PRWD

We are being asked more and more by our retail clients to provide support as they move towards responsive design. In particular our retail clients are aiming to deliver ‘best in class’ responsive ecommerce experiences for their visitors.

Couple this with them being committed to an optimisation strategy, we are extremely excited about the potential to improve their online performance.

But the challenge is, with so few larger retailers with large product catalogues already having moved to a responsive design (and this doesn’t mean the ones that are necessarily doing it well) where can inspiration be gained to deliver a best in class experience?

Enter stage left Nixon, which starts its about page text with ‘We make the little shit better’.

Navigation & Filtering Responsive Design Best Practice

• Consistency – the same filters are available across all devices (some retailers who have gone responsive choose to remove certain filters when on mobiles for instance – don’t do this!)
• Simplification – Nixon use the soon to become fully established design pattern of a ‘3 bar’ tool icon in the header area on mobile to signify access to the primary navigation and tools. This simplifies the main viewport allowing the products more vertical space to engage visitors
• Flexibility – on desktop and tablet, visitors have the choice of the grid format based on whether they want a more visual browsing experience with bigger images or a more information driven experience with smaller images
• Intuitive – primary colour swatches are provided rather than colour names, providing visitors with an immediate reference point for the colours as well as not overwhelming them with too many similar colours (tip – we find that up to 15 colour options works best)
• Clarity – Nixon do a fantastic job of focussing screen space on the most important content. Get down to mobile in landscape and after the logo you see category area, products currently being displayed, sort options, large filter area and then straight on to products – no fluff at all
• Filtering best practice – from allowing visitors to multi-select filters from the same filter group, to maintaining users position whilst they are selecting filters, Nixon are ticking many of the boxes for best practice – I do love their subtle touch on desktop which collapses the filter area if you scroll down the page to start viewing products, as they recognise that your behaviour has now shifted to browsing products rather than filtering
• Speed – whether this is opening and using the mobile flyout menu or applying various filters across any devices, the speed of the browsing experience is excellent and really helps generate a positive, enjoyable attitude when shopping

Product Page Responsive Design Best Practice

• Cross selling – the ability to quickly move to other products in the range you are in is great, both in the main product image area on desktop and lower down the page on mobile
• Image quality and zoom – Nixon provide big impact, high quality images which on desktop in particular means you get one of the most visually rich experiences when viewing enlarged images. On saying this, zoom on tablet does need to be improved and providing this facility on mobile would allow visitors to get closer to the details of products on these devices
• Image variety – another best practice element of product pages is to provide visitors with enough images to get a true understanding and appreciation of products and Nixon provide a range of alternative images for just this purpose
• Subtle positioning – visit a product page on your mobile and you are positioned so that you can’t see the browser bar or the thin Nixon header area – you are immediately focussed on the product title and image
• Subtle re-positioning – try this yourself on a mobile – when you change the colour of a product there is a subtle position change that takes you up to the updated product image. It’s not rocket science but the simplicity at which Nixon deliver this is a super UX touch
• One big primary CTA – across devices there is no argument as to what it is Nixon are wanting you to do with their ‘add to cart’ button. If I’m being picky perhaps it could be full width on mobile
• Editorial content – Nixon are one of the retailers who recognise the importance of delivering high quality editorial content in both written and visual form. Their product pages typically feature both text and video content to engage visitors and sell their brand and proposition

Summary

This is the 1st of 2 articles looking at the user experience of the responsive Nixon website. I was initially drawn to their website due to one of our clients asking us specifically to help them deliver a best in class navigation and filtering experience with responsive design. As more and more retail brands are going responsive, hats off to the Nixon team for delivering some exceptional examples as described in this post.

Introduction

This week I had the pleasure of moderating one of the two tables dedicated to ‘On-site Conversion Rate Optimisation’ at Econsultancy Digital Cream in London. There were over 500 delegates who attended the event from a wide range of businesses across major verticals including retail, finance, travel and publishing.

With three 1.5 hour roundtables planned with 10 attendees on each one, I was really looking forward to the variety of insights that would be shared – and I wasn’t disappointed. In just the same way as when I deliver training courses, there is a real sense of wanting to share insights and help their peers, there certainly weren’t any times when the discussions went flat.

As I expected before the event, businesses covering the full maturity spectrum for on-site optimisation were represented, which really underlined the opportunity many brands still have to move ahead of their competition by continually testing and optimising the online experience they deliver to their customers and prospects.

Common Themes

Below I have listed out some of the common themes that came out during each of the three roundtable discussions.

