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Hayden Library - QH450.S85 2019

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Barker Library - QH581.2.E78 2019

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Dewey Library - QH331.E85 2018

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Dewey Library - QH323.5.W45 2020

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Across several presentations at Google Conversions in Dublin, several speakers shared insights and best practices for conversion rate optimization. Here's a few highlights:

Confirmation Bias - Michael Aagaard

• In the 18th century, tobacco smoke was considered very good for your heart and lungs. In particular tobacco enemas were quite popular so much that they were placed along the banks of the river Thames to help drowning victims. This is an example of confirmation bias at work.
• Confirmation biases is our tendency to accept evidence we agree with at face value and dismiss information we don't agree with unless the evidence is overwhelming. Confirmation biases limits our ability to seek out and uncover the truth.
• Torturing data: if you torture any data long enough it will confess to anything. High levels of correlation between things don't imply causation. We have to be careful to not see what we want in data.
• Stopping A/B tests when they show the impact we want is an example of confirmation bias. Instead, let them run for an appropriate amount of time. Over time, tests are likely to show much less effects.
• How to overcome confirmation bias: accept the fact that you could be wrong, seek out a different perspective. Find people who talk to customers/users. They have a bias toward end users.
• Don't test your ideas, do detective work to find out what customers need and how they talk about it. Then your A/B test is simply the final test at the end to see if you did your detective work well.

CRO - Lina Hansson

• Celebrate the discovery of weak spots. Don't take it as failure but instead be happy when you find something that can be improved.
• The biggest missed opportunity in conversion rate optimization is usability testing. Move away from opinions and instead use user testing to identify issues.
• A common pain point across retail sites is find-ability: both search and browse. When we move to mobile, many sites remove their top categories list in order to fit on smaller screens. This creates discoverability issues. One of the first things retail sites should test is adding categories visibly on their home page.
• Value propositions for companies are usually cut for mobile. Instead of removing them, redesign them to make them work on mobile.
• People can be classified into four behavior types. Methodical people read completely and analyze before making decisions. Humanistic people react strongly to the opinions of others. Competitive people move quickly and expect things to work. Spontaneous people are emotional and fast-paced. You can design experiences that are appropriate for each of these behavior types.
• The companies that solve checkout on mobile are the ones that will win.

Meaningful Data - Simo Ahava

• It's quite simple to get a service like Google Analytics set up but how do we use these tools to really understand what we're doing. How can data become meaningful?
• Tactics (tool expertise) without a strategy (business expertise) are just party tricks and a strategy without tactics is just talk. What brings the two together is agility.
• Tools must be customized for your organization's needs. We are not trying to optimize metrics but our businesses. Default metrics and reports need to be adjusted to work with your specific needs.

Landing Pages - Anna Potanin

• Designers want to do their best and create unique interfaces but making things for the Web often requires understanding and using conventions. Only apply a unique visual design after you have followed best practices.
• 3 things all retail sites should have on their landing and home pages: call to action, value propositions, and visuals.
• The more prominent you make your search bar, the more searches you get. Why do you want to do this? Conversion rates are usually much higher for people who search

In her Full-Featured Art Direction for the Web presentation at An Event Apart in Chicago, Mina Markham shared her approach to building Web pages that work across a variety of browsers, devices and locales. Here's my notes from her talk:

• Full-featured art direction is progressively enhanced, localized for a particular user, yet inclusive of all visitors and locations.
• Start with the most basic minimal viable experience for the user and move up from there. Semantic markup is your best baseline. Annotate a Web site design with HTML structure: H1, H2, H3, etc. From there, gradually add CSS to style the minimal viable experience. If everything else fails, this is what the user will see. It may be the bare minimum but it works.
• Feature queries in CSS are supported in most browsers other than IE 11. We can use these to set styles based on what browsers support. For instance, modular font scaling allows you to update overall sizing of text in a layout. Feature Query checker allows you to see what things look like when a CSS query is not present.
• Localization is not just text translation. Other elements in the UI, like images, may need to be adjusted as well. You can use attributes like :lang() pseudoclass to include language specific design elements in your layout.
• Inclusive art direction ensures people can make use of our Web sites on various devices and in various locations. Don't remove default behaviors in Web browsers. Instead adjust these to better integrate with your site's design.

