop-up for a feature rollout announcement leads with the benefit to the user, which makes users more likely to engage with the overlay. 

Animate your pricing page like QuickBooks

QuickBooks’ pricing chart has a visual cue for each feature that pops out with details, benefits, and a pitch video. This increases user confidence.

How to identify your benefits and unique selling points

It can be tough to find the right benefits and unique selling points to highlight across the digital experience, even if you can see where customers are getting stuck.  

Here are some tips to get you started: 

• Write a list: jot down all of the things that make your business, products, or services unique from your competitors – get specific, like your pricing model, customer service accessibility, and features.
• Research the competition: you won’t know what makes you different if you don’t know what you’re up against. Dig into their benefits and unique selling points so you can be sure to stand out.
• Identify your customers’ needs: research your customers using data and surveys to discover their most pressing needs and determine how your tooling is meeting those needs so you can more prominently feature it across the experience.
• Combine needs and differentiators: cross-reference the list of things that make your successful business different and your list of customer needs to pinpoint any that overlap. 
• Consider how you will implement: these points should be woven throughout the digital experience so that users are presented with benefits and unique selling points relevant to where they are in the customer journey.
• Test and validate: With your improvement ideas in hand, it’s time to test the optimizations. There’s no point going all-in on implementation if the language or functions don’t resonate. Consider a second round of user testing, some rapid testing, or A/B testing where it makes sense. 

For more inspiration, check out our article on 14 unique selling proposition examples. 

Heuristics build the foundation of an excellent digital experience

Most SaaS teams have a million things on their plate, juggling KPIs, internal politics, and all the day-to-day tasks to keep the product moving forward. However, nothing is as important as the foundational user experience and how your audience perceives your product.

This is where heuristics come in. You can uncover pain points that can be solved with tactics to address them. It may sound simple, but it can be a lot to accomplish without an external, user-centered POV. If you’d like support in your efforts, contact us.

The post Is Your Value Promise Falling Short? Here’s How to Identify and Upgrade Tired USPs appeared first on The Good.

There is nothing more frustrating than feeling like a company is giving you the bait and switch. In user experience design, we call this poor priming and expectation-setting, and it is a violation of one of the six Heuristics for Digital Experience Optimization.

Heuristics, by definition, are mental shortcuts used to solve problems quickly and effectively. They allow people to speed up analysis and make informed, efficient decisions. Knowing our brains are wired to take shortcuts and make quick decisions, you can imagine how heuristics play a crucial role in how customers navigate and perceive digital experiences.

Digital experiences that violate user heuristics are bad for users and bad for business. So, let’s take a look at how to address the priming and expectation-setting heuristic in a way that improves the user experience.

What is the priming and expectation-setting heuristic?

Priming and expectation setting is a heuristic that sets users up for success by clarifying how the interface will perform, indicating what actions users should take, and managing user expectations.

Digital experiences that adhere to this heuristic may apply a tactic like explicitly mentioning free shipping early in the journey to reduce cart abandonment rates or sharing estimated delivery dates to manage customer expectations.

Priming and expectation setting is one of the six Heuristics of Digital Experience Optimization developed by our team at The Good. The full list includes:

1. Priming & Expectation Setting
2. Trust & Authority
3. Ease
4. Benefits & Unique Selling Points
5. Directional Guidance
6. Incentives

These heuristics theme common optimization issues and opportunities. Analyzing your digital experience with heuristics in mind keeps the user at the center of analyses and guides your strategy toward building journeys that feel familiar, do what they say, and function intuitively.

Identify violations of this heuristic with user research patterns

Before you can start to address any heuristic to improve the digital experience, you have to understand if, where, and when users are getting stuck.

To understand if your digital experience is violating the priming and expectation-setting heuristic, a great place to start is user research. Set goals, pick the right method for your needs, and start talking to your users (or observing their behavior).

As you analyze the research, look for patterns including:

• Rage clicks: User clicks on an element multiple times without getting the desired or expected result. Usually, this signifies unclear system status, meaning your user doesn’t provide enough cues, semantics, or timely feedback to keep users informed.
• Low directness: Users can be seen scrolling through the site looking for specific content, struggling to find items of interest, and possibly hesitating on the site, suggesting uncertainty. This can be a sign of unmet expectations, meaning your system’s interactions, navigation, or language don’t match users’ mental models of real-world or site conventions.
• Price sensitivity: Users express concern about product or shipping prices, potentially leading them to abandon. This often indicates poor priming because of unclear or missing elements in the interface that typically guide user behavior and inform them of what to expect.

The good news is once you identify the patterns, you can address them with tactics to improve priming and expectation setting. Doing so is an ethical way to improve customer sentiment and increase conversions.

Real-life examples of using priming and expectation-setting to improve the user experience

Most companies have a chance to improve priming and expectation setting across their digital journey. Here are a few real-world examples that can inspire your efforts to adhere more closely to the heuristic. You might see some pretty compelling rewards for your improvements.

Offline download delivery priming

We worked with the largest digital repair manual database, eManualOnline, to find opportunities to improve their on-site experience. Following similar recommendations as outlined above to identify violations of optimization heuristics, we conducted user testing. It revealed that users were confused about how eManualOnline delivers their manuals, as some are digital downloads and others are physical editions.

Because of the mixed delivery method messages throughout the site, customers felt a lack of trust when confronted with the website.

We decided to test out highlighting delivery methods to clarify any confusion and increase transactions. We A/B tested 2 variants: a control and a variant that made delivery methods clearer at various touchpoints.

The variant with clear delivery method language showed a 14% lift over the control. Clarifying access methods for offline downloads resulted in stronger purchase intent. This is a clear example of priming and expectation setting at work.

