Use Conversion Rate Design to Turn Website Visitors Into Loyal Customers
The goal of every business with an online presence is to turn website visitors into long-term customers, and that’s where conversion rate design comes in. Also known as conversion rate optimization user experience (CRO UX) design, conversion rate design provides an important pathway to positively impacting a company’s bottom line.
This article covers what you need to know to begin applying principles of conversion rate UX design to identify, create, and leverage positive user experiences that engender brand loyalty and, ultimately, convert users into loyal customers.
Topics covered in this article include:
Understanding user behavior and how it informs winning strategies in CRO UX design
Identifying and incorporating key elements of UX design to keep users engaged
How optimizing website performance will give your site a winning edge
The benefits of personalizing the user experience
The correlation between design and trust and why making users feel secure creates the kind of positive UX that converts
How keeping up with continuous improvement initiatives solidifies loyalty and reduces churn
Understanding User Behavior Informs CRO UX Design
Effective CRO UX design depends on understanding user behavior, specifically what types of experiences will drive, persuade, and encourage users to become customers. Since the goal is to give users the best experiences possible, the designer must be able to empathize with their target audience, understand how and why they make the decisions that they do, and then use this knowledge to create experiences that will meet or exceed user expectations.
Two well-known companies — Netflix and Duolingo — have created websites and apps that offer great examples of CRO UX design done right.
Netflix Knows User-Friendly Design
For a winning example of a website designed with user behavior in mind, take a look at Netflix.com. Not only does the site make it seamless to toggle between its website and its mobile and TV apps, but the entire interface design demonstrates that Netflix knows how its users like to interact with its site.
The Netflix website invites users to browse titles by interest, select what they want to watch now or later and stream what they’ve chosen when and where it suits them. By keeping the screen bifurcated — the top displays what interests you, and the bottom gives you insight into what’s trending — you control where you want to place your attention.
Add in features like thumbnails of videos to keep users engaged, mini trailers designed to pique their interests, and even an easy way to disable the sound on trailers if users find them distracting, and it’s easy to see that Netflix put UX at the top of its design decisions. And the company’s dedication to conversion-centered design principles means that even first-time visitors can seamlessly and easily join the ranks of Netflix’s 260 million worldwide subscribers.
Duolingo Draws You In
No matter what language you currently speak, Duolingo, the free language learning app, doesn’t mince words. As soon as you hit the landing page, you know what Duolingo is designed to do and how you can jump on board to start learning a second language in just a few simple steps.
The site combines clarity of mission with an immediate call to action, so anyone looking to speak a new language would be hard-pressed to turn down the site’s user-friendly offer to start learning right away. Efficacy meets whimsy as the sleek design supports the persuasive messaging, addressing all of the whys and hows of the app while letting the user know that learning a new language is not only fun and free, but it’s for everyone at any time. Duolingo’s UX design makes it almost impossible not to sign on and become a customer.
The Key Elements of Effective UX Design
As the Netflix and Duolingo examples show, the key to creating an effective UX design that converts is keeping the user-friendly interface top of mind while appealing to the user’s sense of aesthetics in a way that connects with them emotionally. You’ll need to give equal time to creating a visual design, convincing users to perform important tasks, promoting the utilitarian value of what you are offering, and ensuring that the site functions well.
Visual Design
You never get a second chance to make a first impression. That’s why it is vital that you pay attention to your site’s appearance. Form matters every bit as much as function when it comes to user satisfaction. As you’re embracing UX design that converts, be sure to evaluate every element from an aesthetic point of view.
Keep these questions in mind:
Does your interface design appeal to the user’s sense of style?
Does the design hold their interest and invite their focus?
Do the visual elements invite users to explore the site further?
Does the design invite users to move forward with an action?
Does the design offer a sense of security so users feel confident when they’re navigating the site?
Good visual design immediately connects with the user’s emotions and fulfills their needs seamlessly, offering an intuitive way to proceed with focus and intention.
Persuasion in Design
A site designed with persuasiveness in mind recognizes that the user often wants evidence that taking a certain action is in their best interest. Whether that action is navigating to certain pages, signing up for targeted lists, following through with a purchase, or a combination of these and other actions, true UX design that converts incorporates persuasive calls to action directly into the design.
Examples of persuasive design elements that might fit within your website design plan include:
Framing options in a way that adds the perception of value, such as offering side-by-side product or price comparisons or rewards for taking immediate action
Offer reciprocity in the form of bonus items, bonus content, or rewards for purchasing
Establish scarcity by putting a time limit on a particular offer and incorporating a countdown clock or other time-is-running-out element
Emphasize the social desirability of a particular action by emphasizing others’ buy-in using a ticker showing purchases made in a given time frame
Recommend alternative or companion product purchases that others have opted for
Utility in Design
To keep a user interested and encourage them to become a customer, your design must demonstrate both value and utility. You need to show them that interacting with your site and becoming a customer is a useful endeavor. To that end, it’s important to know who your customer is and what they are looking for so you can design for their particular needs and preferences.
