A transcript of Episode 220 of UX Podcast. James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom discuss two articles they’ve recently read – An update to the Lean UX Canvas, and an article about how a positive user experience will perhaps increase your conversions.
This transcript has been machine generated and checked by a human.
Transcript
James Royal-Lawson
Thanks to Thomas, Charlotte, Jonte and Hugo, for supporting UX Podcast. We really appreciate it. You can support us podcast on the community too by visiting uxpodcast.com/support and making a contribution.
[Music]
Per Axbom
Hello, I’m Per Axbom
James Royal-Lawson
and I’m James Royal-Lawson.
Per Axbom
This is UX podcast. We’re in Stockholm, Sweden, and you’re listening in 188 countries from Aruba to Spain.
James Royal-Lawson
I actually had to look up where Aruba was. Do you know where it is?
Per Axbom
No, I don’t.
James Royal-Lawson
I didn’t either. But it’s – it’s used to be the Antilies, the Dutch Antilles. Now it’s Aruba.
Per Axbom
Oh, OK.
James Royal-Lawson
it’s it’s the very North bit of South America.
Per Axbom
Okay, yeah.
James Royal-Lawson
hundred thousand people are there. Yeah, so today, we have a link show.
Per Axbom
Awesome. It’s been a long time.
James Royal-Lawson
Has it been a long time?
Per Axbom
I always say that,
James Royal-Lawson
You always say that. If, Well, it could be a long time if you haven’t listened to a linkshow for a while. And a link show for those of you who are not aware of what that means is where Per and I select a couple of articles that we’ve stumbled upon. During the hours and hours and hours, we spend reading articles every week.
Per Axbom
True story.
James Royal-Lawson
And the two we have for you this week, our Lean UX Canvas version two, by Jeff, Jeff Gothelf.
Per Axbom
And the article number two is encourage direct bookings through a positive user experience by Jordin Wilson.
James Royal-Lawson
Lean UX Canvas version two. Three years ago, Jeff Gothelf, he presented his Lean UX canvas. And, well, the canvas, it’s one of these handouts, worksheets, that you can fill into to help you get your head around a particular subject, thing, whatever you’re trying out.
Per Axbom
Print out, print out really big and put up on the wall and use post its to brainstorm around the different topic areas.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, and there’s been quite a few canvases, as tools over the years from like, business, business model canvases, and so on. The Lean Startup Canvas, oh there’s several of these canvases to help you. But Jeff, produced the Lean UX Canvas a few years ago. And he’s now released an update to it. And this update is being based on, not only feedback he’s received, but also how it’s been used, and how Jeff has been using it during those three years.
Per Axbom
And that’s what I really, I’m really excited when when things go to version two, because I like for example, David Gray’s empathy map, he released that last year, I think, as a version two, and it’s always so interesting to read about, what did they decide to change and why? Because that is hugely important to understanding what people misunderstand, what people think is really good, what type of help they need to understand. So there’s some really good content here.
James Royal-Lawson
And other things are all also an important aspect of of understanding that, you know, we’re in, we work with something that’s continuously in flux, continuously changing. So. So sitting back a bit reflecting and, you know, updating is is a healthly and important aspect to these kind of tools. Which we’ll back up a little bit, I think it’s it’s, we’ll we’ll go through some aspects of the canvas help people understand what is because not everyone will be familiar with, with Jeff’s Canvas, even version one. So one of the.. in Jeff’s blog post, one thing he does is he actually lists what it is. So what it should be useful, to help increase the understanding of where it’s applicable to be used. And his list, he lists, I think, like six points.
Per Axbom
Let me just first give a visual of the thing,
James Royal-Lawson
Oh okay.
Per Axbom
it’s like a big rectangle is eight boxes. And each of the box has a title or a question, or a statement. And you’re supposed to fill in each box. Go.