Permission priming in user onboarding

When onboarding a user to a new digital experience (app or desktop service), priming and expectation setting can strongly impact churn metrics.

Here’s a good example from Scan & Translate. It reminds users that in order to use the scan features and gain value from the app, they need to grant camera permissions to the system.

Preparing, or priming, a user before you ask permission to access their OS makes it more likely that they’ll comply with your request. This is vitally important because your product might not be able to provide value to the user without access.

Expectation-setting without compromising brand language

Residential furnishings brand, Knoll, has a range of uniquely crafted and handmade products. The care and detail that goes into each piece means longer lead times on shipping and delivery.

When we took on a project to improve their digital experience, we tested out adjusting their copy to better reflect the craftsmanship of their work.

Changing the wording from “Lead time: 8 weeks” messaging to “Made for you. Ships in 8 weeks” led to our biggest test win of the year in terms of revenue.

It created synergy between the brand’s needs (priming purchasers that shipment won’t happen for a while) and the customer’s needs (understanding why shipment won’t happen for a while). It also had the benefit of turning a challenge (long lead times) into a compelling conversion booster (custom-made).

Priming in form design

Priming is one of the first principles of form design. It keeps users on the path to form completion by clearly setting expectations and ensuring they don’t drop off due to surprises.

Priming in form design takes many forms but often is provided through progress bars. Adding this element tells the user what they can expect from the process during or before completion of the form, setting the expectation so that users come prepared to fully fill out the form.

See this example from Etsy. The company features a progress bar with clear labels to prime users about what to expect during the mobile checkout process.

To set expectations with a form, you can also be clear about the end result or value users receive upon completing the form. This can generate excitement for the product, motivating form completion.

The “Try Demo” button from ServiceNow, shown below, primes users to know what they can expect after they fill out the form. Users will get to demo the product and can also expect everything in the bulleted list to the left.

Using heuristics to theme your roadmap of opportunities

To transform the priming and expectation-setting heuristic into an actionable improvement opportunity for your digital property, consider building a strategic roadmap.

Leverage user research to identify common patterns indicating violation of the six Heuristics for Digital Experience Optimization. Prioritize those opportunities based on their potential for impacting KPIs. Then, develop a plan to test improvements with a theme-based roadmap.

Taking the time to really understand where users are getting stuck in your digital experience will set you up to make more efficient and impactful decisions.

Our team can support you on your journey through a custom Digital Experience Optimization Program. You’ll have access to an entire team of researchers, strategists, designers, and developers that will help remove violations of the priming and expectation-setting heuristic (and more).

The post How To Leverage The Priming & Expectation Setting Heuristic To Drive Conversions appeared first on The Good.

What you consider “easy to use” could be completely unintuitive for your audience. That’s why user research and identifying common behavior patterns is so important. Ease of use is about more than just clean layouts and fast load times; it’s about understanding human behavior and anticipating needs before users even realize them.

You can do exactly that by leveraging the ease heuristic. Ease is one of the six Heuristics for Digital Experience Optimization, a tool developed at The Good to theme common optimization issues and opportunities with the user at the center of analyses.

In this article, we’re sharing everything you need to know about the ease heuristic and how to leverage it to create a better website or app. Keep reading to learn:

• How the ease heuristic manifests
• How to identify when your website violates the ease heuristic
• Five ways to improve ease (with examples)

What is ease in UX?

The ease heuristic focuses on making a website, app, or digital product “easy to use.” It ensures users won’t abandon a digital property due to its complexity and offers better accessibility to diverse audiences. It includes aspects like information architecture, navigability, and seamless functionality.

Let’s check out these three pillars of ease in more detail.

What is information architecture?

Information architecture (IA) is the practice of structuring content on digital products (websites, apps) to make it easy for users to find and understand the information they need. It focuses on things like:

• Content grouping that is intuitive
• Navigation design to help users find what they need
• Labeling systems that are clear and consistent
• Search systems that find things efficiently

Effective information architecture enhances the overall user experience by reducing cognitive load, preventing user frustration, and ensuring that users can complete their tasks with ease.

What is navigability?

Navigability refers to the ease with which users can move through a website or application to find what they need (information, features, etc.). Key aspects include:

• Intuitive structure that follows a logical pattern
• Clear labels indicating current location and options for next steps
• Consistent design of uniform patterns to avoid re-learning
• Responsive elements with immediate feedback
• Accessible paths that accommodate all users

Good navigability of elements such as menus, links, buttons, and search bars increases satisfaction by minimizing the effort required to find information and complete tasks.

What is seamless functionality?

Seamless functionality refers to the uninterrupted operation of a digital product, where all features work together for a smooth user experience. Key characteristics include:

• Smooth interactions (clicking, scrolling, swiping) with minimal load time/delays
• Consistent website performance
• Error handling with feedback and recovery options
• Integrated features that update as needed
• User-friendly interfaces that don’t require extensive instructions or support.
• Optimized load times

Achieving seamless functionality ensures that users can accomplish their goals efficiently and without distraction.

How does violating the ease heuristic impact the user?

As mentioned, heuristics are tools used to identify optimization issues or opportunities. Information architecture, navigability, and seamless functionality work together to improve the “ease” of use on a website or app. But how does it impact a user when the ease heuristic is violated?

High Interaction Cost

Violating the ease heuristic can often come at a high interaction cost. For example, a task or interaction requires significant time/effort, creating frustration and resulting in abandonment.

Heavy Cognitive Load

Another way lack of ease impacts a user is by putting undue mental effort into accomplishing a task. This may cause analysis paralysis or frustration, leading to abandonment.

Content Fatigue

Excessive textual/visual content on the page can overwhelm users, hindering their ability to find relevant content for successful task completion.

Unclear System Status

If the interface doesn’t provide enough cues, semantics, or timely feedback to keep users informed, the system status is unclear. This results in stress, uncertainty, and likely abandonment.

