|
The
Insighter July 2011 View all articles on our new site |
Neo Insight's e-newsletter on Customer Experience topics and techniques. We invite you to subscribe to our monthly e-newsletter: People value every second on the web – we often hear “Don’t waste my time!” In all of our various usability testing methods, we always measure the time to perform a task – whether the person is finding the recycling schedule on their city site or buying a product on a store site. Time scores tell us a lot about the patterns, difficulty and clarity of tasks. Turns out that seconds also count in lifting conversion rates, which is why experts who conduct Landing Page Optimization include time in their optimization process. Conversion Rate refers to the percentage of web page visitors who perform the desired action, usually completing a purchase or submitting a form. Friction slows people down!Usability improves conversion rates by reducing friction. MECLABS has developed a model of conversion based on years of rigorous optimization experiments. One of the elements in the model is Friction and too much can harm conversion rates. Minimizing friction is the intersection point of usability and optimization. Friction, according to MarketingExperiments/MECLABS, is a measure of the time imposed by both the length and the difficulty of the conversion process. In usability, time scores per task can be seen as a means of measuring friction. Dr. Flint McLaughlin of MECLABS also shares that their experiments suggest efforts to reduce friction produce a disproportionately high return in conversion increases. That’s where usability comes in - testing methods & expertise are oriented to reducing task time by identifying friction elements like unnecessary steps in tasks or elements that create cognitive load or distraction.
All Public and Private sector sites can benefit from Reducing FrictionThere are many usability parallels between sites oriented to conversion and sites oriented to other tasks, like finding a book at a library, checking for certification requirements at a professional association or finding government market data for a business plan. In essence, converting the user to purchase is simply a means of helping the visitor complete their task efficiently and successfully. We find there are some significant sources of friction common to many sites, particularly around Register buttons, and Registration Forms. We’ll use these as examples of the benefits of learning from both optimization experiments and usability methods. Example: Forcing a Visitor to Register is Pure FrictionReducing friction improves sales. During the last year, we worked with e-store clients and government clients with registration processes that were overly long, overly complex and in many cases, totally unnecessary. They were pure friction. There is ample evidence to suggest that registration deters conversion. Jared Spool’s 2009 article The $300 Million Button tells this exact story – removing the Register button increased the number of customers purchasing on a major e-store site by 45%. In our usability testing, we saw participants on E-stores and government sites absolutely desperate to avoid registering. Only when the incentive was high enough (i.e. there was absolutely no other way to fill their need) did they proceed.
“The form, intended to make shopping easier, turned out to only help a small percentage of the customers who encountered it. … Instead, the form just prevented sales - a lot of sales.” Registering is Perceived as a Waste of TimeTime is one of the of the main deterrents participants cite when they try to avoid registering – they see registration as something that will take too long for too little benefit. There are those precious seconds, ticking away again. Usability testing participants tell us why they don't register. Here are some of the reasons we’ve heard:
We advise all of our clients to avoid forcing visitors to register if at all possible. Many sites undergoing Landing Page Optimization are moving in this direction as well. The 2011 Landing Page Optimization Benchmark Report from marketingsherpa shows 74% of respondents reporting that providing ‘Guest Checkout’ had a positive impact on conversion rates. Offering an opportunity to save a password at the end of the guest checkout process (which requires the bare minimum of information) can provide the guest with an opportunity to create an account without the mental barrier to registration that exists today. Dos and Don’ts to Reduce Registration FrictionSome E-store clients were locked in to software or suppliers that forced the requirement upon them. Some government agencies were also forced into registration processes.Some others have managed to force-fit a ‘Guest Checkout’ process onto their system that creates an account in the background. In all of these cases, the trick to reducing friction is to avoid the perceived barriers to registration listed above (and in the meantime, show your suppliers some of this data!). As seen below, Amazon provides a great well-tested example of how to improve conversion rates and usability by providing a registration-like process that avoids those barriers.
Best practices from Amazon will lift conversion rates and improve usability on your own site:
Registration is just one example of an intersection point where usability professionals can learn from optimization experiments and vice versa. We’ll keep recommending the learning from MarketingExperiments and WhichTestWon to our clients, and will follow them ourselves to complement our usability expertise. If you’re at the point in your Landing Page Optimization process when you know there’s friction,but you’re not sure how to improve it, let us know. We can provide a free half-hour consultation to discuss how usability methods can improve the lift you’ll gain from Landing Page Optimization or to reduce friction in any aspect of your site. 
See also:
Quote of the month“The goal of a test is to get a learning, not a lift. With enough learnings, you can get the real lift.” Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, MarketingExperiments If you have any comments on The Insighter, or ideas on usability topics you'd like to send us an email. We invite you to subscribe to
our monthly |
|||||||||||||
|
