UX and CRO - The power of Togetherness

Discussions around improving website performance have been had in my years as a “title” and there is a commonality almost always in them, Optimization and User experience. Yes, both are powerful and essential but are they being leveraged effectively and appropriately to extract the desired outcomes?

In most of the firms, though they have access to both CRO and UX, both are used separately to solve a specific business problem around the user journey. It has a serious impact on the business objectives and strategy by missing out on collaborations and communications between these two.

CRO and UX – Impact on standalone execution

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) answers only “WHAT” and it validates whether a given recipe would be a winner/loser for the segment it has been tested upon. The key data source for arriving at the hypothesis through the CRO process is only Quantitative data which is from any of the analytical platforms such as Adobe Analytics or Google Analytics. Do you think this is just enough to conclude? I would say no, mainly because the experiments are conducted without understanding the WHY factor.

Let’s look at a simple example - Through quantitative analysis, you have arrived at the hypothesis to provide more visibility to a specific CTA on a page thinking that the change will increase the conversion rate drastically and you are running A/B test. In this scenario, it may even show some level of improvement in your KPIs. But if there are other fundamental issues in design, which you will be missing out and have an impact on the user journey, which in turn affects the conversion rate drastically.

Downside:

1.       Conducting Random experiments

2.       Too many iterations - Testing multiple times with different variants for the same problem statements

3.       The cost incurred on the failed test without understanding “WHY”

4.       Time consumption will be high to conclude on desired results which will slow down the maturity in your journey towards Optimization

So that is when UX will act as a supplement to CRO by analyzing the “WHY” to strengthen the Hypothesis and hence the outcome

Now let’s investigate what UX brings on to the table and why it fails when conducted on a standalone basis

UX research is conducted to identify how a user feels when they are using the website. UX research is used for multiple purposes

To uncover feelings of an existing experience or prototypes, throughout the design process to uncover not only what the best look is, but also ease of use through design, and to discover answers to the“WHY” for a given problem statement. This  can be achieved through quantitate and qualitative UX research methodologies such as Card Sorting, Tree Tests, Moderated Studies, Unmoderated Studies, and Surveys

However, In my experience, I have observed the changes to the website which have been done by only conducting UX research has failed drastically. Why? Primarily because the hypothesis needs to be extrapolated to a wider set of audience by validating it through CRO process (running experiments) before drastic changes to experience are made. But how it has impacted the business?

This is not only costing the business whatever the UX study price was, but also the time to implement the update, time observe the stats of the failing updates, the time it takes to roll back the changes, and the lost performance/revenue of the site while the changes were still in place.

So how do we overcome the challenge?

Combine UX and CRO

As a practitioner, I’d like to share my experience in leveraging both UX and CRO in the following flow diagram

The key over here is for any problem which you are solving to improve the website performance should answer both “What” and “Why” to come up with an effective hypothesis that can be implemented. This approach is not only data-driven, but it’s also people-centric, keeping the end-user at the center of your business.

I have seen businesses achieve better optimization outcomes that average around

1.       25% engagement increase over traditional standalone CRO approach

2.       Sitewide exits have reduced by 15% over the traditional standalone approach

3.       15% conversion rate increase

and most importantly

“Experiments run through this model have a 50% higher chance of success rate”

CONCLUSION:

The success in website improvement depends on establishing a true relationship between UX and CRO. Both CRO and UX teams should align communications and strategy  to achieve better objective outcomes