Identifying opportunities with user research

If you want to understand where and when your website violates the ease heuristic, the best way is with user research.

While patterns related to violation of the ease heuristic can appear in plenty of user research methods, such as heatmaps, user testing, etc., here are a few examples of how they might specifically show up in session recordings or observational analysis.

• Halted scrolling: The user pauses on the site to possibly engage with content/reorient themselves, which could imply that the user perceives a false bottom. This indicates a heavy cognitive load.
• Hunting and Pecking: The user bounces around the site from page to page, sometimes back-navigating, looking for specific content without finding products of interest. This may indicate unclear system status.
• Scanning: Users scroll over content (text or images) at a higher scroll rate on mobile, while on desktop, they might hover over some words or phrases or completely skip over content altogether. This could indicate a high interaction cost.

Look for this behavior to identify violations of the ease heuristic. Then, you can prioritize opportunities to improve it for a better digital experience.

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Five ways to make it easy for users (with examples)

Once you know your website violates the ease heuristic and you have identified areas of opportunity, you can hypothesize and test improvements. Here are some ideas for increasing ease on your website.

1. Group products by attributes

When products are not intuitively grouped, users can experience decision paralysis or confusion. Grouping products by shared attributes can reduce frustration and support user wayfinding.

It is especially beneficial when a brand has a large selection of products, like mattress brand Casper.

2. Collapse or expand relevant dropdowns

Content hidden in accordions can cause users to miss critical information in a purchase decision, leading to frustration and abandonment.

Prioritizing relevant drop-downs by expanding them on PDP or category pages can help users better differentiate products and increase the likelihood of purchasing.

Note that it is sometimes necessary to bring in a copy expert to rewrite product copy entirely, focusing on decreasing cognitive load and increasing the user’s value.

3. Refine product grid layout

Users can become overwhelmed with product listings on category pages, especially if there are many SKUs or a large amount of content.

Refining category page layouts to be more scannable may improve shopper experience, easing product discovery and encouraging visits to PDPs.

Specifically, we’ve found success testing on mobile with a 2-up layout so users see more products when they land on a category page. We iterate on category page layouts based on test outcomes and look for opportunities to test things like CTA colors, language, and selector options within product grids.

4. Improve add-to-cart feedback

A lack of notification that a product has been successfully added to the cart can cause users to be unsure of the status, leading to frustration and cart abandonment.

Improving add-to-cart feedback guides users to checkout, increases purchase intention, and reduces uncertainty.

5. Increase the visibility of tooltips

Many tooltips can be hard to see or hidden on a page, which can lead to a lack of understanding and confidence.

Emphasizing tooltips can ease directional guidance and help users understand how a product functions or explain an element on the page in an unobtrusive way, which can lead to better understanding and increase confidence.

Common tooltip use cases include interactive walkthroughs, secondary onboarding, instructions, upsells, feature adoption, and new product updates.

Improving ease (and beyond) in digital experience optimization

Ease is only one of the six Heuristics for Digital Experience Optimization. These heuristics can guide your strategy and help you build digital journeys that feel familiar, do what they say, and function intuitively.

The six heuristics are:

1. Priming & Expectation Setting
2. Trust & Authority
3. Ease
4. Benefits & Unique Selling Points
5. Directional Guidance
6. Incentives

To learn more, or if you’d like our team to review your website for opportunities to improve based on these themes, get in touch.

The post What Is The Ease Heuristic? (And How To Leverage It To Improve UX) appeared first on The Good.

Speed bumps signal the driver to slow down, the rest stop sign reminds them they can take a break on a long trip, and rumble strips alert when they’re swerving into dangerous territory. Curbs keep drivers and pedestrians on separate sections of the road, while curb cuts offer an optional designated crossing area.

All of these indicators intuitively keep us on the right path while occasionally offering alternative routes or opportunities we may not have been thinking of. Similarly, in digital experience design, directional guidance nudges users on a path toward their end goal.

It helps users find what they are looking for by adding visibility to elements that will increase their motivation or intent. It displays compelling options of where the user can go next.

The placement of specific website elements can either guide a user toward their ideal product or take them off track. Strategizing and keeping directional guidance top of mind as you optimize can help direct users through a complicated digital journey.

What is directional guidance in UX?

Directional guidance in UX is a sum of strategies, tactics, or elements that optimization experts implement to help users accomplish a specific goal on a website.

It’s an umbrella term that encompasses anything put on a user’s path to help them find what they want.

“Directional guidance doesn’t just increase the findability of what a user knows they want, it increases the discoverability of things a user didn’t even know they wanted. It adds utility across a website so users can build a mental model of what is in the company’s catalog and how to get there.”

Natalie Thomas, Director of Digital Experience Optimization & UX Strategy at The Good

In digital experience design, directional guidance can be as direct as a clear call to action and easy-to-use navigation or as indirect as personalizing recommendations and surfacing relevant content. It’s like a personal website concierge telling you, “right this way.”

Directional guidance is one of The Good’s six Heuristics for Digital Experience Optimization. They are:

1. Priming & Expectation Setting
2. Trust & Authority
3. Ease
4. Benefits & Unique Selling Points
5. Directional Guidance
6. Incentives

5 ways to improve directional guidance (with examples)

So, what are some specific ways to improve directional guidance on your website?

Of course, we have to caveat that you should develop strategies relevant to your specific goals and users, but here are a few ideas to get the wheels turning.

1. Add suggested products to predictive search

Increasing the use of search is a great way to encourage intentional browsing, but often users need a helping hand to guide them to relevant products or pages.

Featuring popular or relevant products in search suggestions can improve product discoverability, increase the helpfulness of search, and help users quickly and easily navigate the site.

