UX Expert Shares his the best tips for converting users into customers

0:00[Music]

0:07[Music] hi everyone as Rob already mentioned my name is Samuel Kulick and I run the site user onboard comm I'm a longtime UX consultant and designer and I - I'm someone who has had sex before so thank you very much it was it was pretty great so alright so the title of my talk is UX basics that convert users into customers and I want to talk about the conversion part first and then find out how the UX part plays into that and then maybe come back at the end with a slightly different definition of conversions so to start things off with let's go to a really generic conversion funnel or a

0:52user adoption funnel here we have say you have a software product you have a marketing site that markets it for every thousand people that come to the site let's say that 500 ever get to the sign up page of those people 200 make it to actually completeing sign up 120 ever come back a second time after signing up which wherever Patrick McKenzie is I think he can tell you that's optimistic if you're not paying attention to it already and then let's say that you know you're converting about a sixth of that so 20% actually become customers yours could be totally different probably are but this is a pretty general one and

1:27let's say you want to create more sales so one thing you can do is try to come up with a new product feature set talk to your customers do your customer development design it scope it launch it support it it's a kind of a long play big bet there alternatively you could come in on the other side of the funnel and just increase your marketing efforts either get more specific about who you're targeting or double your advertising rate if you double your advertising in theory double the people will make it through to the other end of the funnel however I'd like to offer one alternative which would be focusing on

1:57the funnel part itself and just going for some small wins that can have a big effect so let's say that you were looking at this and I should have made another site but not only are you so say you're going from a thousand five hundred to two hundred you're leaving the negative space version of that on Abell so you're leaving 500 people from the first step you're leaving another 300 at the second so on and so forth and if you really just wanted to see if you could find small wins low-hanging fruit that could take people from even just one out of ten that are blocking

2:25people from moving from one step to the next or preventing them from doing so and try to see get to get some wins there even just a 110 percent improvement on the people you're leaving behind from one step to the next can result in small wins at the top 550 people instead of 500 as you go down though each stage of the funnel is getting more and more effective you're getting more and more people through it as well and you're winding up doubling your sales in this specific case so that's kind of the general case for UX as far as conversions are concerned let's say you're totally sold and you're

2:55new to UX so you would go out and get a ux book and you would be confronted with weird terms like information architecture ethnography studies contextual inquiries user participant recruiting card sorting tree testing taxonomy spokes on amis usability testing on and on and on and they might sound weird and hard and time-consuming and they are weird and hard and time-consuming but they're also really valuable unfortunately they're only going to be very valuable if you bring the right mindset to the table and fortunately if you bring the right mindset to the table you're gonna be able to go pretty far just with that so today I'd like to talk about just the

3:29mindset that you need to bring or that I recommend and how I first help people when I come on in a UX consulting job so the first thing that I want to start with and this sounded really smart when I typed it and when I was looking at it earlier I was like that's really big but we're gonna get to that in a second but I start with just basically saying what you're looking for is investing in your users success and getting more specific about that understanding what they value and how they define that and how you can deliver it and ultimately how you can organize everything that your company

3:56makes around that and to get to that point the there's a sort of diagram formula that I I put in place starring everyone's favorite Italian magical plumber we're all the way on the on the right side there's scrawny little Mario who's just trying to get through things and then comes upon the fire flower suddenly he's big he's throwing fireballs he is a super Mario if you will and the reason that this is the biggest takeaway that I can recommend from this is that the end result is not your product the end result is the upgrade that your product provides to somebody that's really what this is all about as I say people don't

4:34buy products they buy better versions of themselves and so looking at your product it's not as much for what it does for somebody but what it does to somebody so some quick examples here intercom is in-app messaging software but we don't value it because it sends text rings from one computer to another we value it because it turns us into people who are better at talking to our customers in that same way Evernote is note-taking software and we don't value it because it saves strings of text to databases for future retrieval we value it because it turns us into people who are better at remembering things so

5:07coming back to this slide a lot of times I'll kind of lay that out for people and they're like oh that sounds great but I don't know how I turn anybody into anything better so getting really specific about that I have a really actionable tip here basically take out two pieces of paper or one piece of paper with a line down the middle also it works great and basically looking at how can you take the scrawny lame version of that person metaphorically speaking and contrast their behavior sets with somebody who's really doing very well because of their using your product not specifically how they're using your product itself but how their

5:41life is so much better because of it so to extend the Mario metaphor he's doing a lot of ducking and dodging and diving he's being terrified of getting squished and he's just kind of trying to make his way in the world contrast that with the awesome Mario who's slaying enemies from afar not giving a crap if he's hit and crushing brick walls with his face and you can see that the lifestyle difference is pretty profound there so one thing I really recommend is getting really specific about how you transform people from one to the other and ultimately that's what it's all about because you're rewarded when you turn

6:14that person into that better person because the the awesome Mario on the right is the one who pays you money for the experience the Mario on the Left doesn't give you anything because you're not doing anything for them so ultimately you know the general the general takeaway here is that you make money by making better people so you the conversion that you're creating needs to be a conversion in that person's life before it ever happens on the screen so when I talk about I'm not talking about what's happening on your signup form or your billing page or your trial has ended now enter your credit card those conversions are only

6:46consequences almost reflexes of somebody having realized the value of the conversion that you made in their life so when I'm coming into UX consulting projects and I'm looking for those little green lines to start showing up above those bars the increase in the conversions what I'm really looking to do is align that entire process along that growth trajectory of the person so I think I'm pretty much running out here so to recap even a slight uptick can in sorry even a slight they've taken UX across the board can have a compound and profound positive effect investing in your users success is the best is the highest form of user experience and

7:26ultimately if you focus on turning people into the kind of customers that you want then you're going to be able to profit from it at the end you make money by making better people thank you very much oh no I'm not done huh okay I also I also just released the book on user onboarding and I'm such big fans of micro Kampf and everyone here that if you come up to me afterwards I'd be very happy to give it to you for free so thank you you