Jen Buzza: Fantastic, remember to fill out that survey for us to help us always improve, and remember we’ve got the leaderboard contest, the winner gets a $150 gift card, so please be on that. We’ve got our last session for Web Growth Summit happening right now, so you’re in the right place at the right time, we’ve got experts coming in to talk about a UI/UX-driven route to getting maximum conversions. Remember yesterday we talked about how to get traffic to you, and now we’re talking about, they’re at your door, how do you get them into being customers.

So I’m going to bring up Mario first, Mario, thank you so much for being here, bootstrapping lots of different businesses, you’re a pro, and you’re also an angel investor and B2B market thought leader, so it’s an honor to have you here.

Mario Peshev: Thank you very much, love the bio, I need to see it next time.

Jen Buzza: I love it. And then we have Karlijn here, also super excited, she’s CEO of Rumvision, definitely a pro on this topic, so Karlijn, thank you so much for being here today, this is going to be really exciting.

Karlijn Lowik: Thank you very much for having me.

Jen Buzza: Yeah, this is great. And last we’ve got Laura in the house, Laura, thanks for coming, head of managed services at Omniconvert, a super duper specialist and a very kind person, I can already see the laugh, you guys, we’re going to have fun right now. So thank you all for being here, really excited to dive into these questions. For everybody in the audience, pop your questions into the question and answer tab or the chat and we’ll try to get to them. We’re going to run some polls today along with the survey that’s always running to make us better. So, UX-driven results, we want people converting into clients, that’s what we’re talking about, what are some of the essential UX best practices that a small team can implement without needing expensive training or resources?

Laura Ruczui: Okay, so, first of all, disclaimer, if you want the best results you need to invest the resources if you can, you need somebody to put in the work to keep up with best practices. Now, I understand that some small companies maybe don’t have those resources, but it’s important to keep in mind that if you do, don’t cut corners, because you’ll have the best results if you invest time and money into this.

That being said, basically what you’re doing in order to improve the user experience is trying to understand how your users are using your actual website. The first thing I would recommend is to get a user recording and heat mapping tool, basically you can see how your users are interacting with each page, what they’re clicking on, how much they scroll. I myself like Hotjar as a tool, but there are free options that might work better for small companies, like Clarity.

After that, user feedback, really important, try to have surveys, talk with the people from your customer support because they’re on the first line and know best how your users are interacting with everything. Ensure that you’re tracking everything correctly in Google Analytics or whatever platform you’re using. Look at your competitors and steal what they’re doing, if there’s something they’re doing better, steal from them, I know it sounds horrible but it’s the best way to grow.

Read about accessibility, because if the fonts you’re using are too small to read then you’re not doing anything, because people won’t actually use your website properly. Make it easy for the customer to find what they’re looking for, use easy-to-understand descriptions, and lastly, because it’s my specialty, A/B test every change you do, because otherwise you won’t know what its impact actually is. And over to the other people, because I love it.

Jen Buzza: It’s great, it’s gold. Karlijn?

Karlijn Lowik: Well, I’m very much from the performance perspective, and I would recommend doing all of those things but making sure that you understand the impact, for instance running a Hotjar, do it, but make sure you use the data and maybe don’t use it on slow connections, because it will slow the response time of your website and hinder your clients. Invest in good hosting, make sure your website is fast, like Laura said before, time to first byte is very important, make sure you use a CDN if you can, because if people can never enter your website because it’s so slow, then everything we’re going to discuss after this will simply be non-existent.

I also love accessibility, make sure your website is available for all. About A/B testing, try to look into best practices in your field, because if you have very little data and you’re a small company, think about whether that data will be representative, A/B tests are awesome and there’s so much to learn, but be mindful of the performance cost, so it’s always a bit of a struggle, and make sure both are part of your game plan. I’m not saying don’t A/B test, that’s an awesome solution, but yeah, that’s performance me.

Mario Peshev: Love it, I love both playbooks, not much to add really, great recaps. What I’m going to wrap it up with, and double-click on what Laura and Karlijn both said, is that when it comes to user experience and A/B testing, don’t be afraid to invest 10 to 20% of your experimentation time on wild ideas that you don’t believe are ever going to work. There are lots of examples out there for ad creatives that are very outdated, you’ve all seen that Microsoft Paint creative that says “we’re looking for a designer, obviously ours quit,” so some of these outdated concepts, just trying to go against the wind, may be working pretty well right now.

We see very overly produced YouTube videos and great setups, but when you go more authentic, more realistic, it doesn’t seem overly marketed and it may actually inspire more trust, so trying to think against what’s common in the market is a great idea. The way we approach user experience is we use both playbooks that were mentioned, but we invest normally 15 to 20% for experiments, if we have long pages we also have a very short squeeze page, if we have a light and simple and clean one we also have a dark mode template, if we have a long form we also have one punchy “just call us here.” So making sure that we test assumptions that are most likely not going to work may actually reveal some creativity and uniqueness that’s going to make us stand out.

Jen Buzza: I love that, that’s the visionary, try those big things because it might be the next big thing. What are some key UX metrics we should be focusing on to understand and improve user experience overall?

Karlijn Lowik: Yeah, I’m obviously passing Core Web Vitals is the key user experience on my site speed end. If the page takes forever to load that’s super annoying, but if it shifts around a lot that’s actually the most annoying to me, or if you press a button and it doesn’t visually update, so hey, look, now I have two things in my cart, those are vitally important to me, because I have actually almost thrown out my phone if that didn’t work properly.