Deeper customizations might include featuring different products based on user segment, search terms entered, seasonality, or geographic area of the site.

2. Change sort order

Sort orders often default to standard settings that don’t support user goals.

Testing alternative default sort orders (by popularity, by price) can help users quickly discover the products that are right for them and improve directional guidance.

For example, we tested sorting products by featured rather than families to improve the visibility of product listings and increase engagement on category pages.

This resulted in an 8.5% increase in conversion rate.

3. Add quick links

Even within a well-organized menu, users can struggle to navigate to relevant information quickly.

Showcasing what actions users can take with “quick links” promotes directness toward relevant pages.

Improving directional guidance with quick links can encourage deeper page depth from paid ads, decrease bounce rates, and lead to increased transactions.

4. Improve visual hierarchy of mobile menu

A key principle of visual design, visual hierarchy, is crucial to improving directional guidance.

Many websites have poor content hierarchy, particularly in mobile navigation. Users can suffer from indecision without the guidance of a well-organized and directional menu.

Separating shopping-focused links from other kinds of content in the navigation can increase directional guidance and decrease distraction for would-be shoppers.

For one of our clients, re-ordering the popular navigation menu links in line with the primacy and recency effect positively impacted conversions, leading to over $4MM in annual revenue gains

5. Add sticky elements

Another way to improve directional guidance is making key elements sticky and therefore, easily accessible to users as they browse.

Sticky CTA

When users are considering a product, they will scroll through product detail pages to find details that make them more confident to purchase. For example, adding a sticky CTA like a sticky add-to-cart or a sticky buy button, can provide easy access to add-to-cart once the user decides.

Adding a sticky CTA is great for brands with longer PDPs, specifically increasing engagement with product details, reducing friction, and increasing adds to cart.

Sticky search

High-intent users often have an idea of what product they are looking for, and search users generally convert 5-7x better than non-search users. Using search can help them quickly find the product they have in mind.

So, making the search bar sticky improves directional guidance by encouraging use of search and helping guide shoppers to right-fit products.

This is especially true for sites that have a large amount of high-intent users, many SKUs, or sites where users primarily navigate with the search bar.

What are examples of poor directional guidance?

Now that you have five ways to improve directional guidance, what are some signs that your site suffers from poor directional guidance?

Low visibility or low discoverability of items: If your items or products are hidden behind multiple clicks or proverbial corners, your users can’t find what they are looking for (or discover something they don’t know they need!)

Unclear system status: If there is a break in communication between the computer or digital product and the user, then you have poor directional guidance. For example, giving an error message right when a user starts typing their password before they have even clicked ‘login.’

Content fatigue: When your site has too much content (text, images, links, etc.), the user might not find the one product that is meant for them which will trigger a purchase decision.

Confusing or unclear language: Speaking in brand language that isn’t clear to the user removes information scent and prevents them from moving down the funnel.

These are just a few things to look out for in your user testing and research to uncover poor directional guidance in your digital experience.

Is wayfinding the same as directional guidance?

At this point, UX practitioners may be asking themselves, “how is this different from wayfinding?”

Wayfinding falls under the umbrella of directional guidance but is not the same thing.

To differentiate the term, our team often uses the analogy of an airport. Wayfinding is like hanging signs in the airport. While helpful, imagine all the information you needed in an airport was on a sign. You wouldn’t know what to read or look at next.

Instead, airports analyze foot traffic and incorporate strategic pathways, seating areas, audio cues, and symbols to both get you where you need to go AND offer helpful stops along the way. This is directional guidance.

Wayfinding is the signs and cues pointing you to your gate, while the directional guidance might be a water fountain and bathroom along the way for a convenient stop before your flight. Things you may not have realized you needed, placed strategically to help you uncover your needs.

For digital experience design, it is similar.

“Wayfinding is about navigation, while directional guidance is about having the right information on the page, in the right place, so that users know what to buy or sign up for.”

– Maggie Paveza, User Experience and Optimization Strategist at The Good

Are directional cues the same as directional guidance?

Another common mistake is using directional cues interchangeably for directional guidance.  

Directional guidance and directional cues work together to keep the user on their path, but directional cues specifically are visual hints that guide a user to the most important elements on the screen.

There are explicit directional cues and implicit directional cues, including:

• Explicit directional cues:
  • Eye gaze
  • Arrows
  • Gesturing or pointing
  • Object positioning
  • Lines
• Implicit directional cues:
  • Contrasting colors
  • White space
  • Visual hierarchy
  • Framing or encapsulation

Again, directional guidance is the umbrella term, and directional cues may support that overarching goal of guiding the user to where they need to go.

The importance of directional guidance in digital experience optimization

The job of product marketing and ecommerce leaders is to guide the user to the best-fit product for them. Directional guidance is the umbrella term for doing just that.

It’s a combination of many strategies, tactics, or elements, including wayfinding, feature discovery, merchandising, information architecture, bundling, navigation, and more. Finding the right way to make these all work together for your user is the key to optimization.

It can be a lot to accomplish without an external, user-centered POV. If you’d like support in your efforts, contact us.

The post Directional Guidance: What It Is And How To Improve It appeared first on The Good.

As a brand, it’s important to understand customer sentiment: how your customers feel about you. Once you uncover their thoughts, you can make ethical optimizations to your business and website experience that create more positive sentiment.

In this guide, we explain customer sentiment and how to analyze it. We also explain how ethics are intertwined with sentiment and how our proprietary model helps you identify ethical activities that have the best chance of moving the needle.

What is Customer Sentiment?

Customer sentiment refers to the emotions customers feel toward your brand, products, or services. It helps you understand whether your customers’ feelings are positive, negative, or neutral, as well as why they feel that way.