James Royal-Lawson
yeah, yeah. Okay. And we’ll get to the boxes. Yes, shortly. So, when you should use this, or suggest when it could be useful, it’s a facilitation tool for cross functional teams. It can help teams focus on why, not loose track of the why of what they’re doing. It can be an aid early stages of Agile adoption. Jeff also suggests it can be an insurance policy, for making sure that learning takes place in every sprint,
Per Axbom
I like that.
James Royal-Lawson
according to how you’re supposed to work in an agile sort of sprint methodology. He suggests also, it can expose gaps in understanding between members of the teams or even between teams, and can be a first step in moving from outputs to outcomes. So rather than just producing stuff, you actually, focusing on creating an outcome. So so it was nice to see that kind of know Jeff himself summarising how he envisages his tool being used and to be useful.
Per Axbom
Yep. Definitely.
James Royal-Lawson
You’ve already said that it’s a canvas, it’s a worksheet with eight boxes. And on each of the boxes, it contains an aspect that you should consider. You know, fill in, write something, put some sticky posted on some work. And what what Jeff has done innovation to his focus an awful lot on improving the instructions for each of the boxes. And, and clarifying some of the things that have shown to be a bit confusing for certain people or haven’t seen the differences may be between two boxes, not fully understood the differences. So you’ve got boxes one and three are kind of now boxes. Do you have the Do you have the sheet in front of you, so you can say which one or two, or one and three are there?
Per Axbom
Number one is business problem? What problem does the business have that you’re trying to solve. And by box number three is users, what types of users like personell, users and those types of customers. I think we’ll get into that some more.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, so so then you’ve got, so you’ve got 1 and 3, those 2 are used here. And then you’ve got boxes, 2 and 4 to the right hand side, which are:
Per Axbom
which are business outcomes, and user outcomes and benefits.
James Royal-Lawson
And sandwich between these two sets of boxes is box number 5.
Per Axbom
box number 5 is solutions.
James Royal-Lawson
So box 1 and 3 is where you are now, box 2 and 4 is where you want to get to, and box 5 is what you’re going to do to get across there. And underpinning the canvas or the bottom, you have boxes, 6, 7, and 8.
Per Axbom
And box 6. So we’re moving now from left to right, box 6 is hypothesis by box 7 is what’s the most important thing we need to learn first, and box 8 is what’s the least amount of work we need to do to learn the next most important thing.
James Royal-Lawson
So basically, these boxes are the bottom 6, 7, and 8. These are the ones underpinning box 5, I guess, you know, letting you understand and know whether your solution was the right thing.
James Royal-Lawson
Or you could even maybe arguably, boxes 6, 7, 8 underpin actually, all the boxes to 1 to 5, you know, confirming your business problem, your target audience, your business outcomes, your benefits, and that the solution was right to to gel it all together. Yeah. So that’s, that’s that’s Jeff’s entire canvas.
Per Axbom
It’s really good, how it’s how it’s a visual and how it’s actually, it’s there’s a lot of thinking about where things are placed in the canvas. I like that.
James Royal-Lawson
what I what I’ve always liked about the Lean UX Canvas is I think it’s I think it is a good cross functional tool to allow to your team or teams to take that moment to pause and reflect and actually properly think through what they’re doing, and understand what they’re focusing on. As Jeff says, and we’ve seen, it’s far too often you get lost in the feature-factory.
Per Axbom
Yeah.
James Royal-Lawson
Pushing out just producing stuff. And you get further and further away from understanding the impact or the benefits of what you’re doing and and how that actually benefits your business or organisation.
Per Axbom
Exactly.
James Royal-Lawson
There is something though, which I think is still missing.
Per Axbom
Yeah. Me as well. Yeah, we’ve talked a bit about
James Royal-Lawson
I haven’t even said about it yet. Yeah, I just said which it is!
Per Axbom
[Laughter]
James Royal-Lawson
Now, we do actually have the same point for the better what cameras could benefit from what t could benefit from when discussing all of these eight boxes, or perhaps an additional two boxes, or maybe an additional couple of moments of reflection within boxes, 3 and 4.
