No serious SEO can ignore the elephant in the
room: black hat works. For every post informing us that we need to
create compelling content in order to rank, there are hundreds or
thousands of junky posts ranking on purchased links, private link
networks, and tiered linking schemes. Black hat doesn’t work for
long, but it does work.
So why are we sitting here telling you to “think beyond links?” Are
we just industry sheeple, regurgitating Google propaganda about how you
need “great content” in order to show up in the SERPs?
No.
We’re here to tell you that compelling sites take you further than
rankings alone, and that UI and UX are musts if you want to optimize any
relevant KPIs, as opposed to just optimizing for search. If you still
aren’t convinced, take a look at our full explanation.
Today, we’re going to talk about how to do it.
1. Embrace Responsive Design
At the end of 2012,
Mashable redesigned their entire site.
The content now resizes itself if you adjust the size of your browser.
They’ve done this to respond to their changing user base. As more people
switch over to tablets and mobile phones, fewer of them are willing to
put up with sites that force them to use horizontal scrolling or zooming
just to use the site.
Mashable is far from alone in recognizing this need.
2013 is the first year where projected PC sales are expected to be
lower than the previous year. One hundred million tablets are expected
to be sold by the end of the year, and smartphones already outnumber
traditional cell phones.
Meanwhile, very few businesses will be able to design apps accessible
from every device. Apps are certainly a good way to put yourself in
view among your core customer base, but it’s much more difficult to
convince a user to install an app than it is to convince them to visit a
website. Add to that a huge number of conflicting platforms and it
starts to get very difficult to reach as wide an audience with apps
alone.
Using media queries, you can determine the resolution of the user’s
browser and adjust the presentation accordingly. Some screens are too
narrow to accommodate side bars or large images.
In addition to responsive design, “adaptive design” is another
important element in the future of site development. With adaptive
design, you detect the type of device and adjust features accordingly.
You may want to enable swiping, or adjust button sizes to accommodate
fat fingers as opposed to tiny cursors.
Simply saying “we need responsive design” isn’t enough, though. You
need to eliminate age-old habits you didn’t even know you were using.
You can’t just create a mockup of what you want the site to look like
and let the designer make all the calls. You’ll need to do things like:
- Assign a hierarchy to each page element
- Assign a hierarchy to each part of the content (because lorem ipsum just isn’t going to cut it)
- How does navigation change on smaller screens?
It’s not just a matter of making things smaller so they fit the screen.
Smashing Magazine recommends starting with a mobile wireframe design
that makes the hierarchy and priorities immediately clear. You can then
hand this mobile mockup to a designer. A good designer should be able to
immediately envision what the desktop size version should look like.
(Here is there example, starting with a
PDF of the mobile version and ending with the
hi-res desktop version.)
It’s much easier to design for mobile and envision how things will
adjust when the screen gets larger than it is to go in the other
direction. This is central to
effective responsive design.
2. Understand Split Testing
You’re not going to maximize conversions, user engagement, or create
the most positive user experience if you don’t perform split tests, or
don’t perform them correctly.
Danny Inny at CopyBlogger
compared split testing to sex in high school:
everybody says they’re doing it, most of them aren’t, and most of those
who really are probably aren’t doing it right. Truer words have rarely
been spoken.
Here are a few of the biggest mistakes people make when they split test their pages:
Statistical significance is not some vague feeling that you’ve run
the test long enough to verify that one page works better than the
other. When you ignore statistical significance, you surrender to
statistical flukes and your own biases. You need to reach 90 or 95%
confidence before you decide that one page is working better than the
other. If you don’t know how to do that, you can take advantage of this
free tool by Firepole marketing, you can learn
what a two-sample t-test is, and you can take advantage of
Google’s own split-tester right in Google analytics, or use the
Premise WordPress plugin right from the WordPress menu.
You need
a lot of traffic to spot small changes. 100 impressions is only enough to spot a 20% difference between two results. It takes
10,000 impressions
before you can spot a 2% difference between options. That’s why, unless
you can afford to pay for the traffic, you should start with major
changes like:
- Entire landing page concept
- The headline
- Price
- Content
- Images
Some will argue with me on the first point, but I think that’s
unwise. I maintain that changing the entire page is still “changing one
thing at a time,” and it’s probably the very first thing you should
test. The landing page
concept contains within it hidden
assumptions about how your audience acts. You need to test what kind of
audience you’re working with before you test individual things.
Testing individual page elements will help you get the best version of a page, but it will
not get you to the best page concept.
3. Behaviors Speak Louder than Words
Split testing is great for maximizing conversions, time on site,
etc., but there is another kind of testing that is absolutely vital for
UI and UX: usability testing. It’s
very important to understand that usability testing is pretty much
nothing like split testing.
The purpose of usability testing is to see how users
actually use the
interface. It’s user-centered design at its best, and it helps you
build an interface that accommodates the way people actually expect it
to work. This results in an intuitive user experience that flows
naturally.
So how does usability testing work?
In usability testing, you present users with the interface and ask
them to perform a series of steps. Their interaction with the interface
is recorded, observed, and documented.
Unlike split testing, a very small number of users are actually
needed in order to arrive at conclusions. The reality of the situation
is that most people, especially those relatively inexperienced with
technology, will respond to the interface the same way. It almost never
takes more than ten users to spot a design flaw or opportunity, and
typically takes fewer than that.
