What to get out of conversion funnels in early design phase
Here’s a situation :
John is a product owner of a latest product to be released. He gets designs ready from his designers, discusses over the designs, and once everyone on the table approves of it, the designs are forwarded to the development team. Developers put in hours of work and dedication. The app is ready just as per the vision of John and the designers. He now decides that he should run a usability test on the app prior to releasing it on the app store. John’s jaws drop when he sees the results of the test — Usability issues that the team never thought about.
The reaction of John (Product Owner) when he finds out the usability issue!!
Now John turns towards his developers! But, eventually, he realises that it’s way more expensive, time-consuming, and frustrating for his engineers to go back and make changes in the code than it would be for his designer to go back and make changes in Sketch or Photoshop or Illustrator.
John(Product Manager) runs back to his developer to make changes in the code!!
Next project onward, John runs usability tests on his designs before it goes to his coders! And he is very particular about conversion funnels! Why?? Let’s understand
John now validates the usability and conversion early in the design phase!!
Conversion funnels at the prototyping stage — It has much wider scope than just design. It lies on the crossroads of design, marketing, user research, psychology and other spheres dealing with users, their behavior and solving their problems. More than that, it’s a token of acceptance of the solution.
And this is exactly why the UXers are so fascinated with conversion funnels. Why a particular shade of green converts more users to a payment page than the other lighter shade of green? Such questions can only be answered when you have test results with context.
Conversion funnels for prototypes
Users’ goals are often quite conflicting with the business goals. Business goals are to convert a lead, get subscribers, direct users to payment page etc. Whereas a user’s goal might be to download a PDF file, buy a gift, read an article etc. To maintain that mid-way is the real challenge for a designer.
Conversion funnels are a lighthouse for designers in the early design stage. Measuring and analyzing the conversion on a prototype gives a fairly decent idea of what the metrics are going to look like in few weeks, on the real app.
How does conversion funnel help in the early design phase?
1. Visualise and map where users are dropping off in your funnel
When you share a prototype with your users, you want to keep them on the prototype until the end. But that does not always happen. And this is exactly what you want to minimise with every other iteration on your designs. Understanding which screens have a higher drop-off in the flow streamlines the iteration process. You can shift your focus to modifying these particular design screens.
Testing such metrics in the early stage of the project (design phase) is often preached. This is because the number of drop-offs in a flow is a clear reflection of the friction of users with the app/website interface.
2. Find your most popular flow
When we have a bulky app, the tendency is to create multiple flows to reach the ultimate goal. Let’s take an example of an e-commerce app. To find a “Reebok shoe” on the app, I could go via one of the following paths -
Shop by category -> Shoes>
Women-> footwear-> shorts shoe
Sale -> women -> footwear -> shorts shoes
But as a designer, I would want to make the one flow that is most popular as the primary flow for my app.
To get such insights conversion funnels are super effective. Iterate on your designs such that the most popular flow is most intuitive and easy to discover for the users.
3. Which Call-to-Action converts more users
At its simplest, A/B testing is a method for comparing 2 versions of something against each other to discover which is the most successful. That something can be an image, a button, a headline, or beyond.
An interesting use case of this could be to test out the Call-to-Actions that convert more. Duplicate a prototype on CanvasFlip and replace the screen with the other version of the Call-to-Action. Segment your users and test each version with a user segment. Compare the conversion rate on each prototype and confidently go ahead with the better Call-to-action.
4. Understand and establish the most accurate user persona for your app
With a new feature or a product we often struggle with understanding and establishing an accurate user persona. Understanding and aiming for the closest user persona is always preferred while you are designing. It’s good for the business and the users.
A “Hey guys, hit on this button to jump in!” would work for a different user persona and “Please click on the button below to get started” would work for another. Choosing a bright color vs a soft color, login with social media or only with an email id and much more such design decisions depends primarily on your user persona.
Test the same version of the prototype with different user personas on your list. The one that converts best will be the closest to your user persona.
Automatic creation of conversion funnels with CanvasFlip
This is exactly how you get a conversion funnel of your prototype on CanvasFlip. As soon as a user is done reviewing the prototype, the conversion funnel is automatically updated.
[HOTTEST NEWS] : All these insights in $1 per review!!!
At CanvasFlip our aim is to empower design and development teams to get quick, reliable and cost-effective UX insights. Having said that, CanvasFlip has revamped it’s pricing plans and you could now get usability insights at just 1$ per user!
Read more about Conversion funnel on CanvasFlip..
Wrapping up
If all of this has incited your appetite for conversion funnel in design stages, you should hopefully have the information you need to get started. You could have more use cases of the conversion funnel. If you have some amazing use case of conversion funnel in the design phase, do let us know!