Per Axbom
Yeah, even more clarity around these boxes, maybe just in the description of what you could talk about in those boxes. It’s interesting, because I highlighted some of the Jeff’s comments, I was trying to do an analysis of what did he learn himself. Based on what I was saying before. What did you learn that made you change something? So actually, when it comes to box number 3, which is users, he noted, he had noticed that teams were taking a bit of a shortcut with this box. So he needed a simplification clarification around that. And box number 4, which is where you want the users to be in the future, like the user outcomes and benefits. This was the part of the canvas with the most confusion. I thought that was interesting, as well as so the two of the boxes that were causing the most problems with the canvas are the users and user outcomes. And what could that tell us maybe about how people work? I’m thinking, yeah, it’s easy to fill in. This is the problem we’re trying to solve. And this is what we want to get for the business. And these are fun solutions, we want to write out and think about how we could get to that outcome. But there’s very little and I think this is so common. In most teams, there’s too little focus on spending a lot of time getting the user boxes, right, which means you have to actually go out and understand people.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. And this is also why I think we need to add, we need to go beyond the the things you’re focusing on. And think about the the things outside of that focus area.
Per Axbom
Yes.
James Royal-Lawson
So for example, box number 3 the, the users, there. And it’s a good improvement that Jeff has pointed out that the users might be maybe somebody who configures the system or an administrator or doesn’t have to be the person who buys your product and service. But here, it will be healthy to think about and list. Who is excluded from your product?
Per Axbom
Yes, exactly.
James Royal-Lawson
Or what you’re producing. Accidentally or deliberately, or I mean, there’s several ways people can be excluded. But here’s your chance to actually, kind of putting in concrete terms, the people who really are going to be pushed away from this.
Per Axbom
Yeah. And I think I actually wrote, wrote down the similar, I wrote non-users question mark. Because sometimes it’s even helpful. Sure you we understand who the users are. But then maybe it’s a way also of putting constraints on your solution. These are the non-users because like you said, some of them will be excluded intentionally. And then you have like, as as common, it’s a go to example, exclude people with accessibility needs, that you perhaps don’t wish to exclude really, but that you probably will, in the beginning, as most people argue, and you’ll add something later. If you’re not talking about that up front, chances are higher that you’ll keep forgetting them.
James Royal-Lawson
Exactly. It’s a it becomes more of a conscious. You’ve lifted the decision to the surface and made it more conscious and more more obvious that that decision has been taken. Too often we take these decisions, I think, subconsciously,
Per Axbom
Yeah.
James Royal-Lawson
It glides under this, I think comes to box 4 as well, when you’ve got outcomes and benefits. Of course, I mean, you want to focus on the positive, you want to focus on the positive business outcomes and use and user benefits. But the will be thing that will be harmed, there’s potential for harm in almost everything we create.
Per Axbom
Yep.
James Royal-Lawson
So here’s your chance to, to actually think about that. And maybe write down, not user outcomes or benefits, but potential harm.
Per Axbom
Exactly. What what could go wrong? What’s the worst that could happen? That’s always interesting to think about. Because we always have like indicators of so how do we know this is a success. But we should probably also have indicators of when is it a failure? How much needs to go wrong before we actually decide not to do something, not to pursue it. It’s interesting, because this I mean, of course, user outcomes and benefits is the parallel box, or twin box to business outcomes and business outcomes. And Jeff has put in examples of what you could put in there, like it’s a 25% increase in customer retention, or 35% 35 percent, decrease in support calls, and very, very measurable things.
Per Axbom
Now, those things could happen, you could have a 35%, decrease in support calls or increasing customer retention. And people could be worse off. I mean, that those are outcomes that are really good for the business. But they could also mean that people are worse off. So box number 4 becomes this indicator, where you probably have to be a bit more specific than I think that and then Jeff has given examples of with that you actually have to be start talking about well-being. As a note, when I was going through this, I actually wrote like box 4 is the the ethics box. This is where you have the opportunity to like you were saying, map out what could go wrong, but also think about the indicators of what do I want for the users? How do I make sure that there’s an indicator here that says, And not only is the business going in the right direction, the user or the people and humans are also going in the right direction when it comes to well being?