• A lack of resource and ownership means optimisation typically doesn’t get the attention it deserves within organisations
• On-site optimisation isn’t presented at or reported in at board level within most organisations
• In many organisations, business areas work in silos rather than being integrated, so any learning that comes from testing and optimisation doesn’t get shared to relevant departments
• Executive management teams are not always aware of the potential bottom line impact that developing an optimisation programme and strategy can deliver
• Testing isn’t being delivered in a planned, co-ordinated way
• Reporting on tests to form part of a ‘test and learn’ philosophy isn’t usually done well
• Understanding the impact for multi-channel shoppers for on-site optimisation is a major challenge for attribution
• There is a continued disparity between the amount of acquisition versus optimisation spend – more traffic = more sales is still the key driver for many businesses
• Most businesses who are testing, focus on continuous improvement (refinements to existing pages i.e. button wording or colour) rather than discontinuous improvement (more radical tests aimed at really shifting user behaviour)

Opportunities

What came out of the sessions was that for all businesses there were significant opportunities to either develop, integrate or simply improve their testing and optimisation strategy.

Here are a few more of the key opportunities that surfaced:

• For brands not yet doing any testing and learning to improve site performance, carry out a ‘proof of concept’ trial optimisation project to sell in the commercial benefits to senior management
• Conduct bolder testing to move from continuous to discontinuous testing
• Exploit testing targeting and personalisation much more to drive better revenues from their most profitable customers
• Better understand the impact each test has on segmented visitor data
• Start testing with a tool such as Optimizely to remove the technical barriers that stop many businesses from undertaking split and MV testing

Summary

It has to be said there is very much a long and winding road ahead for almost all businesses when it comes to reaching the promised land of having a robust, integrated, process driven on-site optimisation strategy.

What this does mean is that there are still huge opportunities for brands to steal a march on their competitors by truly embracing the potential that on-site optimisation can deliver commercially – but I doubt I’ll be saying this after Digital Cream 2014!

Conversion Thursday Manchester is back, and we’re really excited about our first event on the 14th March 2013.

PRWD have teamed up with Founder Dan Croxen-John team from AWA and Jonathan Kay and co. at 120 Feet to work together to take CTManc to another level in 2013. There have been a few changes, for example we’ll be focussing on quality not quantity, so CTManc will now run quarterly, and we’re planning further in advance to give you guys plenty of warning.

Our Speakers

We’re really excited to announce our first speaker, Matt Althauser of Optimizely who will be presenting:

“Best Practices and Lessons Learned from over 100,000 A/B and MVT Tests”

His talk will highlight use cases of current clients and highlight some general guiding principals for testing.

Our second speaker is Colin McFarland, the UX Experiments Manager at Shop Direct Group, who will be presenting:

“Designing Experiments – moving beyond optimisation to using A/B and MVT as a serious design approach”

Brands already signed up include

Agenices and service providers who have signed up include

Sign-up Now Before Tickets Run Out

We’re expecting to sell out so make sure that you sign up for your ticket now.

Please follow our new Twitter account @CTManc and keep an eye on #CTManc too.

Introduction

Developing and integrating a testing and optimisation strategy within businesses is what me and our respected optimisation team at PRWD do, and what more and more businesses are looking for. If you haven’t seen it before take a look at our article Will 2013 be the year of conversion optimisation?

There has been a recent Q&A with Dan Hubbard, the Head of Web Analytics at the RSA Group, a Global Insurance Company, and there are so many great insights I wanted to share a number of quotes from Dan. I have recently delivered training in e-commerce and persuasion for the Head of Testing at RSA and I can confirm that RSA are one of the most mature organisations I have had the pleasure of dealing with when it comes to having an optimisation strategy…

Team Ethos

What is the con of running this type of programme in-house versus having an external consultancy?

The main con I think is the risk of the teams becoming too specialised and dropping out of step with the wider digital community. Insurance isn’t pushing digital boundaries as quickly as retail and telecoms sectors are, and we must ensure we continue to bring elements of those leading industries into our own. I think we solve this through personal development and staff engagement – everyone is encouraged to participate in industry-wide events and experimentation of new technologies and methodologies is very much encouraged.

The Importance of Personalisation

Personalisation is running a year or two behind that but is on the same journey. From what we’ve learnt so far, it has the capability to really drive up user experience and engagement.

There’s been some bad press about personalisation which is centred around its use for third party retargeting, but when used appropriately it just means that the messages you see are more likely to match what you’re looking for on the site.

People seem to love their local shops because they get a personalised service and the same is true online. I really believe that the concept of a static homepage will be unthinkable in a few years time.

Reporting versus actionable insight

Generally if a report can’t be automated, I don’t agree to deliver it and we can usually offer to do something more valuable with that time such as analysis reviews and insight workshops. Most of the tools we use have great automation capabilities but to be honest it’s quite rare that partners ask for regular reports once they’ve seen our pitch and way of working.

