Design for Conversion

Part 1 — Experiences for Behavioral Intentions

a field note from ixdeology.com

There are plenty of articles online explaining how to drive users to landing page experiences and convert them. These resources even include optimized layouts — mostly encouraging impulsive user behaviors for increased click-through rates. As much as I agree that Search Engine Optimization is necessary, I also believe that its implementation from a User Experience Design point-of-view can be elegant and further enhance the quality of the conversion by leading to one. Therefore I chose to write this Field Note focusing on a layout agnostic approach to designing for conversion.

The most important aspect of designing for conversion
is relating to the behavioral intentions of a user.

Identifying this factor first greatly influences the choice of Landing Page Experience, followed by the conversion elements needed within it to determine a layout for your brand’s story.

Audiences & Intentions

During the user research phase, there are 2 audiences that need to be considered. Understanding them, and deciding which one precedes in priority to meet your promotional objectives, will greatly help in selecting your landing page experience.

• Intentional Users — These users are already aware of your brand along with its credibility, and may need less convincing. It is best to lead them directly to the goal of the landing page to meet their planned behavioral intention. (Reference: Theory of Planned Behavior by Icek Ajzen)

• Unintentional Users — These users would happen to your site by the various digital traffic drivers such as a search result listing. They are less aware of your brand and may need more convincing than the Intentional User.

Experience Formats

Once a primary audience type is defined, a conducive landing page experience format needs to be selected as part of your brand’s digital conversion strategy. For those unfamiliar, the term “Landing Page” is commonly used to refer to pages where conversion can occur once a user is led to it. Technically any page on a website can be a landing page with proper curation of content, however for categorization purposes the following 3 formats can help you focus your message to reach the intended audience.

• Lead Generation Format — It is a page that can stand alone, or exist within a larger website, depending on the purpose of the conversion strategy. Usually it is one page that has the ability to capture a user’s interest via a form with focused content. If the target audience is an intentional user, then this is one of the best formats to use. If there are users with multiple primary intentions that need to be targeted, then a series of separately customized pages for each audience should be considered.

• Transitional Format — It is a page that has the ability to build interest and further funnel or transition your user to achieve a desired outcome on another page. It can stand alone or exist within a larger website depending on the content goals.

• Multi-paged Campaign Format — This landing page experience usually has multiple pages for more interim engagement, with strong call-to-actions to lead them to focus on the objectives of the site. Better suited for building a contained experience for your brand’s awareness, it includes the above formats, with curated information for both user intensions. Single scrollable page experiences that have multiple types of content are a new form of this same concept since it contains multiple sections of information.

For more on guidelines and elements to consider for design within a landing page experience format, please read Part 2.