James Royal-Lawson
I think I think what we’re talking about here is because I mean, I like the fact that in the canvas, it goes from the left side of 1 and 3 to the right side with 2 and 4, via 5. So they there’s a symmetry that there’s a there’s a flow to the canvas, whereas we’re talking about boxes, which underpin 1 and 3 and 2 and 4. So they kind of sit, they sit down there was like a reminder that yes, what you’re doing is leading you from now to a future state. But there are there are things that happen when you go on that journey, we probably should do a UX podcast variation of Jeff’s canvas.
Per Axbom
Oh, that would be cool. But but to our point is also, this information that we’re talking about that you would add, add to this, then is helpful when you get to the underpinnings of the canvas. And so when you’re looking at what what are the most important things we need to learn first, but when you actually decide what’s the least amount of work to learn the next most important thing, you also are aware of who you are excluding when you are testing that. So you are made aware that we are doing the least amount of work to learn something here, based on the fact that we are excluding certain types of users that we will not learn anything about potentially. So you always need to, because, yes, we learn stuff by doing a minimum viable product and so on. But that is often at the expense of a lot of people being excluded, because you do do things in a shorter timeframe with less people, and a less diverse set of people. Likely.
James Royal-Lawson
And you can also you can also, you can learn more quickly, if you were right that it would potentially cause a certain mount of harm. There there. There may be may be indicators that that that hypothesis itself was was correct. So you couldn’t actually prevent that halm from growing.
Per Axbom
Right. And just it’s striking me now when I’m looking at Box eight, because the question is, what’s the least amount of work to learn the next most important thing? And we could also decide to switch that question around. So what’s the next most important thing I want to learn with the least amount of work? So you decide the importance of it before we decide that the the amount of work is still indicator?
James Royal-Lawson
It’s a, it’s a great tool. And and as we’ve just shown it, it creates conversations
Per Axbom
Exactly.
James Royal-Lawson
Even if you don’t fill it in. We’re just we’re just calling it learning conversation now about the empty boxes. So So imagine the conversations you can get from your team, if you actually do try and complete this.
Per Axbom
Exactly. And remember also, used well, it’s a canvas, you use it in workshop format, you use it in groups. I mean, it’s not that Jeff has not added the things we just talked about. It’s just that those that may well come up in conversation and workshops, when you’re talking about it. These are the things that we think a lot of people miss.
James Royal-Lawson
Yep.
Per Axbom
So this time around what we’re going to do the link show we we actually had a brief discussion about, we need to find something positive, because there are a lot of articles out there on UX right now that are talking about this dystopian industry that we’ve contributed to and making people addicted to stuff. So I went on a hunt. And that’s probably why the phrase positive user experience is part of this title.
[Music]
James Royal-Lawson
Giving away what you searched for.
Per Axbom
It probably, yes. So it’s it’s called Encourage direct bookings through a positive user experience. And it’s by Jordin Wilson, on the Blue Magnet Interactive blog.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, nice that I think they’re an agency in America, that focuses on the hospitality industry.
Per Axbom
Right. And so what made me stick with this article, because I always obviously found a lot of articles is that it made me feel good. It made me feel good about our work and what we strive for, and what we can contribute to. And something that we always have been contributing to, and it’s sometimes we need to remind ourselves and not forget that what we do is essentially positive. An interesting thing about this, of course, also is that it’s about e-commerce, it’s about selling hotel rooms. So but Jordin, that Jordin in this article, and the at the offset talks about declining conversion rates, and giving examples from Fast Booking and invest who have statistics around conversion rates dropping over time,
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, the last five years, This chart shows conversion rates dropping from like three and a half percent down to just over two, in that five year period. I’m gonna, I’m not gonna be dystopian, but I’m gonna add a little star next to this, because this these figures are talking about average website conversion rates. Globally, as far as I can tell, I mean, I haven’t dug really, really deeply at the stats, but but when we’re talking about global conversion rates, then there’s going to be they’re going to mask a lot of variations between countries and a lot of variations between industries.
