A successful website is optimized for conversions and a pleasure to use. To create such a website it has to be done based on both the best UX design and CRO practices. Therefore, these two professional disciplines should always go hand in hand to ensure that the audience, as well as the website owner, gets the most out of a given site.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) and User Experience (UX) both aim to help users get things done with the least amount of effort. Although they are not the same, they both make use of the same methods such as user feedback and usability testing.
The approach to UX design is simple but it provides long-term benefits to CRO—you have to make sure that all tasks on your website are intuitive and the complete flow across the website is according to users’ expectations. Furthermore, you need to identify areas of friction experienced by your site visitors and try to fix them.
If you think user experience and your conversion rate have nothing to do with each other… you think wrong. When users land on your website, they expect to be guided by its design, layout, functionality, and flow. If your visitor experience is executed properly, it will ultimately lead and convert them.
As users navigate your website, their opinion gets influenced by the experience they’re having such as navigation without any issues or accessibility of information they are searching for. With proper UX design and testing to gather data-driven visual insights, we would be able to persuade people to do what we want and when we want, which ultimately means converting them. This is why UX and CRO both need to work together to give visitors what they are looking for while making it enjoyable for them, and for you to achieve your business goals.
UX and CRO are two sides of the same coin because they go hand in hand even when they use different approaches. Therefore, your UX efforts affect your CRO and vice versa. CRO focuses on increasing the percentage of website visitors who take a specific action on a website. It is a process of funneling your efforts to improve user interaction by channeling them into taking an intended action, for example filling out a form or do a survey, etc.
How does one measure CRO?
CRO = Purchase orders / Total sessions
Here, purchase orders signify user interaction resulting in an action beneficial to the business, and total sessions indicate the number of site interactions that took place. A higher CRO value shows that your CRO efforts are working effectively and create more purchase orders per session.
UX Design aims at streamlining the user journey through a well-incorporated layout. Meaning, UX is a reflection of how the user experiences your website. Depending on the UX efforts you put in, this experience can be good or bad.
So how does CRO complement UX?
UX design focusses efforts on improving the experience of the visitor when they land on your website. So when you work on improving your user’s interaction with the website, it directly affects your CRO. Customers are more likely to take any desired action when they have a good website experience.
If you want to read more about the impact UX has on CRO, here is a very interesting article about it which you might enjoy.
