I recently attended the Design for Conversion conference that was held on the light boat in Amsterdam. The venue was small and had a bar/nightclub feel to it, which promoted an informal atmosphere and made it easier to start conversations with total strangers.

The attendees were divided into seven groups of each about 12 - 14 members, with two or three team captains. Each group was assigned a case to work on in between the keynote sessions, and at the end of the day every team had to give a short 3-minute presentation about the ideas they had to improve the conversion rate of their case subject.

The group I was put in had the KPNvandaag.nl portal as our case topic. The objective of the case was to promote usage of the portal, find a way to integrate KPN commercial messages in the portal, and how to gain valuable user insights from usage of the portal.

The team captains of our group were Lotte Zwijnenburg (info.nl), Boris van Beek (ikki.nl) and Reinout Wolfert (webanalisten.nl). Some of the more active participants were people from small agencies, IT companies, freelancers and insurance companies. The final 3-minute presentation for our group was given by me (no one else volunteered).

Our ideas for the KPNvandaag.nl case:

• More openness in the portal to allow for more customization, more news sources for users to add, and more widget functionality (calendars, email overview, etc).
• Integration of KPN services into the portal. Examples: SMS/phone history, personalized phonebook, sending SMS messages direct from the portal, overview of your phone activity, remotely program your digital TV DVR to record a TV show, watch TV, subscribe to digital TV channels, etc.
• Integrate relevant commercial messages into the widgets on the portal in a subtle way.

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Keynote 1
Andrew Chak - Getting the Next Click

Andrew Chak wrote a book a few years ago called Submit Now. He spoke about the core tenets of conversion optimization and divided them into three principles:

1) Start with the user and where your users are
Find the sites your users are active on (also search engines), and advertise on those sites.
Create different landing pages or microsites based on the needs of your users. Specify your message to different types of users and their specific needs.
Users only see what they are looking for, so be specific to that user type and use their own words.

2) Don’t sell, help them buy it
Help them find the basic information they need to make an informed decision.
Help them choose, be clear about your offer.
Influence the choice with highlighting, scarcity, user ratings, recommendations, etc.
Help them evaluate the different choices (feature table).
Help them see the result of their actions.
Be honest, authentic and complete.

3) Remove the barriers
No upfront registration, give (partial) content before you ask for user details.
Remove ALL unnecessary fields in your forms.
Remove uneducated choices.
Add persuasion elements (recommendations, scarcity, special offers).

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Keynote 2
Steve Jackson - Combining 4 techniques to improve your conversion rate

Steve Jackson has been a conversion optimizer since 1999, and he’s been writing a book about conversion optimization and web analytics which will appear in April 2009. He has created a model for conversion optimization called the insight model and explained it with a high-level view in his keynote.

The Insight model

There are 4 elements to conversion optimization in this model:

1) Persona - create a persona that is somewhat typical for our userbase, and view your website through the eyes of this persona. Be detailed in creating this persona and be honest to the choices this persona would make.

2) Competitive data - what works for your competitors? What sites are good sites with good conversions? Don’t be afraid to steal ideas from your competitors.

3) Clickstream data - use web analytics to gather information about what your users do on your website. What pages do they click through to, what pages have a high bounce rate, what pages are exit pages? Find the troublespots and correct them.

4) Experience data - you know from your own experience as a user and a professional what works and what doesn’t. Apply this knowledge to your optimization.

Steve also mentioned some other quick ideas:

• Use error pages to your advantage. You can turn a 404-error page into a better experience for the user. You can for example add a site search engine to your 404 error page, as well as quick links to the major pages in your site.
• The REAN model: Reach, Engage, Activate, Nurture.

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Keynote 3
BJ Fogg - The Elements of Behavior Change

BJ Fogg is a professor at Stanford university in California. He has written several books and does classes on human behavior, how to influence it, and how to apply this knowledge to the online realm.

BJ sees three main elements to human behavior that need to be present:
1. Motivation - people need to want to do something
2. Ability - people need to be able to do something
3. Trigger - people need to be triggered to do something

Motivation

There are three core motivators that you can use to create motivation for an action:
- Pleasure / Pain
- Hope / Fear
- Acceptance / Rejection

Use the lightest touch that works. Avoid over-motivation.

Ability

Users need to be able to do what you are asking. Increase the ability factor by simplifying the action, not by training your users. Make your conversion action as simple as you possibly can.
Reduce behavior to one click, one step, one action.

Simplicity has six elements: time, money, physical effort, brain cycles, social deviance, non-routine.

Triggers

There are three types of triggers, tying in to the three elements of behavior change:
1) Facilitator - makes behavior easier
2) Spark - motivates behavior
3) Signal - indicates behavior

Learn what already works for your target behavior and apply it to your own situation.
Often enough the motivation element already exists. Focus on facilitation (ability) and triggers.

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Conclusion

It was a good and informative conference with an informal atmosphere that made it easy to talk to other attendees. The case studies could’ve been better, but for a first-time conference it was very well organized. I’ll seriously consider attending the next one.