Designs that convert

Great designers don’t solely focus on making things pretty. They often also focus on the business goals, like getting more customers and increasing sales, which help you justify your salary and help you get ahead faster in your career. The most effective designs that convert don’t trick users (and ethical designers don’t trick users anyway). Great designs that convert do each of these: 1. Effectively communicate the benefits of your product. 2. Educate users how to actually achieve the most out of using the product. 3. Make it easy to accomplish those goals. Conversion and growth isn’t about black magic or tricking your users into doing something they don’t want to do. It’s mainly about process. You start with a hypothesis, you implement it, you run a test, and then you learn what worked and why. Then you try again. After some months, you’ll notice you’ve likely grown your conversions by a fairly large amount. From a tactical standpoint, there’s three simple ways to help your product grow: 1. Increase the number of people aware of the product and coming to the website. 2. Increase the number of people signing up + converting to paid users. 3. Increase the revenue per user or average size of orders. Your first task is to make sure you have data for all three of those steps. Once you have data, your goal is to focus on the 1-2 steps that are performing the worst. Spend time learning from your customers, make some hypotheses, and start testing new designs. Do the numbers get better? Rinse & repeat. Cycle through improving each stage of your customer conversion funnel a little bit at a time, and you’ll realize after some months that the growth has compounded. That’s the perfect place to start. Follow the process, make sure you’re truly helping customers, and use data to confirm what’s actually working. Use the links below to dig in deeper and learn how to be a more effective designer.

1. Traction: a book for getting new customers in the door

   This is a great book whether you’re building a new product or growing an existing one. It will give you tons of ideas for ways to build inbound traffic to your product, and even more importantly it will give you a structure and process for testing these ideas.

2. “Position, Position, Position!” – what is your product really selling

   It’s easy to convince yourself that products with similar features or details are selling the same thing, but if you focus on why your customers come to you and what you do best then you can change the story. Luckily, this exercise will also help you learn where to focus new feature development. This relates a ton to the Jobs To Be Done framework (which you should also research).

3. Learn about Jobs To Be Done

   One of the most useful mental models I’ve learned about as a designer is the Jobs To Be Done way of thinking. It’s become fairly trendy the past few years, but only because it can be so effective. The goal is to stop thinking about individual characteristics of your customers, but to focus on the larger forces at play when they decide to buy or use your product. What is the real reason they became a customer, and why now instead of the last time they learned about it, and more.

4. “Practical Advice for Growing a SaaS Business”

   This presentation does a great job of breaking down why process is so important for working on growth and conversion. Growth comes from a bunch of small wins that compound, no magic bullets.

5. Stripe Pricing Guide

   Even though this guide is about SaaS, there’s a lot of great tidbits you can use across product-types and pricing models. Working on pricing is the most high-leverage way to increase step #3 (revenue per user & average order side). This guide from Patrick McKenzie at Stripe is one off the best breakdowns you’ll find about the topic.