The most reliable way to grow your business is to keep finding news ways of solving problems for your customers. One powerful way to do this is through experiment-driven design. This is an approach that relies on rapid experimentation to validate assumptions and drive decision making. By running frequent experiments and constantly collecting data about your customers' behaviour, you can make informed decisions about where to focus your energy and resources. It’s at the core of everything we do here at The Obsidian Lab.
So if you want to design your way to higher conversion rates, all you have to do is follow our 6-step process.
- Identify
- Prioritise
- Design
- Test
- Analyse
- Repeat
Let’s dig into each one in depth.
1. Identify the problems
Step one is to do your homework.
Find out where your services aren’t meeting customer expectations. That means doing design research. If you’re an e-commerce brand there are a number of different approaches you might take:
- Learn about e-commerce and UX best practices
- Audit your customer journey
- Observe user behaviour on your site
- Listen to customer feedback from your CX teams
- Read customer reviews
- Analyse your site metrics
There are many types of research you can perform as a business. No one solution is best. Combining data from different sources is the most powerful option. With the insights from your research, you can come up with with a series of hypothesis around what you should be fixing, and why.
2. Prioritise opportunities
Every problem you discover is a chance to deliver a better service to your customers. Once you’ve identified all the areas of opportunity, you’ll want to prioritise them so that you can focus on the most important work first.
There are all sorts methods for prioritising work, but the most common ones compare value vs effort. High value tasks will have the greatest positive impact on your metrics. High effort tasks require the most time and resources to complete. Ideally you want High value - low effort work.
3. Design your solutions
With your problems identified and prioritised, it’s time to start exploring solutions. The best ideas come from a cross functional teams working together to solve the problem - Product, Design, and Engineering. If you can’t get all three, finding a Product Designer with a good knowledge of each discipline goes a long way.
Ideally you come up with a range of solutions that you believe solve the problem, so you can test out which is most effective.
4. Test your solutions
The goal of testing is to gain as much insight into the success of a solution, with as little effort. If you can, test prototypes of your design before you spend developer hours building it. The more chances you have to put your work in front of users before it’s launched, the more successful you will be.
Once you’re ready to go live, always launch your changes via an A/B test, or multivariate test if you have multiple variations of the design. This is crucial. Why?
You want to make sure you’re testing your new designs against your original version during the same time period, under the same market conditions. Conversion can fluctuate from week to week. Say you launched a new marketing campaign that send a flood of eager buyers to your site the same week you launched a new homepage. How would you know if the uplift in conversion was due to the marketing or the homepage? You wouldn’t. Maybe your new design actually would have performed worse if you hadn’t run that marketing campaign.
5. Analyse the results
Analyse the results of your test. Did the solution you came up with have the desired result? If it did, launch it to all of your customers. If not, why not? What can you learn from the outcome? Not every test is going to be a success, and some will be more impactful than others.
6. Repeat the process
Repeat this process continuously to see a steady growth in the conversion rate of your site. Despite what some people might tell you, there’s no silver bullet to growing your business. Only by applying this experiment-based approach will you be able to confidently turn more visitors into customers, because you’re consistently working to improve your services.
If you have any questions, we’re here to help.