If you offer someone the choice between a big spreadsheet of numbers versus a list of data-driven improvement ideas, backed with examples from our other brands, they rarely choose the spreadsheet.

Getting board level buy-in

We use Adobe Analytics across all sites and pull data through the API into a central dashboard which is designed to help the group’s senior team identify opportunities and trends at a global level. To say this has been popular would be a huge understatement; the global web dashboard now has a regular slot at quarterly board meetings with our Chief Executive and Chief Financial Officer.

The trends we pull from this dashboard are shifts in device usage, marketing, usability performance, customer shopping behaviour and shifts in external factors such as the activity of insurance aggregators.

Creating a testing culture

Creating a culture where change is AB tested can be a challenge especially as it can add to the complexity of deployment. Our design and UX teams love it though, because it’s the best way of finding out exactly how each change impacts our online metrics. A few years ago I was busy convincing people of the need to test, now I’ve got more demand for testing than we can keep up with.

What to test and why

We have implemented a lot of UX changes based on test results and sometimes it’s surprising to see what customers prefer.

We don’t do those awful button tests, e.g. changing the colour of a button to see whether you can drive up click-through. I’d question how that really benefits customers in any way.

What we do is look for ways of presenting information, ways of gathering data and ways of navigating which customers find easiest and most intuitive to use. We also test to find out what messaging to use in each stage of the customer journey, because essentially the website should exist to make insurance understandable and accessible if the web is your channel of choice.

The most interesting tests are usually the wacky ones which have some sort of emotive trigger. We have played around with personalising our pet insurance journeys, such as changing images to show the correct breed of dog for owners who are getting a quote for a pure breed.

It seems daft when you explain the concept but that little test ramped up conversion to sale by 4%, which proves that customers respond well to a user experience which feels personal to them.

So where to next…?

Me and the respected conversion optimisation team at PRWD have been involved in developing testing & optimisation strategies for huge organisations like Shop Direct, John Lewis and Belron – if you want to see how we can help you please get in touch – we’re a very personable bunch!

That’s what I’ve been saying since 2011 and looking ahead in to 2013 I still very much see this as being the case. More and more businessess will invest continuously each month on optimising their digital experiences, knowing that they can reduce their growing acqusition costs and increase their customer lifetime value (CLV).

At the end of 2012 myself and two of our team Paul Postance and Craig Sullivan provided a range of predictions for the conversion rate (or more specifically profit) optimisation industry in 2013.

Here is a quick snapshot in case you’d rather stick around on our blog rather than heading over to Econsultancy to get the full lowdown…

• The growth of low cost and DIY testing solutions (e.g. Visual Website Optimiser and Optimizely) will accelerate as more brands take the plunge and start testing
• More brands will start to talk about the concept of ‘putting it to the test’ as a way of challenging assumptions, perceptions and perceived best practice
• More brands embarking on full redesign processes will truly adopt an agile, iterative, user-centered design approach and bring the voice of the customer in at the very start of the process. User research will be less of an afterthought when redesigning
• More brands will realise that on-site conversion improvement is the way to build on a saturated acquisition strategy. If you haven’t read this before then here goes… “For every $92 spent acquiring customers, only $1 is spent converting them.” – Bryan Eisenberg, Conversion Conference London 2011
• 2013 will be the year that CRO becomes a competitive advantage for companies

You’d like a quote to use?

Go on then, here are some quotes from me, Craig and Paul as featured on the original post “Will 2013 be the year of conversion optimisation?“…

Craig Sullivan

2013 is when more companies will start to deliver on the promise of conversion rate optimisation, by investing in the tools, techniques and staff to execute a conversion optimization strategy. Whether you are a startup or an established business, the maths is pretty simple; if you convert 10% of your site visitors and your nearest competitor only converts 5%, you’re going to grow faster, spend less and kill their ability to compete with you.

Paul Rouke

CRO will become the new SEO. Businesses will eventually understand that the likes of ‘voice of the customer’ and ‘testing and optimisation’ aren’t just name checked or for the select few.

On-site optimisation will become an on-going, integrated strategy for brands alongside their acquisition and retention strategy. 2013 will certainly see a continued progression towards this promised land, although there may still be years to go.

Paul Postance

Organisational understanding and maturity will start to bring optimisation out of the shadows. It will be increasingly seen as a highly cost-effective way to increase performance while reducing acquisition spend – so it becomes a requirement not a ‘nice to have’.

Here is one of the ways we are preparing for CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) becoming the new SEO with our recent appointment to our highly experienced optimisation team at PRWD.