Per Axbom
Right, and you’re also not mentioning that you’re increasing perhaps the number of visitors. So you, perhaps having the same number of sales, or increasing number of sales. But the conversion rate, of course, is decreasing, because of the number of visitors is increasing. Yeah, I mean, there’s I mean, there’s so many factors,
James Royal-Lawson
There’s a lot of complexity to conversion rate, and what is conversion rate, and who what data is used, what’s the sample and all this, but but there are other sources as well, that, that that is showing that conversion rate maybe isn’t, by and large, as large as what it once was for some industries anyway.
Per Axbom
Right? Okay. The numbers guy has spoken. So. So well, of course, when she started an article like this, I was sort of expecting now then you talking about declining conversion rates. So what do you people usually think? Okay, so we need to increase the conversion rate. And and then people start talking about these techniques, like the dark patterns, like bait and switch, or confirm shaming or scaremongering or, or like making
James Royal-Lawson
Scarceity!
Per Axbom
The counter saying there are people that five people looking at this room right now, or you have this much amount of time, left to book for to get this discount, and stuff like that
James Royal-Lawson
only only two rooms left.
Per Axbom
Yes. But no. What she goes on to do is talk about simply making it better for people. And it’s just so heartwarming, heartwarming, because that’s not what I expected. And that says something about expectations today, in our industry, about the types of articles are written, how do we boost our profits and make shareholder value grow? No, this is all about the users and making them more comfortable with what they’re seeing on the screen so that they are actually helped to book a hotel room.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. As an interesting, aside Per I read, or I saw a headline today that talks about how Ryanair is top yet again, of the kind of black list of companies here in Sweden, for the way that they thought they conduct their business. But to simplify that data, the number of companies it’s a database on the number of complaints that the Ombudsman here in Sweden has to deal with and Ryanair is they take home that trophy every year.
Per Axbom
It’s crazy.
James Royal-Lawson
It’s fascinating that they they they still survive. It’s one of those mysterious things.
Per Axbom
Yeah, kind of goes to show how how much a much, much cheaper price can make people choose something that they know may not even be a benefit to themselves,
James Royal-Lawson
and even go and even go through a lot of bad patterns or dark patterns to reach that prize of something very cheap. Sorry, that was an aside.
Per Axbom
Yes, exactly. Now back to Jordan. So. So she’s writing a site should be made with purpose and intent. And of course, that’s a beautiful introduction. She goes on to talk about the booking button, highlight the button button by making the Colour Pop, or using a bold font so that potential guests can locate it immediately. It’s a booking site for hotel rooms, make the booking button easy to find is what saying here essentially.
James Royal-Lawson
No, come on!
Per Axbom
But no, but it’s it sounds silly in one way. But it’s also great reminder that you have actually sometimes you I have to tell people this because they’re so focused on other types of conversion rate optimization techniques. And the she talks about simplicity do not overwhelm guests with too many options. Excellent, because that’s something that I when I go to booking sites, actually, I’m overwhelmed with options, because they’re trying to sort of cause a cognitive overload. So it’s be impossible for me to compare different alternatives. She actually mentioned analysis paralysis. Yes, it’s real. People have a hard time making decisions. So it actually so she’s saying in a may actually make people not book because you’re and I think that that’s sort of I what I hoped I can of course not draw this conclusion, because there’s no way of saying why those conversion rates were dropping, but I’m kind of hoping in my heart that that conversion rates are dropping, because people are tired, tired of these techniques.
James Royal-Lawson
Well, yeah, I mean, when from personal experience, you know, that if you you’re faced with unbundling, and having to kind of re-bundle it yourself, while kind of going through this booking process. It’s, it’s it’s hard. I mean, if in some ways it falls back to that classic thing we talked about many, many years ago with with, you know, one of the best things you can do with forms is reduce the number of fields in your form. you simplify it by taking things away.