Generally speaking, if your customers have positive sentiment, they are more likely to buy and become repeat loyal customers. Customers who think of your brand negatively are less likely to buy.

What affects sentiment? Your products are the biggest factor. If people love your products, they’ll probably think well of your brand. But your service quality, personal interactions, charity work, company values, website experience, and other factors can influence sentiment.

Sadly, there is a discrepancy between companies’ opinions on customer sentiment and how customers actually feel. A NICE CXone report discovered that 50% of businesses believe their customers have a positive sentiment toward their brand, but only 15% of customers agree.

What’s interesting about sentiment is that it’s infectious. It can spread from one customer to others. For instance, suppose a customer has a delightful experience with your brand. They will undoubtedly share their experience with others, which will improve those people’s sentiment.

If you gather enough feedback from customers about their feelings, you can take steps to address any issues and build a better brand experience. But to get this feedback, you have to ask the right questions.

Direct vs. indirect feedback

Customer sentiment relies on direct and indirect feedback. Both are valuable. Their differences lay in how you get them.

Direct feedback refers to statements your customers make to you directly. This includes emails, phone calls, customer support tickets, live chat, or in-person conversations. Generally, these only happen when customers aren’t happy, though direct praise isn’t uncommon.

Indirect feedback refers to statements your customers make publicly, but aren’t intended for you. This includes conversations with friends and social media conversations. With the right tools, you can find and listen to these statements.

Some communications straddle the line between direct and indirect. A Twitter complaint, for example, is directed at the brand, but the tweeter relies on the pressure of a public conversation to make their point or get a response.

Measuring customer sentiment

We have lots of ecommerce metrics to measure how people feel, such as customer satisfaction (CSAT), customer effort score (CES), ease of doing business (EODB), or Net Promoter Score (NPS®).

While those metrics are valuable, they don’t attempt to understand why customers feel the way they do. To learn why, we have to approach it qualitatively.

More than 90% of communication is nonverbal, but that presents a challenge when you’re dealing with written communication, which lacks visual and acoustic aid. The words people use are only a fraction of their feelings.

This is referred to as the Iceberg Principle. Like an iceberg’s mass, which sits mostly under the water, your audience’s sentiment is similarly obscured. It’s your job to decipher the true meaning.

Customer sentiment is based on words, so we have to either a) have to have conversations with our customers, or b) peer into their conversations with their friends, family, and followers. A star rating will tell you whether a customer had a good or bad experience, but it doesn’t give you any information in regards to fixing the bad and leaning into the good.

Sentiment analysis, therefore, will put you on the path toward improving the experiences of all of your future customers. According to the Customer Service Trends for 2022 report, 64% of consumers stop doing business with a brand after only two or three bad experiences, so it’s important to make sentiment-improving changes quickly.

Sentiment analysis is the process of trying to understand your customers’ and potential customers’ feelings about your brand, products, and overall experience. Furthermore, it helps you look beyond their words at the tone of their comments. You can do this manually or with a customer sentiment analysis tool.

Let’s use a basic example. Suppose a customer leaves a product review that simply says, “It’s fine.” At face value, that’s a good review. “Fine” certainly isn’t negative, but even through the text we can see that the customer isn’t really happy with their purchase. Maybe the product isn’t what they wanted, but not worth initiating a return.

They said “Fine,” but in actuality, they had a negative experience. Even the most basic customer feedback can help you discover potential optimizations.

The Intersection of Ethical Website Design and Customer Sentiment

Now that you understand customer sentiment, you’re probably wondering how to improve it.

There is a general correlation between higher sentiment and more conversions. It’s not a linear relationship, however. While customers who like your brand are more likely to buy, increasing sentiment doesn’t always improve conversions and boost sales.

There are definitely some things you can do to improve customer sentiment and will make people more likely to purchase. Social proof, for example, makes customers feel better about their purchase and improves conversions.

However, some sentiment-improving activities won’t impact your conversion rate. Having a blog or offering a freemium model of pricing makes people feel good, but doesn’t necessarily move users down the conversion funnel.

As you would expect, activities that produce negative sentiment, such as poor imagery, hidden prices, and slow-loading pages, can hurt your conversion rate.

However, we have to consider the ethical ramifications of any initiative, even if they lead to more sales. Some sentiment-reducers can actually boost sales, like popups, false claims, and blatantly copying your competitors. These initiatives work in the short term, but they often have long-term, irrecoverable effects on your brand.

If you’re confused, don’t worry. Here’s a model we put together that shows common site elements and how users interpret them based on our research and testing.

The top left quadrant represents activities that will improve customer sentiment, but won’t boost your conversion rate. These are not a priority.

The bottom left quadrant represents activities that will reduce customer sentiment and reduce your conversion rate. They frustrate users and detract them from making a purchase. Avoid them at all costs. If you have any of these issues, don’t bother testing. Just fix them.

The bottom right quadrant represents activities that might improve your conversion rate, but are still unethical. They work, but that could affect your brand image over time. They also might have non-customer-related consequences. False claims, for example, could cause legal trouble.

We know that no one intends to create dark patterns or act unethically toward their site visitors, but it does happen. For instance, there is a fine line between “urgent language” and misleading users. These are elements to stay away from and potentially test to determine if it improves sentiment and purchases.

The top right quadrant is the intersection of ethics and good design: activities that improve sentiment and conversions. These represent opportunities that deserve your attention.

What we do at The Good focuses on this top right quadrant. We approach optimization with an understanding of what drives positive sentiment. This helps us develop better outcomes for our clients. A client may have a lot of ideas but we may not test all of them for data-backed reasons or because we know it won’t move the needle towards purchase.