For those of you considering attending Conversion Conference London, I wanted to share 6 reasons to attend what should be a fantastic, insightful and engaging 2 days.

I have been privileged to be on the advisory board for the conference as well as presenting at 2 of the sessions, on e-commerce best practice and rapid fire live page critiques.

Read on to find out more about this 2 day conversion conference.

1) Confessions of a Conversion Rate Optimiser – Bryan Eisenberg (Conversion Guru!)

With three best-selling books and more than 15 years of conversion optimisation experience under his belt, Bryan Eisenberg is legendary for his work is persuasion architecture, persona development and conversion rate optimisation. In this tell-all keynote, he reveals the intimate secrets that few insiders ever get to hear.

Glimpse into the history of CRO and understand what will happen to this discipline in the future. Learn from almost two decades of successes and failures — why Bryan thinks most marketers are still in the dark ages in terms of conversion and testing, and how his simple three-step formula has streamlined the testing process for some of the most successful companies on the web.

If time permits, we put Bryan in the hotseat when he opens up the session for a no-holds-barred question and answer period that could transform the way you think about online marketing.

2) Mobile & Realtime Optimisation – Amy Africa (Eight by Eight)

Why is your established online strategy not transferring well to mobile? What are the important factors (and what aren’t) in determining how to increase your mobile conversions? What delivers results, how do you deal with “abandons” and save up to 60% of them? What should you be tracking? For anyone currently active in mobile, or planning to be, this is a keynote session you really cannot afford to miss. You’ll hear why your mobile conversion strategy has to be different and pick up the tips and tricks you need to put it in place.

3) Praxeology – Lessons from a lost science – Rory Sutherland (Ogilvy)

Advertising and communication has changed immeasurably over the last twenty years. But our tools for understanding people and brands remain largely trapped in the 1970s – if that. Can a missing science fill in some of the gaping gaps in our knowledge?

4) E-commerce Best Practices – Paul Rouke (PRWD) & Stephen Pavlovich (Conversion Factory)

How do you design your ecommerce website to persuade more visitors to convert? What guidelines should be followed when designing product and category pages? Learn guiding principles for making changes to your ecommerce website that will significantly increase your conversion rate.

5) Rapid Fire Landing Page Critiques – Paul Rouke (PRWD), Stephen Pavlovich (Conversion Factory) & Rob Jackson (Conversion Thursday)

Your landing page stinks – it’s just a question of degree. Bring your URL and our experts will give you some quick and actionable tips to immediately improve performance. Guaranteed to be an educational and entertaining session.

6) Plus lots more engaging and insightful sessions

Along with these 5 reasons to attend, take a look at the day 1 and day 2 agenda to see what other sessions are on which may interest you.

Use #ConvCon to follow the conference live

If you are unable to attend you may want to keep any eye on the #ConvCon twitter hashtag which I expect will be getting used extensively during the course of the 2 days.

Further resources on conversion optimisation

If you are looking for more resources on usability and conversion optimisation, view our up-to-date list of articles, case studies and presentations – Conversion Optimisation Resources

What you’ll find here is:

• Usability & conversion optimisation articles for lead generation
• Usability & conversion optimisation articles for e-commerce
• Tools that you can use to monitor & improve your website
• Conversion rate optimisation case studies
• inks to presentations & slides from events & conferences

Thanks for reading, and I hope to see you at the conference!

Thursday 24th April marks the 1st Conversion Thursday event to be run in Manchester, and I am delighted to be the first person providing a presentation. My talk is titled “Increasing basket to checkout conversions: the ASOS way“.

What is Conversion Thursday?

Conversion Thursday Manchester is an inspiring and exciting bi-monthly networking event that centres around online conversion and web optimisation. Conversion Thursday is already held in six cities across Europe, having begun in Barcelona. We hold the events at comfortable and relaxing venues that provide the perfect setting for debate and discussion of the important issues in online conversion and marketing.

The evening begins with a brief round-table discussion about recent events in the digital arena, then we have an interactive quiz (with prizes for the best team), before moving on to our main presentation of the evening. After the presentation, people are welcome to hang around for another drink and network with other attendees.

Who is it for?

Conversion Thursday is open to anyone interested in improving the web and increasing online business, including online marketeers, conversion and SEO/PPC experts, and web analysts. This free event is a fantastic opportunity to meet like-minded professionals, and build long-lasting relationships within the industry.

When and where?

On the 24th February we will be welcoming CT to the north-west of England, at the very first Conversion Thursday Manchester, sponsored by Applied Web Analytics and Elisa DBI.

The event will take place in Bar 38 in Manchester, between 5.30 and 9pm. Simply register online and you will be emailed with confirmation.

Drinks, on this occasion, are sponsored by Applied Web Analytics.