Per Axbom
Right, to a certain extent.
James Royal-Lawson
I’m now I’m simplifying the advice there, but it would it would ties in with that, that thinking.
Per Axbom
And then she talks about mobile friendliness and making your website responsive because obviously makes sense. And I thing is I was looking at, read the article looked was looking back at and I thought that she may be mentioned that Google was penalising people who did not have mobile friendly sites. But she did not write that. And I liked that she did not write that because that is not the reason you should be making mobile friendly websites.
James Royal-Lawson
No. It’s not the main reason, no exactly.
Per Axbom
The reason you’re making mobile friendly websites is because people need them.
James Royal-Lawson
And that is why Google is penalising. It’s
Per Axbom
Yes!
James Royal-Lawson
it’s that they’ve been the they’ve been the kind of like the bearer of bad news that, they’re saying to you, Look, we’re going to penalise you because you haven’t already done the job of making this better for the actual users. Because we’ve noticed they do think it’s better if your site is optimised for mobile.
Per Axbom
Exactly. But but but Jordin is now not talking like a conversion rate optimizer. She’s talking like she’s someone who cares about the people, which, again, is what I really love. I’m so positive.
James Royal-Lawson
That was interesting. You You You just did a little thing there where you implied that conversion rate optimises don’t care about people.
Per Axbom
No. And that’s, of course, not true. I’m gonna sort of say that straight out, but the same time I have been struggling with. And of course, there are cliques in all different types of work and people that are writing that. Because the thing is, I’ve heard people say we don’t need UX, because we have conversion rate optimization, we could do A/B tests, and we will learn what works just from the data. We don’t need to talk to the people, because the people, by clicking will tell us what they want and need. And of course, I think most people have dropped that argument. But I lived with that argument for many years. And I was growing so tired of it. And for me that that was like when people said conversion rate optimization, that was what I was thinking in my head. But of course, I know a lot of people in CRO who actually do work with just making things better in the ways that Jordins talking in this post.
James Royal-Lawson
I mean, I mean, I deliberately took the chance to call you out on that little comment there. But I
Per Axbom
and that was good, because then I was able to clarify.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, I think we have we have felt and seen this, that there. There has been like a coming together of the marketing, CRO, UX worlds. And then there’s been – what I feel anyway – that were drawinf away from each other, again. That I think may be connected to what you said about there’s a lot of lot of tools, a lot of practices, where we’re CRM, or marketing and sales don’t feel they need the the details that maybe UX provides all the extra competence UX provides. Or maybe even, we try and slow down, we maybe that’s part of it, that I think we’ve we’ve got an inbuilt in many of our processes, there is a tendency, a requirement for us to just slow down a little bit, you know, resonate, think, collect data, look at what’s happening and come with a reasoned suggestion or design. Whereas in many of these businesses, the conversion rate optimization, conversion rate optimization is about getting quick results. Finding out Yeah, cheaply quickly. Is it that or that that works, is it that or that that works? was so we’re constantly kind of like tweaking of it. And it’s it’s, it’s numbers, it’s it’s big numbers, and it’s doing stuff quick and now.
Per Axbom
And it doesn’t measure well being.
James Royal-Lawson
And it doesn’t tell you a lot of these things don’t tell you actually, whether it’s the right thing, whether it’s what some people want the numbers tell you what, various what works better. But it doesn’t necessarily that that is the right thing to do. Even work on.
Per Axbom
Yeah, it doesn’t even give you the options of what to try next, really, because that’s something that sort of comes out of people’s imaginations. And if you’re not talking to people, and being out there and make doing interviews and observational studies, you’re actually not getting the hypothesis from other people. You’re getting them from yourself. So perhaps if you talk to people, you could get more data on what types of things to try next.
James Royal-Lawson
I love some of the some of the quotes from from the article there. They they made me smile as well. I think there was one then “you must lead potential guests to take action and book directly with without being too pushy”.
