The document provides 8 tips for improving website usability and conversion rates: 1) Don't neglect what actually happens on your website. 2) Calculate the potential return on investment of improving your conversion rate. 3) Provide transparency and answer visitor questions. 4) Remove barriers to entry like forced registrations. 5) Focus the user on the primary action you want them to take. 6) Listen to customer and prospect feedback through user testing. 7) Follow general usability and e-commerce best practices when possible. 8) Continually test and optimize pages through split and multivariate testing.

1. 8 Essential Usability & Conversion Optimization Tips by Paul Rouke Head of Usability at PRWD 12 th July 2011 @ FutureCommerce 2011 by How Do Bridgewater Hall, Manchester Twitter Hashtag #fcomm2011

3. The Leading North West Usability & Conversion Optimisation Consultancy Provide services to help businesses improve their website conversion rate Usability testing Expert evaluations User-centered design Usability training Consultancy Conversion rate optimisation About PRWD

4. PRWD Clients Include PRWD clients

5. Effectiveness – Can they reach their goals find what they are looking for do what they want to do? Efficiency – How fast number of errors amount of effort number of steps? Satisfaction – Was it a good/bad experience? Do it again? Recommend to others? What is Usability and User Experience? What is good website usability?

6. What does all this mean for website owners? more & more expectant visitors...

7. Key recommendation Don’t neglect what actually happens ON your website

8. Calculating ROI… What financial impact will an improved conversion rate have? Not just sales impact, but profit as well It should not be hard to build the business case to invest more in a user-centered business culture Calculate potential ROI for both lead generation and e-commerce websites The financial impact of improving your website conversion rate

9. View the ROI calculator at: http://www.prwd.co.uk/what-we-do/usability-return-on-investment Calculate your potential ROI

11. Key recommendation Provide transparency

12. What ASOS don’t do Stay still Think that they know best Ignore what their customers are saying Presume their brand credibility means visitors will automatically trust them as an online retailer.

13. More details - http://bit.ly/ASOSbbp

15. Do we hide important information from visitors? Do we present visitors with any nasty surprises late in a journey ? Do we get customer service calls about questions we can answer online ? Do we manage visitor expectations ? What can we do to give more visitors confidence to complete their on-site journey? Questions on your website…

16. Photo credit - http://www.flickr.com/photos/adactio/99387925/lightbox/

17. Key recommendation Answer visitor questions

18. Test version A Does answering questions improve conversion?

19. Test version B Does answering questions improve conversion?

20. Test version A v Test version B - RESULTS + 66% Does answering questions improve conversion?

21. What questions do our offline customers often ask us? What questions can we answer to help visitors make a decision ? Are any of our key pages currently confusing for new visitors ? What’s the number 1 question our customers currently ask us? Questions on your website…

22. Photo credit - http://www.flickr.com/photos/sooperkuh/2932775162/

23. Key recommendation Remove barriers to entry

24. Don’t force registration

25. Remove barrier but still give the option

26. A much better way to encourage ‘registration’ More details - http://bit.ly/reduceabandons

27. If users have to, the word ‘register’ is a barrier

28. Replace the words register/registration

29. Does our wording give visitors to wrong impression ? Are we forcing new customers to register? Do we really need to ask for all this information? Do we provide visitors with benefits for them if they do what we want them to? Do we know if there are any barriers which we need to improve conversions? Questions on your website…

30. Photo credit - http://www.flickr.com/photos/editor/283989913/

31. Key recommendation Focus the user on what you want them to do

32. Bad Example Don’t use 1 button style for all actions

33. Bad Example Focus on the primary action for each page

34. Consider what you want visitors to do

35. Don’t be shy about attracting attention

36. Bad Example Don’t clutter your primary CTA

37. Bad Example Focus on the primary action for each page

38. Focussing the visitor on what you want Use button size, style and colour to focus the user and increase conversions

39. Does our primary call to action stand out amongst other actions? Do we use different button styles dependant on how important the action is? Do we encourage visitors to think about exiting/cancelling by providing buttons which are too prominent ? Is there white space around primary action buttons? Do we draw visitors attention to what we want them to do? Questions on your website…

41. Key recommendation Listen to what your customers and prospects have to say

42. We all know how important it is to be considerate of what people want… especially when buying Christmas presents… …look what can happen when we’re not!

45. Getting an understanding of how other people use your website is one of the most enlightening experiences you can have when it comes to online marketing There are 3 main types of user testing, suitable for all budgets: User testing overview Guerrilla Remote Moderated More details - http://bit.ly/usertesting101

46. What are the business benefits of user testing? More business benefits here: http://bit.ly/UTbenefits Photo credit - http://www.flickr.com/photos/wwarby/4915772994

48. What is remote user testing? Cheap Simple Enlightening Delivers actionable results

49. Try it for FREE with a PRWD partner: Visit http://whatusersdo.com Use promo code PRWD 1st 20 get one FREE test

50. What is moderated user testing? In-depth Comprehensive Important for larger brands Delivers actionable results

51. Some insights from user testing with our client The time I had with 9 women in 9 hours – (Google ‘ 9 women x 9 hours ’ ) 10 e-commerce best practice features – (Google ‘ Lakeland best practice ’ )

52. Have we ever watched one of our customers use our website ? Do we know what is stopping new visitors from buying from us? Do we know why visitors aren’t completing their application? Why do so many visitors end up exiting our website at this particular page? What is stopping visitors from signing up for our service? Can we ask some of our current customers to help us improve our website? Questions for you and your business…

54. Key recommendation Stick to ‘best practice’ in most cases

55. Not sure what best practice is all about… WFT does usability best practice actually mean?

56. Want to find out about general best practice? usability best practice

57. Looking for e-commerce best practice? e-commerce usability best practice

58. or for a different approach you could try… hancholo

60. Google Analytics and other analytics packages provide intuitive and powerful advanced segmentation functionality You need to understand what is your true conversion rate – not just from visitor source, but other factors More information on this approach can be seen on my Econsultancy article: http://econsultancy.com/blog/4340-traffic-segmentation-humble-or-sliced-which-pie-are-you-having Gaining a true representation of how a website is performing is crucial, and there is one thing that traffic segmentation does do - it delivers benefits to clients, agencies and last but not least end users. Advanced Traffic Segmentation

62. | THE most important type of on-going testing and optimisation Builds on best practice improvements to help make further refinements to improve conversion rates Removes the purely theoretical aspects of usability Companies still gladly increase acquisition spend in order to improve sales, without investing seriously and continually in on-site conversion optimisation Split and Multi-variate Testing

64. Don’t neglect what actually happens ON your website Key takeout for all

65. Connect with me http://uk.linkedin.com/in/paulrouke Office: 0161 228 0585 Mobile: 07739 745 126 Email: paulrouke @ prwd.co.uk Web: http://www.prwd.co.uk PRWD 22 Lever Street Manchester M1 1EA http://twitter.com/paulrouke

66. Thankyou for listening “8 Essential Usability & Conversion Optimization Tips” by Paul Rouke Slides, resources, tools & best practice available here: http://bit.ly/CROresources