Predictions, trends and what to look out for in UX and CRO in the year ahead

More businesses than ever are running Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) programmes and User Experience research are going mainstream. With CRO and UX in the limelight, what do industry experts predict will happen next? Good user experience is driven by user research and good CRO testing methods combined lead to higher revenues. The result of both higher sales and happier customers. But these worlds are huge, in the UX world there are designers, researchers, strategists and in the CRO world it’s not much different. This is why our trends post covers a lot of ground, from research, to operational trends and beyond. Let's go straight into the trends, first with a prediction from myself, after that, we cover CRO, research, and content UX trends.

1. Quantitative user research becomes the focus

User research was founded in qualitative research principles and methods,…

Brands across all industries need to rethink their mobile experiences to focus on speed

A study by Google Research found that the average load time for a landing page on mobile is 22 seconds on an average 3G connection, while over half of your visitors will leave if the page takes longer than 3 seconds. As consumers, we expect to have access to what we want when we want it and having to wait is not acceptable in a world where Amazon Now can anything from Groceries to the latest Playstation games to your door within two hours. So, how do the top industries fair when it comes to giving their potential customers what they want at the speed they expect. Not very well as it goes. The Finance industry seems to be the best of a bad bunch with the Automative industry in the UK lagging behind with a miserable 12.3 second load time.…

Chart of the Day: Which resolutions of web browsers should you target when testing new website designs?

If you have ten people in a room together, chances are high that most of them will have different device types that use a different browser and have a different screen size. This is why it is important to be aware of screen resolutions and the devices your prospects and customers are using. The quality of experience you deliver through your website can vary greatly depending on how well your design works at different resolutions. Due to the countless resolutions that exist across the same screen size, designers use viewports to help create mobile-friendly pages. Viewports are scaled down versions of resolutions that allow sites to be viewed more consistently across different devices.

The tables below show the most popular screen resolutions and viewports for both Apple and Android products:

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These are what some of the biggest websites looked like 20 years ago and you won't believe it...

Since the World Wide Web was invented in 1990 designers and web developers have been constantly working to improve its original clunky basic text design into a simple, fast and eye-catching user experience. Check out some of these amazing web design transformations from the past 20 years!

1. Smart Insights

Smart Insights is only 8 years old, but we wanted to highlight the design transformations we've gone through. The site originally started as a blog as seen on the home page in 2010. It's evolved into a marketing publisher - keeping its roots in content, but now offering premium services and elearning for members.

2010

2015

2018

2. YouTube

YouTube…

Standing out online is not a question of quick fixes. It’s a question of mindset

Web design sits at the core of a site’s success. It communicates the substance of what you do and why anyone should care. Peel back the veneer of a lot of sites and you’ll be surprised by how many fail to do either. More people are online than ever. Standing out online is not a question of quick fixes. It’s a question of mindset. There are now nearly 200 million active websites, and over 3.5 billion internet users. Yet the average user visits less than 100 sites each month. That all adds up to a lot of competition. The internet is busy on a level we can barely conceive, and only so many sites can rise above the bustle and have their voices heard. Modern resources mean just about anyone can make a website, which is great.…

Chart of the day: customers expect more personalized experiences according to businesses and that's why they are prioritising improving CX

Customer Experience (CX) improvements are being led by customers wanting more personalized experiences according to new research. Customer expectations are essentially driving CX prioritisation. 7 in 10 businesses said they were improving CX because customers expect more personalization, whilst 6 in 10 simply said they want to improve customer loyalty, which makes sense, we all want loyal customers! I think they are right though, customers expect far more personalization and many businesses are still not personalizing the experience for customers. It's great to see that businesses realise that customers have a desire for personalized experiences, but now they are expecting this and therefore it's important that businesses start to prioritize this and act fast. You'll notice the least concern was competitors delivering a better experience,…

Web forms are a crucial communication channel between your organization and your audience - so making sure they deliver a first-class User Experience (UX) is imperative.

Turning a one-way flow of information into a two-way dialogue with your users, web forms can play a key role in facilitating the completion of tasks that are more often than not inextricably tied to the success of your organization. This may be an online purchase for those in the e-commerce sector, an application for membership of a particular institution or service, or a request for information for those operating in B2B industries. [si_guide_block id="5686" title="Download Premium Resource – Improving Results from your website: 7 steps guide" description="Use a structured review to increase leads, sales and satisfaction from your site."/] However, audiences today are fickle, and many users will be unlikely to persevere with a form that’s unclear and difficult to use, no matter how much they…

Optimize your customer experience on mobile to avoid being left behind

Not long back, the secret of business success on the Internet seemed to be all about product and service quality. Whereas quality is an enabler of success, it’s not the big secret that makes e-businesses successful. The secret is – customer experience. Econsultancy conducted a survey for Digital Market Trends, and the results made it obvious that most participating business executives considered customer experience as the most exciting opportunity of 2017. Customer experience has supplanted content marketing and mobile marketing as the secret of e-business success for entrepreneurs. User experience is important from an SEO perspective as well – websites where users don’t spend more than 10 seconds, because of messed up user experience designs, fail to sustain their rankings. What’s more, a Walker study predicts that customer experience will be more important than price as well as product by 2020. The…

Whether you’re new to Conversion Rate Optimization or a seasoned pro, you need a solid CRO programme to take your digital marketing career to the next level

Done a lot of split or multivariate tests, or various other CRO activities, but not achieving the quantum conversion lifts you’d hoped for? If so, you need to read SmartInsights’ new and improved Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Programme Briefing!  

While still providing foundational advice on these topics:

Creating a data driven organization Estimating the ROI of your CRO projects Using the latest and greatest customer research tools Incorporating both big tests and smaller optimizations into your systematic testing

[si_guide_block id="46714" title="Download our recently updated Business Member Resource – CRO Programme Briefing" description="A marketers guide to running structured AB and multivariate tests to boost results from websites."/]

Our updated CRO…

The EAST framework combines behavioural economics with other sciences and psychology to truly understand and influence behaviour change

Behavioural economics is nothing new in marketing, having been a fundamental industry discipline for the past few decades, but there's a new kid in town and it's behavioural economics, supercharged. Behavioural Insights (BI) has long been a tool for Government departments to improve the design and implementation of public policy, with its umbrella spanning research into behavioural economics, sciences and psychology. Its aim is to understand and influence behaviour change among citizens by: Simplifying processes Removing unnecessary steps Making services more user-friendly We think it translates perfectly into marketing too when improving and enhancing customer experience.

Nudge and learn – a winning approach

Much like in conversion rate optimisation (CRO), services are streamlined by testing subtle changes to the design, content, timings, and navigation of websites, letters, emails, forms and other methods of communication with citizens. Something as simple as changing…