It’s helpful to create user personas. Also referred to as customer or audience personas, these are detailed sketches of your ideal customers. It’s important to know as much as you can about the people you are designing for. How old are they? Where do they live, where do they work (or study), and what do they like to do for fun?
Knowing your target audience inside and out will help you incorporate assets that speak directly to your users and encourage them to become customers.
Maintaining Functional Integrity While Optimizing Website Performance
Even if you create an award-winning conversion rate design for your website, it’s going to fall flat on its face if it's clunky or buggy or cumbersome to the user. Content that loads slowly, problems navigating from page to page, or glitches during checkout are death knells when it comes to UX. Form is useless if function isn’t there. That’s why CRO UX design requires design and development to work in tandem to produce the best outcome possible.
Personalization and Tailored Experiences
In order to determine which design elements to include in your website to attract, delight, and ultimately convert users into loyal customers, you’ll need to understand user behavior. Customer journey maps and customer-focused optimizations will help you personalize the customer experience to make it attractive and fulfilling for your users.
Creating a customer journey map helps UX designers understand how users interact with and experience a website. It’s a visual representation of the actions users take before, during, and following their time on the website, helping you to define the target customer’s goals during each stage of their journey.
Along with understanding the user journey, paying attention to data-driven insights will help you determine how to provide experiences for your users that feel personal and tailored to their needs. Analytics on where users land, how long they stay on a page, and what they do while interacting with your site all help designers identify user preferences and pain points. This data, in turn, can offer guidance on where and how to incorporate customer-focused optimizations — like organically inserting keywords into your content, using enticing colors and attention-grabbing buttons, or even toning down the bells and whistles to offer a more streamlined experience — to give the user an experience that feels like home.
Building Trust Through Design
While a professional design will go a long way to promote your brand as trustworthy and credible, there are a number of visual trust elements you can add to your website to signal that it’s safe to do business with your company. Make sure your design incorporates security and trust elements on every page and not just the home page. Remember your customer’s user journey, which may bypass the homepage in many instances.
Trust signals to consider incorporating into your UX-centric design include:
Offering reviews and testimonials from actual users who can attest to your credibility and value
Displaying customer logos prominently on your site to demonstrate the trust others place in your products or services
Introducing your team members with photographs and synopses of their backgrounds and credentials
Inviting users to visit your social media sites and providing buttons for easy access
Showcasing your partnerships with familiar payment partners — think Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal — by displaying their logos
Offering a clear and concise rendition of your return and refund policies in a prominent and accessible manner
Continual Improvement with User Feedback
User feedback is invaluable when it comes to refining your UX design. Consistent refining is the cornerstone of the continual improvement you need to keep current customers and attract new users. Try employing one or more of these strategies to keep your website fresh and user-friendly.
Surveys and questionnaires. Provide users with a set of questions — either online or in person — about their attitudes and preferences and what they like and dislike. This quick and inexpensive research method can render extremely useful qualitative/attitudinal research data.
Interview your users. Another simple and effective way to understand users is to simply contact customers and speak to them one-on-one about your site or app. You can pose open-ended questions about what makes your site user-friendly, what can be improved upon, and how comfortable the user feels using the site. Sometimes, the best suggestions for improvement come from these types of unscripted conversations.
Card sorting. Sometimes, especially when you’re going to embark on a major upgrade or add significant pages and features to your site, it makes sense to gauge user expectations before you get too deep into the improvements. With card sorting, users are provided with information about new site or page architecture and are invited to group, label, and describe information in a way that makes sense to them. This helps the UX designer understand how the users categorize information so they can, in turn, better anticipate how to create a functional design that is intuitive for users.
A/B testing. A/B testing — also known as split testing — is another method many designers find useful in determining UX design direction. The designer creates two versions of a page and then observes the traffic and performance for each. They then take this information and use it to adopt the highest-performing elements.
Ready to Launch a Career in UX/UI Design? Ideate Labs Can Help!
When done properly, UX design can attract users and encourage them to become loyal and lasting customers. So, how long does UX design take to learn and execute? With the right tutelage and resources, you can become a CRO UX design expert in just a few weeks.
Teaching both novice and experienced website designers how to create websites and apps that are optimized to convert users into loyal long-term customers is Ideate Labs’ purpose.
Founded by two women eager to make the dream of becoming a digital design professional accessible to all, Ideate Labs’ UX design courses offer an intimate class structure, personalized mentorship, and a guarantee that you’ll walk away with the tools and knowledge you need to reach your career goals.