Can beautiful designs also be highly functional? The answer, of course, is yes. And as a user experience (UX) designer, your bag of tricks includes all sorts of layout strategies, design cues, and best practices learned over years of experience.
But if you’ve yet to learn how to use conversion rate optimization (CRO) tools, you might be leaving opportunities on the table for delivering even better designs and creating more meaningful relationships with clients.
✏️ Thanks to our friends at Lucky Orange for writing and sponsoring this blog post!
Clients love data-driven designs
If you get a bit nauseous when you hear the phrase “data-driven,” you’re not alone. What we’re talking about isn’t another bland charge to add statistics from the internet to your design presentation.
This is a call to focus on the behavior of real website visitors to determine how current designs function and to do the same once updated designs are released. By doing this you gather powerful qualitative data that can sit within your decision-making throughout the design process.
For example, if you’re working to redesign a website’s navigation, watch session recordings of people clicking through menus and dropdowns to see if categories need to be changed or if other changes are required for a more intuitive user experience.
Adding CRO tools to your design process
If you’ve got your own portfolio website, consider adding a CRO tool like Lucky Orange to the mix.
After all, there’s no better place to practice optimization than your own website. While we’ll mention a few vital CRO tools to use later in this article, start by looking at Heatmaps for your key pages. More on what a heatmap is later in this post. See how far down the web page people are scrolling to decide if your CTA’s and other key elements are high enough on the page.
Watch a few Session Recordings to see if people are engaging with the design elements you’ve prioritized. And if you have a contact form on your site, use Form Analytics to judge which fields might be causing abandonment or causing trouble for your potential clients.
For client websites, consider adding current website design analysis to your workflow. If they don’t have a CRO tool in place, encouraging them to do so will open up a whole new way to think about their website and you’ll be the one to thank. Present this as an opportunity to truly see what’s happening on their site, with an emphasis on spotting insights that are not only valuable for website optimization but also for other efforts like sales prospecting or marketing.
The top two CRO tools you should be using
Dynamic Heatmaps provides a visual report of visitor behavior on any given page. With this tool, you’re looking for behavior trends like clicks and scrolls and your key takeaways will give you an understanding of how people interact with your page design.
Once you see something interesting in a heatmap, it’s time to watch Session Recordings.
Watch a full playback of everything a visitor did on a website including each page visited, element clicked, form completed, and more. By using this tool, you’ll watch your designs function in real-time. Insights from session recordings will help you illustrate problems with page layout, forms and navigation, or even content length.
And because you can search and filter recordings, you’re able to track down an example of a specific behavior or research an ongoing issue. The use cases for this are endless.
You can find session recordings to see when:
- A visitor submits a form saying something is broken in your checkout process
- People are dropping out of a conversion funnel on a specific page and you want to investigate
- Cart abandonment is high for a new paid traffic source and you want to see if they’re taking different steps on the site than other sources
- Users are complaining about your live chat getting in their way on a mobile device
The combination of heatmaps and session recordings leads to a greater understanding of the true situation on a page or set of pages. This knowledge can inform test ideas, new design elements, and even complete redesigns. Be sure to make note of your key takeaways and any testing hypotheses you may develop as a result of your research.
Improve your web designs today with CRO
Ready to take your design expertise to the next level? The quick path to becoming a conversion rate optimization expert, just like anything else, is with practice. The best CRO tools will guide you to regular aha moments that become powerful insights for you and your clients. Our recommendation is to keep things simple, study visitor behavior and trust your finely-tuned design abilities when new ideas arise. ■
About the Author: Sean is the Senior Content Marketing Manager at Lucky Orange, a leading CRO software serving over 300,000 websites around the world. He helps businesses of all sizes better understand the role of a great website in the customer journey. Find him on LinkedIn.
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