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How to Conduct Customer Research to Improve Customer Experience

How to Find Ethical Initiatives That Increase Customer Sentiment and Conversions

In order to find initiatives for testing, we first focus on that top right quadrant. This is the sweet spot where optimizations have a reasonable chance of improving conversions and increasing customer sentiment.

• Post-purchase incentives
• Shipping incentives
• Imagery with product in-situ
• Brand value alignment
• Social proof
• Search improvements
• Quality tiles
• Priming
• Buy-now-pay-later
• Urgent language

Does this mean that those initiatives will definitely improve sales and sentiment? No. Nothing is guaranteed because all brands, products, and audiences are different. But these are great topics to inspire your experiments.

Furthermore, there are probably some ethical activities that improve sentiment and conversions that are unique to your business. Maybe your customers want a product builder on your site. Maybe they want you to get involved with a related charity. Or maybe they want special, nonstandard product filtering.

If you aren’t sure what your customers want, you’ll have to go out and get that information. Here are some actionable ways to determine customer sentiment and learn how to improve it.

As you hunt for your own optimization, plot them in our sentiment-ethics model, then focus on the ones that fall into the top right quadrant.

1. Collect reviews and survey responses

If you aren’t already, someone on your team should be reading every customer review that comes in. This includes reviews on individual products and general brand reviews on Google, Yelp, Facebook, and Trustpilot. If you don’t have reviews coming in naturally, start requesting them as part of your post-purchase experience.

Don’t focus on the bad reviews from unhappy customers. Positive customer experiences can validate what you know works in your website experience and marketing campaigns.  

Additionally, use online surveys to collect your customers’ opinions. These are typically longer than a simple product review request, so your response rate will be lower, but they give you the opportunity to ask probing questions. Plus, surveys aren’t public, so only you see the answer. You can encourage your customers to be brutally honest.

Who should take your customer satisfaction survey? It depends on what you want to know. If you want to know what you’re doing right, talk to your most active customers. If you want to know what you’ve done wrong, ask customers who only purchased once.

Most importantly, make your customer surveys easy for customers to complete. Send a link to a simple form. Include multiple choice questions they can complete quickly, but also add comment boxes so they can provide unique feedback in their own words.

2. Conduct customer interviews

User interviews are one-on-one conversations with existing users or potential users in your target audience. The purpose is to get direct feedback on how they feel and what you can do better in your brand experience, including your ecommerce site.

Admittedly, user interviews are expensive and time-consuming. Someone on your team has to conduct each one. And sometimes you don’t come away with any valuable feedback. If you need feedback at scale, opt for social listening or satisfaction surveys.

But customer interviews have the potential to provide a surprising amount of information, especially if the interviewer has experience pulling information out of your customers. A skilled interviewer can probe deeply to extract powerful insights.

Analyzing your feedback from interviews is challenging because the information is qualitative and unstructured. You (or someone on your team) will need to go through them one by one and divide customer comments into categories that help optimize the website. In some cases, you might look for answers to specific questions, such as “Why don’t our users take the quiz?”

3. Monitor customer service calls and live chat

When customers contact you directly, it’s important to measure their sentiment. Since 96% of customers don’t complain when there’s a problem, you have to take the ones that do complain seriously.

Suppose a customer calls to complain about missing shipment tracking information. Perhaps they didn’t receive the shipping confirmation email. Or maybe there’s something wrong with the tracking field in the email itself.

In this case, the customer support representative should summarize the encounter in a shared document or CRM. Then, review these notes regularly to look for repeat complaints. If you see sentiment patterns, have someone fix the issues so future customers don’t suffer the same problems.

4. Conduct customer sentiment analysis with AI

Sentiment analysis (sometimes called opinion mining) is a process that uses conversational artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and machine learning to determine the sentiment behind text. It attempts to extract those intangible bits of communication and identify customer issues.

These kinds of tools can analyze any type of text: social media posts, review sites, news articles, blogs, support tickets, live chat transcripts, and more.

After reviewing the comments, the AI will unpack the text to understand its structure and classify the words as positive, neutral, or negative, thereby turning qualitative information into quantitative data that can be analyzed at scale.  

How does it work? The algorithms turn words into vectors, then use the distance between those points to understand their relationship. For instance, a sentiment analysis AI would group “Honda” and “Ford” together because they are related. (This TEDx talk explains everything.)

Sentiment analysis can detect emotions, like anger, happiness, frustration, or disappointment at different stages of the customer journey. It can even deduce what customers think of your product. Suppose customers complain that a product “breaks right away” or “isn’t very durable” or “fell apart in my hands.” In this case, the AI would classify all of those comments as “low quality” to give you a comprehensive picture.

Fortunately, you don’t need to build this yourself. There are plenty of pre-built sentiment analysis SaaS tools your data team can use, such as Talkwalker, Reputation, Repustate, Brand24, or SentiSum.

5. Interact with your audience on social media

A proper social media presence is more than just blasting out content into the void. Smart brands engage with their audience to create genuine relationships and extract valuable social media feedback.

In a 2020 Bain & Company study, 54% of companies reported using technologies for analyzing customer sentiment from social media platforms. This is expected to exceed 80% in 2023.

The benefit to these interactions is that you can hear from all customers, not just recent ones. You can even learn what non-customers think of your brand and website experience.

When a social media user mentions your brand, document their comments. Try to determine why they made those comments and how you can fix the problem for that customer and future customers.

If your brand gets a lot of social media activity, consider using a social listening platform to monitor conversations at scale, such as Sprout Social, Falcon.io, or Hootsuite. These tools let you track brand mentions, hashtags, and any keywords you like.

The Best Results Come From Tailored Insights

Best practices only take you so far. At a certain point, you have to run methodical experiments to determine what moves the needle for your brand and ecommerce site.

At The Good, our experts can help you develop accurate insights tailored to your specific site and user goals. We’ll find ways to increase conversions and customer sentiment without violating ethics, mistreating your users and customers, or causing long term damage to your brand.

