Behind The Conversion Rate
Top 5 Design Principles From 100+ A/B tests
You must have heard about A/B tests and conversion rate if you are in the fast-growing digital world. And there are countless UX rules behind every hypothesis, for example, attention, reassurance, usability, contrast, trigger, etc. By revisiting 100+ A/B test cases, I listed other 5 design principles that can also be crucial for conversions.
1. Focusing effect
Focusing effect explains that customers can be very vulnerable because one factor might play the major role in decision-making. Therefore, it is very important to figure out what their focus is and when they make judgement of buying a product. In one test case, the hypothesis was that product feature W was our customers’ main focus. So we highlighted W at 4 different steps in the purchasing flow. The result confirmed that this feature helped a lot in persuading the customers, and the focusing effect kicked in mostly before the check-out.
2. Paradox of choice
Paradox of choice tells that more options leads to fewer purchase decisions. Overwhelming your customers with all kind of choices might not be good. Less is more. In one test, by removing less important product categories and promoting the hero products in focused tab view instead of carousel, more purchase were made. And the result was not surprising.
3. Social proof
Social proof is used everywhere nowadays. For example, when you see your favourite celebrity is enjoying a glass of coke on Instagram, you will probably get a coke as well if the weather is sunny. That’s the power of social proof. In product detail pages, by placing videos of customers using the product at home, we were able to increase the final purchase conversion. Moreover, loading the videos from Facebook have more positive impact than directly from the website.
4. Outcome expectation
Outcome expectation stems from the expectancy theory and basically states that users like to infer the outcome after performing a behaviour. When designing triggers and writing persuasive copies, outcome expectation cannot be neglected. In a redesign project of a 3-step questionnaire, we started telling visitors what the next step will be. And the conversion point (traffic that finished the questionnaire/total traffic ) increased more than 50% .
5. Culture and emotion
As we learned in school, a good design should be good for its users. And users have emotions and their own culture background. In one of the tests for the Chinese market, the hypothesis was “changing the buy button from orange to red will lead to more WTB (want to buy) conversion.” It was based on the fact that red is associated with happy in the Chinese culture. And also, red triggers the urge to buy. The result was satisfying. The total conversion rate for all product ranges increased more than 20%.