In her PWAs, Payment Experiences and More presentation at Google Conversions 2018 in Dublin Ireland, Jenny Gove talked through the new capabilities available on the Web to build fast and engaging products. Here's my notes from her talk:

• The Web was built for desktop devices, not mobile. Native apps, in contrast, were built from the ground up for mobile. So it's no surprise that Web sites are still catching up in terms of experience. While there are great mobile Web experiences, most have a lot of work to do.
• To help incentivize people to improve mobile Web experiences, Google added the "mobile-friendly" label to search results. When 85% of results in mobile search met this criteria, the label was removed.
• Progressive Web apps bring richer experiences to the Web through a set of technologies that enable fast, installable, reliable, and engaging. They're the next step in making great Web experiences.
• Speed is critical for mobile Web sites but it takes a mobile Web page a median time of 9.3 seconds to load on 3G. Pinterest reduced their time for interactive from 23 seconds to 5.6 seconds with their PWA. This resulted in a 60% increase in engagement and a 2-3% improvement over their native app.
• You can improve speed with technical changes and design (to manage perception). Lighthouse is a tool from Google that shows time to meaningful paint and other relevant metrics for improving technical performance. You can manage user perception of speed using skeletong screens and gradual loading of content.
• PWAs allow you to add mobile Web pages to your phone's home screens. On Android these apps show up in app switchers and setting screens.
• Service workers in PWAs enable reliable experiences when there is no network or slow and intermittent network connections. Even in developed markets, slow network conditions often exist. Service workers are now available in all major Web browsers.
• PWAs make use of Web technologies at the right time and place like app permissions, push notifications, payment request APIs, and better form interactions (autocomplete, input types, etc.)
• 42% of top sites in Europe don't show the appropriate keyboard for specific input types. 27% of the top site in Europe didn't identify which form fields are optional.
• Google Search uses a PWA to enable offline queries and send results when people are back online using notifications. With a PWA they were able to use 50% fewer external JavaScript requests.
• In the Starbucks PWA, daily & monthly active users have nearly doubled (compared ot the previous Web experience) and orders placed in the PWA are growing by more than 12% week over week.
• While mobile has really driven PWA requirements, desktop devices also benefit from PWA app switching and integration. Service workers, push notifications, and other new Web technologies work on desktop as well.
• It's possible to run PWAs on the desktop in app windows which can be themed. These apps need to use responsive design to adapt from small sized windows to full-sized screens.
• What's next for PWAs? Support for Windows, macOS and Linux, Keyboard Shortcuts, Badging the launch icon, and Link capturing.
• Watch the full video of Jenny's: PWAs, Payment Experiences and More talk

In his Slow Design for an Anxious World presentation at An Event Apart in Denver, Jeffrey Zeldman espoused the benefits of design that aims to increase comprehension and intentional use. Here's my notes from his talk:

• We live in fast times and care a lot about making things faster for people. In this world, "slow" is often associated with friction. But some things are better slow.
• Fast is best for transactional customer-service designs. We optimize our checkout flows for efficiency and our code for performance. Likewise, service-oriented content must be designed for speed of relevancy. Getting to content like driving directions, return policies, and more should be quick and easy for customers.
• Slow is best for comprehension. Reading slowly helps us understand more of what we read and even transactional sites have some content that we want people to understand more deeply.
• There's lots of resources for site optimization but few for slowing people down so they appreciate and understand our content.
• Legibility means you can read what's on the page. Readability is where the art comes in. You don't need to be a graphic designer to improve readability. When focusing on readability you're focusing on absorption not conversion.
• Improving readability means putting the focus on content and removing distractions. The service Readability optimized Web pages for this by removing ads, third party widgets, and more.
• Considering different reading modes like in bed, at breakfast, on your lap, etc. can trigger ideas for layout and type for sites. For example, big fonts can help you lean back and take in content vs. leaning in and squinting.
• Big type used to be a controversial design choice on the Web but now has been adopted by a number of sites like Medium, Pro Publica, and the New Yorker.
• To be readable: use big type (16px should be your smallest size); use effective hierarchy for type; remove all extraneous elements in your layout; art direction helps you call attention to important content; make effective use of whitespace.
• Art direction can bring unique emotion and resonance to articles online. In a world of templates and scalability, distinct art direction can help people take notice of intentional high value content.
• Macro-whitespace is the bigger columns and padding around content we often associate with high-end luxury brands. Micro-whitespace is the space in between letter forms and between the lines of type. Consider both in your designs
• Ensure your content is branded so it stands out. When all content looks like the same it all appears to have equal value. Have a brand that sticks out to be more trusted.
• With all these techniques we're trying to get people to lean back and have a good "readable" experience on the Web.

How H&M, Zara and Marks & Spencer are buying viscose from highly polluting factories in Asia. By Natasha Hurley.