Our years of experience let you focus on the initiatives that will have the greatest impact. You may have a lot of ideas, so we work collaboratively with you to test ideas that move the needle towards purchase while surfacing improvement opportunities that your team can implement. 

Learn more about our Conversion Growth Program. Let’s accelerate your business growth with our done-with-you optimization program that has proven results and no long-term commitments.

FAQs About Customer Sentiment and Ethical Design

What is customer sentiment?

Customer sentiment refers to the overall attitude, opinion, and emotions of customers towards a product, brand, or service. It can be positive, negative, or neutral and can have a significant impact on a company’s success or failure.

What is a sentiment example?

An example of negative customer sentiment in ecommerce is when customers leave negative reviews about a product they purchased online, citing issues such as poor quality, incorrect sizing, or slow shipping times. This negative sentiment can discourage potential customers from making a purchase, leading to a decrease in sales and revenue for the ecommerce business.

How do you measure customer sentiment?

Customer sentiment can be measured through various methods such as surveys, feedback forms, social media monitoring, online reviews, and sentiment analysis tools. These methods allow businesses to gather data and valuable insights about customer opinions, emotions, and attitudes towards their products or services.

What is ethical website design?

Ethical website design involves creating websites that prioritize the privacy, security, and well-being of users. It includes transparent data collection practices, accessibility for all users, and user-centered design that prioritizes usability and functionality. Ethical website design also avoids the use of manipulative tactics to exploit or deceive users.

What is customer sentiment analytics?

Customer sentiment analytics in ecommerce involves analyzing customer feedback, reviews, and social media mentions to understand customers’ emotions, attitudes, and opinions about a company’s products or services. This helps ecommerce businesses identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions to enhance the customer experience and ultimately drive sales.

Hundreds of millions in revenue generated with our strategic optimization programs.

But don’t take our word for it. Hear about the amazing results from 15+ years in business, straight from the source.

SEE HOW

The post Drive Business Growth at the Intersection of Positive Customer Sentiment & Ethical Website Design appeared first on The Good.

How does our team of expert conversion optimization strategists build a roadmap for clients?

Lots of research, planning, and a deep understanding of each website’s unique opportunities for improved conversions.

One framework we use, created by our Director of CRO and UX Strategy Natalie Thomas, is called The Hierarchy of Conversion Optimization.

In this article, we sat down with Natalie for a candid Q&A on what the framework is and how to use it.

A Conversation With Natalie Thomas on the Hierarchy of Conversion Levers

Tell me about the framework – what is it for and how is it structured?

Think of a pyramid. There are sections that represent themes from bottom to top. We use this pyramid as a way to assess the overall potential impact of the changes we could make, and it informs the order of a site’s optimization roadmap. As we optimize a website, we progressively work our way up from the bottom to the top.

At the bottom of the pyramid, you have the biggest opportunities that will impact the largest portion of your audience. As you work your way up the pyramid, the audience you’re speaking to might get smaller, but the improvements you’ve made below impact them too, so the efforts are compounding.

Ok, so it’s a pyramid shape, the opportunity audience gets smaller and smaller as you go up the pyramid, but the gains are cumulative.

Exactly.

So what’s at the widest point of the pyramid? Where do you start optimizing?

The bottom of the pyramid is trust and authority.

We tackle these issues first because they turn off both web-savvy shoppers and those with less experience buying online. Examples might be bugs or errors, low visibility of who’s behind the company, or an unconventional checkout that just feels not secure for some reason. Anything that makes a user second guess your authenticity or security would fall under this category.

I tend to think this trust factor is the area where small business operators have the biggest blindspot since “trustworthiness” in the eyes of the user tends to be based on a range of things from visual design to breaking from convention.

Users might not be able to put into words what they mean when they are on a checkout page and they say the website “looks sketchy” but one of my strategists can look at the same checkout page and identify the parts that are a little off right away.

They’ll say “well of course they think it’s sketchy, there is no order summary and the footer looks generic, not to mention the logo changed from the last page to this one, so I’m not confident I’m on the same website anymore.” It takes a trained eye to know where a site could improve that trust factor.

Web design is a lot like writing in that you have to know the rules in order to break them. A lot of custom websites break the rules in a haphazard way.

I get that trust is important, but why is it first on the list? Why is this the bottom of the pyramid?

Just because someone trusts you, doesn’t mean they’ll give you their money. We see this play out in non-profit organizations. Users may think that the organization seems trustworthy but, they still need more than that in order to convert. Trust is required, but not a clincher. So trust is the foundation we build off of. Without it, you’re toast.

What kind of impact do you see when you work on a site with really low trustworthiness?

One of the best parts of my job is that I never get to critique a client site without offering an improvement strategy in return. So on presentation day, the more it feels like a pile-on of really bad news about trustworthiness, the more room for improvement there is. We’ve seen double-digit percentage point gains within months for some of the sites with the lowest initial trust scores. It’s really gratifying.

Next in the pyramid is Friction. Can you tell me what that is?

For us, Friction is really about removing all the micro-frustrations from the site that simply prevent people from moving forward. It’s not the same as just saying “make it a good user experience.”

In this case, we’re focused on the pain points that just give people a hard time when they’re already motivated to buy, but something is standing in their way. The issues individually might be small, but the user may not have the patience to overcome all the issues combined.

Can you give me some examples of painful user experiences?

It definitely depends on the site, but we’re generally looking for any place we can mitigate annoyance, reduce repeated tasks, or simplify convoluted purchase funnels.

These are things like cumbersome customization processes, poor functionality of search widgets, a bad categorization that requires users to burn time hunting down products, etcetera.

How do you know when you’re done with optimizing the user experience?

