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Guessing the need for something might end up in a whole lot of features that doesn´t provide value, but instead makes the product and the user experience suck. This is more common than one would imagine and coming from a developer background I could easily see why. People that are the actual builders and implementors of a solution to a problem (web developers eg.) tends to have more focus on the actual solution and the development of it, rather than the core needs. This goes especially for those who are some what innovative and building something that doesn´t even exist.

Most of the feature requests we get during meetings, which we consider the most qualitative and proven way of gathering feedback. It enables you to have control over the process in a whole different way, following up with questions and some times even confronting the client about her needs in order to validate if it is a real need rather than a “nice to have”.

The actual prioritisation

After defining needs and gathering feedback on new features we typically determine priority for each feature by the following order:

1. The actual need. How many have requested it?
2. The value it provides to our customer base as a whole
3. Its complexity
4. Resources taken to implement it

Now we´ve ordered each feature by its priority. In a second round, we then try to think of it on a higher level. Looking at each feature from a helicopter perspective brings us decide its “fit”. Here, we usually have to tweak some to get it to work with our initial offer and focus.

• Vertical rather than horizontal – is this a niche feature, one that will provide value to only 10% of our customer base, or one that 90% will gain from?
• Balance of simplicity / complexity – will this be hard to maintain or use? Every feature will add some complexity, both to the user and ourselves. Is it worth it?

Continuous Feedback Gathering

One rather important aspect of feedback is that, it will change over time. Gathering feedback no matter in what context or state your product is in I think is vital. Using tools such as Kundo or a more resource demanding sort of service like Olark, will serve you well both in terms of new and old feedback. Kundo is especially great in the support context. The idea of not having to answer the same question more than once and be open and transparent to clients definitely adds value to your brand.

Conclusion

Investing in relationships with new and old clients is one of the most proven ways of gathering feedback. Feedback will come as a result of any relationship and in your role as a provider or “problem solver” you are able to quickly follow up with questions or even confront the client about there needs to validate them and to see how the client react. Remembering one thing, will help you focus and feel more confortable in asking for feedback during a meeting: both you and your client are in it for the value you create together.

First quarter

We started last year launching a newsletter targeting Conversion Rate optimisers called CRO Weekly, with the goal of each week spreading a summary of relevant blog posts and articles in the conversion rate optimisation space. We aimed high, tried to spread it in different channels across the web and got quite a following. This could act as a marketing channel for us in the future.

Though we soon realised that the amount of time required to gain real traction was to demanding and we felt that we soon lost focus on the core problem we are trying to solve. For a bootstrapped business, time and focus mean a lot.

Inspired from Conversion Jam Jonas K wrote about the online bumper and quickly after that announced who joined designing our logo and brand.

After researching and prototyping the first application we wrote a short post about the basic problems RevRise Form Analytics is trying to solve. One of these problems happens to be Conversion Rate Optimisation, which we tried to explain in a mini series called CRO Basics – what conversion is, A/B testing, the value proposition and the sales funnel.

By that time, we had gotten questions and early feedback on the impact of site performance using Form Analytics and declared the tiny impact with a bunch of other frequently asked questions.

Second quarter

Decreasing shopping cart abandonment is one of the goals with RevRise Form Analytics. Knowing what other reasons shopping cart abandonment occur is also important to our clients.

Speaking to clients and prospects, one common question we get related to analytics in general is “What should I measure in my e-commerce business?“.

During the spring, our friends arranged a hackathon that we just had to participate in. Our idea was to explore what our platform could offer and how much performance it could leverage by tracking and recording each visitors individual mouse movements, clicks and interactions with a site. All while recording their voice at the same time. We basically prototyped this during eight super hectic hours and made a fully working solution. The problem we tried to solve was basically remote usability testing without any external tools but the browser. Calling it utest, we were really happy with the result of just eight hours of work spent on top of our platform.

In late may we were invited to Improove to speak about the importance of web forms and some common pitfalls that could easily be improved. We believe that web forms deserve much more attention as it is the last and final endpoint before eg. a visitor is converting to a customer or an order is placed. You have spent all the energy, time and resources to get people there, yet still there are problems  and user experience issues with it.

Third quarter

While exploring good and bad web form design, we noticed that another common problem with websites in general is their call to action, which besides the forms should also be of importance to site owners.

We also got to participate in Sweden Social Web Camp, which is an awesome unconference taking place on an island in southern Sweden. While there, Jonas A held a session on Node.js, which is part of our technology stack.

Fourth quarter

Another important aspect of usability and the web is its performance and speed, which we brought up in a post. At this time things were starting to take off in terms of customers and prospects. Jonas K wrote about E-commerce checkout design while we were in a constant crunch time mode with Form Analytics.

The 2012 edition of Conversion Jam played out successfully and provided some really interesting topics focusing even more on user experience than last time.

We are all about improving the user experience while improving the conversion rate, so communicating ways to do that quickly seemed like a must.

We also wrote some notes about how one of our clients are using RevRise Form Analytics (although in swedish), while announcing a competition to win a free account on Form Analytics.

Happy new year!

With these words, we look forward to provide more insight and improvement suggestions in your web forms this year, stepping Form Analytics up a notch. We have a feeling that we will meet even more of you discussing user experience, web form design and analytics this year.

Looking forward to hear from you and help you increase conversion rate while improving the user experience in your web forms!

Christmas is fast approaching so we thought giving away a Christmas gift for our fans. We are giving away three months free use of RevRise Form Analytics!

Take the chance to get an understanding of how your customers behave in your forms.

Our key metrics for a form

• Page views
• Form activation
• Form submission
• Conversation rate
• Number of drop outs
• Average time in form

For each form field you will find out

• Average time in field
• Character length
• % left blank
• Drop out rate

Send a tweet with the url to the form you want to measure and tag it with the hashtag #revrise.

