I am often asked what are the best practices in the field of UX. And preferably the golden tips that lead to a big conversion increase. You know... those tips of “you should never use header images or carousels”, “orange buttons work best”, “you need to create scarcity or time pressure with your user” or “you need to make the user feedforward give”.

In recent years, Online Dialogue has done a lot of experiments for different companies in a variety of sectors. These have shown that best practices are good ideas, but do not always deliver the intended results. On September 8, Online Dialogue therefore organized a UX meetup: “Tips & tricks, fables and pitfalls”, with the goal of answering the frequently asked question for the golden UX tip. What are the fables, pitfalls and low hanging fruit within UX design?

Fables 

The fables that circulate about best practices in UX and CRO often start with success cases that led to a huge uplift in conversion. In such a case, this is often widely communicated. Logical, because success should be celebrated. The question is whether these best practices are actually widely applicable. 

An improvement on your site depends on the context: the type of product or service, the price, the proposition and the users. This is different in every situation, so the chance that these best practices apply to your organization is limited. However, it can be good input for your testing ideas. Maybe there are ideas among them that are worth testing and can be successful, but substantiate why this is a good idea for your website. So, “better good copy than bad thinking” does not always apply.

Pitfalls

A major pitfall is to project the design choices onto yourself: “what would I do?”, “do I think this is obvious?” or “would I think this makes sense?”. What you think and think is irrelevant. You are often close to the product or service. Because of your field, you look with different eyes and are therefore not objective: you are not the user! 

It's hard to see through your user's eyes. Fortunately, you're not on your own. Your users are happy to help you with feedback. Ask them questions or use online tools like an exit survey asking what keeps them from making a purchase. You can also ask customer service about the most frequently asked questions and issues: they are often the closest to the customer.

You can also test your prototype by presenting the design to your users. You can do this with a usability test, through the use of online tools such as Five Second Tests (usablity test to measure first impressions) or at an earlier stage through paper prototyping (prototype based on drawings of an interface). 

Low hanging fruit

Are you still looking for low hanging fruit? Something that always works? A no-brainer is to fix design and technical errors. These are optimizations that are so obvious that you can implement them anyway. Consider a dead-end order process due to a certain error message occurring, important product images not loading or loading slowly, a required form field not visible, and missing search results due to missing product attributes. 

You can find these kinds of errors by studying irregularities in your data, automated user tests or error tracking set up, session recordings looking back and error logs view. But going through the customer process yourself with different scenarios and devices can also go a long way. 

What is the golden UX tip?

I have removed carousels resulting in a negative impact on conversion. And the best color for a button is not the same for every website. So the golden tip is: always keep testing! Keep a finger on the pulse when implementing new features and make sure it's technically correct. Test with the user and do not rely too quickly on results and best practices of others. There is probably some truth in this, but it does not mean it is applicable to you. Good luck testing best practices for your website!

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