Ha! You’re never done. Our favorite saying here at The Good is “it could be further optimized.” But there is usually a point where the issues are small enough that there are diminishing returns. That’s when we know we’ve gotten the big stuff out of the way and can largely start focusing on the next tier.

What’s your approach to adding content to a website? I bet there’s a tension between saying too much and not enough.

Totally! My approach should be a poster hung on the wall, I say it so much: Show when you can. Tell when you can’t.

Instead of writing the measurements of a product in a chart, show a schematic or an in-situ photo that represents the scale. It’s about users absorbing the info with minimal effort.

What about the next tier, Wayfinding? What is this about?

I’ll compare it to something I think a lot of people have experienced. Everyone has that one friend who you invite to dinner, you ask “where do you want to eat?” and they say “I don’t know, where do you wanna go?”

Some people just need someone to say “right this way,” and lead them to where they need to go. They need extra guidance, otherwise, they won’t have an easy time deciding on their own.

In the context of ecommerce, this could be about banners, collections, landing pages, or anything that is tailored to helping a specific audience navigate seamlessly to their perfect product.

I think that makes a lot of sense. And I definitely have that friend who needs a lifestyle concierge. Can you give me any examples?

One that relates to categories specifically, yeah. We had data suggesting we should create more meaningful menu categories for a client who sold sit-stand desks, so we surveyed new customers to understand how people were planning to use their desks. We were asking them at the moment of peak excitement what their plans were, so we got to hear about how these desks would improve their lives.

We asked about where the desks were going to go within their homes and what they were doing with them, and the range of responses was incredible. Everything from the geared-up YouTuber with dual monitors, a mic, lighting, etc. to parents who work from home at their dining table. Some of the parents had to dramatically change their setup twice per day and needed a lot of flexibility.

We created some really fun featured categories based on the research. We landed on “Best for maximalists” for people who needed maximum desk space and plenty of accessories like the YouTubers, as well as “Small but mighty” for people who needed to be able to turn any surface into a standing desk and then back again.

That’s a really fun way to shop for desks.

We thought so too!

So, tell me about the next layer of the pyramid, Differentiation.

Differentiation is probably what most people think of when they think about optimizing a website. This is about images, words, value propositions, comparison charts, and the like. I think this is actually where ecommerce managers spend most of their time already, making sure the editorial-type stuff matches their vision.

When it comes to optimizing content, we’re not talking about rebranding or completely starting from scratch. We’re more focused on getting to some of the nuances that customers are asking about after having reviewed the website already.

We use think-aloud protocol for our usability testing, so we get to hear from users what questions they have after browsing a website. You’d be shocked what users still don’t know after 10-15 minutes of looking at a website! Differentiation is focused on answering the lingering questions in the quickest way possible and making it clear why you should purchase from this company over another.

Ok, onto the next category. Incentives. What is this about?

Incentives can cover a lot of things, but in general, this is meant to address the portion of the audience who has every reason to purchase but just needs a little added incentive. They trust your site, they can find what they need and get all their questions addressed, but they need a little motivation to make the purchase.

I think about cart parkers in this case. People who have items in their carts for months on end wanting to make the purchase but not making the move. They might be waiting for a sale, but discounts are only one way to turn a desire into a purchase.

If we’re not just talking about seasonal sales, what are some other high-incentive motivators you’ve used?

It’s really based on the brand because every company kind of has a different personality when it comes to incentives. But some we’ve used in the past are bundle pricing, loyalty programs, warranties, free gift with purchase, things like that.

These can be both things that show up in your inbox (like limited-time offers) and more long-term implementations that make it more appealing to purchase now rather than later (or buy from you rather than your close competitors).

That makes sense, you’re talking about being more than just a purchase. It’s about getting more value from the transaction—beyond the product.

Exactly.

And do you A/B test these?

Sometimes yes, but most of the time the way we support here is to provide research and recommendations since a loyalty program for instance are usually a big undertaking in terms of implementation. We would provide guidance and research and then ultimately let the client team decide what is right for them in terms of timing and approach.

Alright, so not on the pyramid, but something we have chatted about being a “bonus tier” is the crème de la crème of optimization: Untapped opportunities. What does this consist of?

Untapped is about that special something that we really won’t figure out until we work with the client for a while. We never know what it is ahead of time, but when you get to know a customer base as well as we do throughout the research process, it’s inevitable that we’ll stumble upon something really spectacular.

Can you share an example?

Well for one client, Snow Peak, it was about this exclusivity effect. We worked with the US website, but they were headquartered in Japan, so there were often stock issues. They might have an item on the website that was sold out for months longer than anticipated.

I think the team at the time was a little sheepish that they had so much out of stock, but when we talked to their customers it was clear that they didn’t care. The quality of the goods was unparalleled and the limited supply added to this air of exclusivity. So our recommendation was basically “own it.” Lean into that exclusivity.

We added messaging in key areas of the site that told people basically these are limited runs, made with care, and when we say the last one we mean it. We also added more visibility to the product guarantees to relate the limited stock to the quality manufacturing, and we recommended an approach to start waitlisting people for the sold-out products. The results were really bonkers.

And you find this with all your clients?

Every long-term client, yes. There’s always this moment where we feel like we’ve unlocked a door we didn’t previously know was there.

This framework can serve both new to CRO brands and experienced optimization teams as they build an optimization roadmap.

Remember, conversion rate optimization is an iterative process, so once you’ve gone through the pyramid and executed your subsequent optimization roadmap, start back at the bottom with fresh learnings.

If you want a quality-driven CRO firm to help your team better understand the hierarchy of conversion optimization, we would love to hear from you. Contact us.

The post The Hierarchy of Conversion Optimization: Q&A With Natalie Thomas appeared first on The Good.