Design like a scientist

Never design with your assumptions again.

Aditya Krishna
6 min readFeb 6, 2019

Being UX designer, we know our work has an impact. But not everyone can connect the dots between design and business growth. The problem is, it’s hard to quantify the quality of a design. It’s important to know what you’re going after. Start with the goal of the project you’re working on. Break that goal down into units you can measure.

Measuring the ROI of design is essential because business needs to know the real value of investments in design. Design managers and leaders are often asked to provide evidence of success.

Design modifications can be made to increase the performance and usability of products and services which is measurable. User experience metrics are generally different than marketing metrics, but they do overlap in several critical areas like engagement by users, bounce rate, page views, session duration and pages per session and lead generation are all able to be impacted, and all these metrics can be measured effectively through Conversion Rate Optimization.

Never underestimate the power of CRO

Conversion Rate Optimization, also commonly referred to as CRO in short, is the exercise of increasing sales and prospective leads from any website. The added advantage is that it can be done without increasing the percentage of website visitors. CRO helps in attracting more clicks to your homepage or site without extra expenditure.

In this blog, I’m going to cover how I use CRO to evaluate the design.

Analysis Over Assumptions.

When we talk about user experience (UX), we are referring to the totality of visitors’ experience with your site — more than just how it looks, UX includes how easy your site is to use, how fast it is, and how little friction there is when visitors try to complete whatever action it is they’re there to complete.

It could be the way a user scans a screen — their “scanning pattern” — can provide valuable insight into your users’ behavior patterns. In general, people follow an F-shaped pattern when scanning a page. Some users begin scanning the page on the upper left of the screen; this area ultimately receives the most attention.

In design business, we need data to prove, and the only way to find out is by observing their behavior.

Many heatmap applications also allow monitoring scroll behavior, allowing you to assess how deep into the screen users are willing to scroll, where they typically drop off, and what information attracts them the most.

As it applies to Funnel Analysis, the importance of UX cannot be overstated. By carefully crafting your user experience, you can ensure the user stays on task and keeps moving through the funnel, having been given just enough information and options at each step.

Session replays are very useful for observing how people fill out forms on your site or react to your site. You can configure event tracking for Google Analytics, but it won’t provide the level of insight that user session replay videos do.

Record user sessions, and watch your actual visitors interact with your site. You can record video sessions of people going through your site. It’s kind of like user testing but has no script and no audio. But people are risking their actual money — so it can be more insightful. You don’t need a million visitors to record user sessions — this is almost like qualitative data.

Target The Right Way.
Is it finally time for web personalization to fulfill its potential? While it is still seen as the most difficult method to implement, it has improved to being considered the third most valuable CRO method, so for those that are getting web personalization going, it has been worth the effort.

Hopefully, more people will see this impact and start to invest the time and money into people and data that are key to driving web personalization. Clients that have managed to get a proper web personalization strategy live has shown that the results have more than justified the investment.

Sometimes, you want to target audience based on the number of visits and views made by the audience. Unlike new visitors, returning visitors are more interested in your website and are more likely to get converted.

Web Content Personalisation provides a handy way of monitoring the number of page views and visits made by a visitor and bucket visitors based on those targeting condition. These options will granularly target returning visitors who are interested in your product or page.

If you don’t understand your users, the ideas you generate will be less worthy. They may not be on target, and, even worse, you won’t have the correct evaluation criteria to validate the idea/product.

“Ignoring design means ignoring people, and a design is not complete until people use it” ~ Aditya Dhotre

Still wondering which tool to use?

Allow me to help. I would strongly recommend you to save your time and money by not juggling between tools. If you need to analyze, optimize and personalize website in one place, then go for Freshmarketer

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Thank you for reading 🙏 .

About Author:
Hello! I’m Aditya Krishna a.k.a Aditya Dhotre, I have worked with a number of clients, both independently and through corporates. Sometimes, I’m fortunate to teach and give lectures. I’m fuelled by true passion, with an excellent eye for detail & craftsmanship.

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Aditya Krishna
Aditya Krishna

Written by Aditya Krishna

Exploring the world through art and design. Always on the hunt for new inspiration and adventures.