Per Axbom
Yes.
James Royal-Lawson
Excellent. And then just have one and “reveal your price sooner rather than later”.
Per Axbom
Yes, exactly!
James Royal-Lawson
“No one that likes to feel like they’ve been fooled. Be upfront with your price”. So there was some wonderful, kind of, common sense. God Yeah, that’s that’s that is how I feel when I’m kind of tricked, conned, realised that it wasn’t the whole truth. And you don’t like it.
Per Axbom
Exactly. And my favourite i think is when she writes, “listen to the wants and needs of your current and potential guests”. She’s talking about listening, she actually has the heading less talking more listening. I rare, very rarely see people give this type of advice. But she’s writing it under the heading of the FAQ page that you’re actually the FAQ page is a help to people who rarely take the time to call you to ask questions, so that you make sure that you have answered the questions, the real question that they tend to have, she has a great example, if a guest is arriving before check in and they need to know if they can store the luggage with your hotel, they will likely want to find this information on your website and not have to call to ask and when people have to call back. Sometimes they go to another website. So this is just a way of realising that if we are better at listening to the real questions that they usually have, and understanding those, we can provide them a better experience on
James Royal-Lawson
We’re we’re being reassuring. And we’re also aiding comparison. Because Because if like if you need to know whether the hotel has parking, then then that information has to be easily available for me so that I can decide to exclude this to this hotel, or I can decide to go with it. It’s not necessarily just price based. It’s It’s It’s facilities and and reassurance that this is going to work for me. Does it have a lift? Does it have wheelchair access? There’s plenty of things which you, you really need to bake into it to give you that feeling. Yeah, I’ll go with this one.
Per Axbom
Exactly. And it’s so good, because based on that introduction, conversion rates are decreasing. This could have been an entirely different article, something completely different than we’ve seen those articles.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah.
Per Axbom
But this is one of the few times I’ve actually seen someone look at data and say, so we have to be do better by users. It’s not that we used to need to use tech to make people buy more, it’s that we need to bet do better by our users.
James Royal-Lawson
I was Yeah, it’s these kind of articles. I think you we’ve read many of them over the years where they’d be, they’d be lists of behavioural economics tricks, and they’d be kind of tips about what kind of tests to run, what, what colours to try, what kind of things, tweaks to do to your landing pages, all those kind of, you know, hands on in the sandpit kind of advice for making the needle budge.
Per Axbom
Right,
James Royal-Lawson
instead of taking that step back to thinking what you know thinking about the person at the other side,
Per Axbom
that’s sort of what I want to end on here as well is that when we start getting into these dystopian feelings and discussions around where our industry is heading, and what we have contributed to, we need to remind ourselves that things like this make a huge difference for a lot of people. We make their lives easier, we make certain things that you do, commonly in life easier to cope with. And that is what we contribute with. And of course, we should take on the challenges that we’re discussing on a higher level as well these days. But remember that these are the things that we stand for. And I just think that there’s something positive to take away and be thankful for
James Royal-Lawson
happy people = a good business.
Per Axbom
Yes.
[Music]
James Royal-Lawson
If you want to share your conversion experiences or any other thoughts with us, then you can email us at Hey@uxpodcast.com that works with the Swedish and American or English version of Hey,
Per Axbom
and if you want a suggestion of something to listen to next, try out, Episode 85, where we actually talk about persuasion techniques, back in 2014, with Bart Schutz.
James Royal-Lawson
And finally, if you’d like to contribute to funding us podcast, then visit UXpodcast.com/support.
Per Axbom
Remember to keep moving.
James Royal-Lawson
See you on the other side.
[Music]
Per Axbom
What did the fish say when he swam into a wall?
James Royal-Lawson
I don’t know. What did the fish say when it swam into a wall?
Per Axbom
Damn!
This is a transcript of a conversation between James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom, recorded in September 2019 and published as Episode 220 of UX Podcast.
This transcript has been machine generated and checked by a human.