On Monday December 17th we will tell you who will be the lucky fellow!

Image cred: paparutzi

Inför julen har de en kampanj där du kan ge bort en resklar get i julklapp. En get som skickas iväg i uppdrag att bekämpa fattigdom bland kvinnor och flickor.

På sajten www.presentermotfattigdom.se mäter vi användarbeteendet i beställ- och köpprocessen. Vi har delat upp mätningen i två delar, “Välj e-kort” och “Kassan”.

För båda formulären får vi reda på

• Sidvisningar
• Aktiveringar (hur många kunder har påbörjat formuläret?)
• Genomsnittstid per formulärfält
• Lämnats blankt (inte fyllts i, används inte = onödigt?)
• Avbrott
• Antal postade formulär
• Konverteringsgrad
• Genomsnittlig aktivitetstid

All statistik är över tid och vår standardgraf visar senaste 30 dagarna men det går bra att jämföra även över längre tid.

Med dessa siffror får vi en förståelse för hur kunderna beter sig i dessa formulär, statistik över hur formulären fungerar.

Insikter i formulär 1, “Välj e-kort”

Förutom antal påbörjade- och fullföljda beställningar kan vi se om en kund har problem att fylla i flera e-postadresser, välja datum, glömmer fylla i meddelande eller missar att bifoga bild.

Insikter i formulär 2, “Kassan”

Eftersom vi mäter om något fält lämnats blankt kan vi se om någon kund fyller i fältet “Adress 2″, detta gäller även fältet “Telefon”. Om fältet aldrig fylls i finns det ingen anledning att ha det kvar. Färre fält = enklare formulär vilket ökar chansen till högre konverteringsgrad.

Vi ser också om något fält tar ovanligt lång tid att fylla i eller om, och isåfall var, kunden avbryter.

Så här görs implementeringen

1) Skapa ett projekt genom att registrera e-postadress, lösenord och domän.

2) Implementera tracker-koden som är ett par rader JavaScript.

3 Namnge och definiera formulären som ska mätas.

Nu har vi allt som behövs för att samla in data och vår rekommendation är att mäta minst 60-90 dagar för att får en sanningsenlig och kvalitativ data.

Better Password Masking For Sign-Up Forms
It is time to change this approach?

Christmas e-commerce: 35 tips to increase conversions
E-commerce tips for Christmas.

“Mimicry” Optimizing online conversion? Mimic your customers behavior!
Is mimicry a useful online persuasion technique?

The State Of E-Commerce Checkout Design 2012
Solid article I’ve written about before.

There were four general tips that fit most industries.

Prove your offer

• Social proof, if you have hundreds or thousands of customers, make it a well-known fact
• Third party reviews
• Show up your stuff! Nothing like a good demo to prove what your product does
• Case studies are very effective

Remove distraction

• Remove or shrink the menu on landing pages, no sidebars or big headers, NO stock images
• Remove or minimize everything that is not relevant to users taking action

Communicate the value
Particularly common among start-ups or entrepreneurs, they do not provide enough information about the products or services they sell.

Compare with your competitors
Every service or product has it’s competitors, compare to competing product/service before the users do.

One week since this years Conversion Jam has already gone. We loved last years conference and had quite high expectations this time. This years event topped last years with a busy schedule and a lot of hands on tips and insights. Here are my key take aways from Conversion Jam #2.

Measuring click to call

This was something completely new to me. Thinking about tests made earlier that prompts the impact of even showing a telephone number on a site at all, this seems like such a natural next step for completely understanding that sort of call to action. Craig Sullivan of conversion fame introduced many of us to this method. This could be super useful when trying to cover all of your users touch points with the brand.

“Cleaning” data input rather than having the user doing it

This is such a no brainer and such a common problem. Since we do a lot of form analyzing, we know for a fact that validation errors are common while often poorly made. Imagine a world without validation errors and messages! Imagine forms that “just works” from the user perspective. This was really nothing new, but it deserves more attention.

Mobile first

Not an entirely new concept for me, however listening to someone who’s actually implemented a whole e-commerce site that way was really interesting. Annelie Näs from Young and Skilled showed some quite useful insights there.

“Both desktop and mobile versions would contain the same content” – makes complete sense in most cases in my mind. The placement of the content will vary, but making the same content available in all contexts forces performance and simplicity. Which mobile first of course is all about.

Predefining offers rather than having the user choose among a products properties. Basically figuring out which combinations of properties is the most popular and predefining those, so that the user can change some, rather than set them all. Essentially giving the user less choices, but enabling them to opt in to change them.

General thoughts

Everything is about context. This is not something anybody mentioned specifically, but rather something I kept reminding myself throughout the conference.

Especially when tests are made on a micro level, like red vs green button color, its context means a lot. There were some mentions on that topic in between the sessions, where people seemed to get the idea of tests that would be applicable to any context, which generally will not work.

I wish I´d do this different

The conference went by in a blast and unfortunately I didn´t have time to visit the experts, during “Meet the experts” hours.

The overall quality of this years Conversion Jam sort of blows my mind, when thinking of how it is executed and how few people that seems to coordinate and manage the whole event.

As big UX and conversion fans, me and Jonas hope to contribute by increasing Conversion Jam’s following! And as for next years edition, I hope to meet more great conversionistas and get a lot of new insights in the world of conversion and UX. Happy conversion!

A handful of interesting facts that they have found

• The average checkout process consist of 5.08 steps
• 50% asks for the same information twice
• 24% require account registration
• 41% use address validators
• 81% think their newsletter is a must have (opt-out or worse)

Read The State Of E-Commerce Checkout Design 2012 »

We have a mini-hackathon this weekend!