Being visual creatures, humans are reliant on sight as a facilitator for decision making. Entire industries are built on providing visually appealing products, sometimes at the expense of utility. We all have a friend with an eccentric furniture collection, who favors form over function. This is one of the reasons that product images are at odds with the rest of the conversion optimization mindset. For pretty much everything else, we worry about function over form....

As I’ve said before, websites should be built for the user, not the business that created them. This issue of Conversion Gold is going to talk about how you can do that. We’re going to dive into the best way to understand what users think about your website. It’s difficult to build a great website in a vacuum — which is exactly what an overwhelmingly large amount of companies do. Learning from (and collaborating wherever possible) with your customers should enable you to build a site that meets all of their requirements in a way that creates value for the business behind it....

In a typical browsing session I’ll see a lot of pages that have multiple goals. It’s a lot to ask of a single page to complete one goal, much less two or three. Four? Fuhggedaboutit. The next few issues of Conversion Gold will be about specific page types. We’ll evaluate the distinct roles that they play on the site, and the distinct goals and outcomes they attempt to serve. I’m going to start with the homepage — it’s the most iconic of all pages, and the central “beating heart” of your website....

I break conversion optimization into two parts: Pre-checkout: meant to deliver important information at the proper time in order to encourage a conversion event. Checkout: where the rubber meets the road, the actual intended action. You can do all of the work in the world to make sure that your pre-checkout information (homepage, product pages, marketing collateral, etc) is absolutely outstanding, yet still, you’ll often suffer from poorer results than your site is capable of....

If you abstract out and take a look, you’ll see that there are really just two colors in this content section: black text and a white background. I’ve also played a little with bolding and increasing the font size of the headlines. There are no buttons, no accordion menus, no add to cart or checkout functionality — it’s a pretty simple piece of content from a utility standpoint. If you’re reading this, I’m going to go ahead and guess that you’re reading it linearly....

Based on the hint above, you might begin thinking about which type of context I’m talking about. The answer is, of course, all of the contexts. Here, I’ll enumerate a few for you: What is the context of the users visit? If I’m arriving at your site from an email newsletter you’ve sent me, does it make sense to show me a newsletter signup popup that I have to dismiss before I can complete my task?...

They say that the only constant in life is change. On a human level, it certainly rings true: we seem always to be changing something about ourselves. Sometimes we come up with the changes ourselves, other times they’re pushed onto us by those who have authority over us. Both of these conduits of change are fed by culture. In many ways, it seems like we want to appear more average than we actually are....

If we look at how the average internet user spends their time, it probably looks something like this: Text and instant messages Social media status updates YouTube, Instagram, and other visual media Google/search engine queries Short form, low-text content has become the dominant way that we deploy our attention, and it’s displacing a lot of the long form ways in which we discover ideas and construct our thoughts....

Before we begin though, I should probably tell you that I disagree with the vast majority of productivity blogs and gurus. Also, this method isn’t backed by science, thousands of studies, or one weird trick. It’s pretty straightforward. Rule #1: Be aware of the incentives you create for yourself. Becoming really good at productivity often means becoming really good at completing large numbers of tasks. I don’t care about optimizing how many tasks I can get done in a day....

When it’s not outright crap, it’s shallow content regurgitated in hundreds of ways. I’ve spent close to a decade looking for the perfect productivity system. I’ve tried dozens of task list apps and project management systems, and I’ve read more books and articles than I can remember. I hate to say it but the vast majority of that time was wasted, misguided at best. Like so many others before me, I became obsessed with the system instead of the results....