User testing is
not market research. It is
not about asking users what would make them like the interface more or asking for feedback. It is
entirely about
observing behavior. The truth is, people rarely know what they want or
what would make the interface work better…at least not consciously. It
is only by observing their
behavior that you can learn what the product is missing, or where opportunities lie.
Jakob Nielson of Sun Microsystems popularized the concept of a large
number of very small usability tests during development in the ‘90s. All
that is typically necessary is five or six random users. This has come
to be called “hallway testing” because of the implication that the users
to test will be random people picked up off the hallway.
Put simply, as soon as you spot two or three people struggling with
the interface, you don’t gain very much by watching hundreds or
thousands of other people go through the same problem.
Statistically speaking, samples this small aren’t really
representative of the general population, but that’s not the point. You
can almost always spot problems of some kind with samples this small,
and it’s pointless to test further until the problem is fixed. Testing
larger samples is unnecessary until no problems can be detected with
such small samples.
The point is to focus on iteration. Usability testing is much less
scientific than split testing, and is driven primarily by the experience
and intuition of the designers, combined with the behavioral data of
users. With enough iterations, the overall sample size does become
large, but the benefit of using this method is that initial problems are
resolved early on and never encountered again, so that smaller problems
can be uncovered by subsequent tests.
Usability testing can be made more effective and efficient by using tracking software, heat maps, and eyeball tracking tools.
It doesn’t have to be expensive, however. One method that is being
advocated for startups is called paper prototype testing, and it’s
exactly what it sounds like. This involves using paper mockups, which
may even be hand sketched. It involves a user, who interacts with the
paper mockup, a facilitator, who takes notes and delves into the
problems with the users, and a “human computer,” who is familiar with
the interface and manipulates the mockup to simulate the final
interface.
Such paper prototype testing has been working quite effectively since
the ‘80s and is unlikely to go out of fashion any time soon.
While usability testing isn’t the same as market research or
qualitative questionnaires, it can be useful in some cases to mix them
together. Face to face interviews tend to be most useful, particularly
right after a user testing session. These interviews can help uncover
the root issue behind the behaviors. They can be very informative, as
long as you remember that behaviors speak louder than words.
4. Build Consumer Psychology into the Site
User experience is all about what is happening mentally, so it’s
important to understand a few things about consumer psychology when you
design the interface and decide on the content. We can start with Robert Cialdini’s six principles of influence:
1. Reciprocity – Humans, in general, are more
inclined to do favors for people who have already done favors for them.
The more value your website offers to its users, the more inclined they
are to offer value of their own in return.
2.
Commitments – People are more
likely to follow through on something if they make a commitment, no
matter how small, and even if it is a mental commitment. For example,
you are more likely to get a positive result in most circumstances if
you ask “Will you…” instead of “Please…” Small commitments also open up
the door to larger commitments in the future.
3. Authority – We tend to trust people with
credentials and expertise more than people without them. A seal of
approval, a group membership, or an endorsement from a trusted authority
can go a long way. This is also the entire premise of content
marketing: that you can become a trusted authority by offering valuable,
helpful content on subjects that matter to your target audience.
4. Social Proof – We’re more likely to be influenced
by somebody who is trusted by others, especially if they happen to be
popular in groups that we associate with. This is even truer when
somebody that we personally know endorses a product, organization, or
person.
5. Scarcity – The more rare something is, the more
valuable we tend to think it is. Unfortunately, this tactic has been
used so often, and has become reminiscent of so many “don’t miss your
chance” infomercials, that consumers rarely trust it anymore. It’s best
to allow them to come to the conclusion that your
brand is rare on their own, by producing content, products, and an online experience that is hard to come by.
6. Rapport – This is where market research and user
targeting can get especially helpful. The more consumers feel like they
have in common with you, the more likely they are to trust you, and to
eventually buy from you.
In addition to these six principles, we can add 4 cognitive biases and heuristics that affect the way we think:
7. Loss Aversion – Generally speaking, the fear of
loss is more influential than the promise of reward. We’re more willing
to take a risk to avoid a loss than to earn a reward, and this is true
even when the outcome is exactly the same. This has been scientifically
validated many times. It’s the reason we fear the unknown, and it’s why
stock market players hold on to losers too long and let go of winners
too early.
8. Status Quo Bias (Default Bias) – If we’re given a
series of options, we tend to choose whichever one seems to be the
“default.” Anybody who’s ever been overwhelmed with decisions by the
restaurant waitress (or the confusing menu) knows what I’m talking
about. We like options, but don’t like being forced to make a decision.
This is why smart restaurant menus highlight just a few dishes with
special coloration and pictures, and why smart site designers make it
clear where they want users to start.
9. Anchoring – Humans don’t think in absolutes. They
think in relative terms. We tend to anchor things on our first
impression or our most memorable (probably most emotional) one. As an
example, if we see the highest price first, the lowest price will tend
to seem lower. If we start with the lowest price, the highest price will
seem much higher. The same goes for any other quality we might
evaluate. This is why it’s important to be very careful with first
impressions, and how we move forward from there.
Conclusion
Hopefully this introduction has given digital marketers
something to think about. The careful balance between UI and UX is
every bit as important as off-site SEO, and it is a crucial part of the
buying cycle. Master these basics and you will be worlds ahead of the
competition.
What are your thoughts on UI and UX strategy?