Laura Ruczui: Absolutely going on that, we actually have clients that come to us for A/B testing and, for example, their checkout page loads in like 10 seconds, and I’m like, if you don’t improve this there’s literally nothing I can A/B test on your website to make this page work, you need to improve the loading speed. I actually have data of 28 seconds that we worked on with a client, and they were like, that will help me have more conversions, yes, if your website doesn’t function properly people will just leave, it doesn’t matter how pretty it looks.

If we go to the basics, you should obviously look at conversion rate and revenue per user, but I assume everybody does that. Also you should have everything set up in Google Analytics so you can see the drop-off rates between each step in the funnel and see if there are problems, if between the add-to-cart and the actual cart you have a huge dropout rate, then you should investigate that area specifically.

Then you can look at page per session, time on page, session duration, bounce rate, the classic things, cart abandonment rate. But what I’d like to add, you should always look at your user ratings, because that’s a good way to see what your users actually think about your products and website, and if you can implement a customer satisfaction score, an NPS, anything that allows you to gather feedback besides looking in a data platform.

Jen Buzza: Wonderful, anything to add there, Mario?

Mario Peshev: Definitely a great list, so not much to add, what I’d say is definitely look into the type of product we’re talking about, some of the conversations here were for e-commerce, but we also have user onboarding, SaaS, customer service, affiliate, and publishing, so just make sure you’re acquainted with what sort of KPIs and scorecard you’re tracking, and implement it as early as possible.

And since I mentioned scorecard, one of the key things we’re missing is oftentimes we go for an audit once, we know something’s off, we attempt to fix it, but we don’t really have incremental improvements. So one of the most important things we do here is we maintain a scorecard for each department, including when it comes to UX, keeping track of improvements on a weekly basis, that’s extremely important. Sometimes there are core WordPress updates, or a new landing page, that may degrade the entire user experience, and when you keep a clear weekly overview reporting every Monday morning compared to the previous weeks, it’s really easy to see when something goes off and react in no time.

Jen Buzza: I love it. We have a poll running right now on which UX element the audience thinks has the biggest impact, and we’ve only got 20% on visual, so I wanted to ask you all, visual appearance in UX, is it really as crucial as we think it is? Go ahead, Mario.

Mario Peshev: I’m the Microsoft Paint designer one. What we do at least on the agency side is our landing page templates have three different styles, one very enterprise one that looks like an ERP or accounting software, one standard, and one very modern, the ones that are winning awards. We normally stick to three different looks and feels depending on our audience, we definitely see a huge variety of buying behaviors and perceptions in different targets.

We also work with customers targeting, let’s say, stay-at-home females in small towns that are 50 years old, or retired gentlemen in Iowa, and they click on different forms of UI that don’t look like Figma or Intercom or Zendesk or some of the modern-looking fields. So we try to stay attuned to what our customers’ visitors are used to browsing on a daily basis and what user experience they’re getting used to, we don’t want to scare them away with something too foreign, we want to mimic something they’re already used to and still modernize it so it adheres to the latest UX strategies.

Karlijn Lowik: And if I can add something about visual appeal and cruciality, I think accessibility and color blindness is very important to take into account, because if you have buttons or text where the contrast is invisible to someone who has color blindness, which I believe is 16% of males, that’s a lot. For instance, I’m having a hard time telling blue from green in most cases, and it’s just horrible, so think about me please when you design.

The yellow and orange is always a struggle, because then they put it against white and the contrast is off, and that is such a small thing to forget sometimes for designers but so crucial, because you lose 20% of your audience if you’re not careful about your color picking, and that’s just one thing but it can be enormously important.

Laura Ruczui: Absolutely, what you can do to get educated in this area is search for the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, they have a long list of what you should do to improve accessibility on your website and specialized tools that can tell you if a contrast is not sufficient, if the combination of pink and dark gray isn’t the best combination.

And to add to what everybody else said, in my experience I have some clients that come to me and say they want their product detail page to look like the one from Apple, and you should never fall into that pitfall of looking at really huge companies, because they can afford to have their design look a specific way and take chances. If you’re a small company you have to have an interface that users are familiar with and that they don’t need 10 minutes to figure out how to add something to the cart.

Obviously you should have a clean brand image and stick to it, if you use certain colors on social media, use them on the website and be consistent, and if you have the resources build a design system, that’s basically like a brand book on steroids that you can create in Figma or any other design platform, and there you can tell your developers these are the colors we use, this is how a button should look, and that will make your life considerably easier in the long run.

Jen Buzza: Yeah, and just a call-out, I’m having this memory, I believe, Laura, that I met with your company about a year ago under a completely different context, nothing to do with Cloudways, and the logo is ringing out to me, so you practice what you preach, I love it. What other things can people avoid that negatively impact usability, what kind of design elements and practices can we avoid?

Mario Peshev: I’ll jump in here, because we actually faced that today with an agency website, a digital marketing agency that’s very successful and works with Toyota and Audi and stuff in our area, and their testimonials block was broken, it was pretty complex, they put a lot of time and effort in, but it was also clumsy and actually wasn’t working, there were different glitches.

So what I want to call out here is when you go fancy on animations and transitions and very specific elements like parallax and carousels, there’s a pretty significant chance this is not going to render on every single browser, platform, resolution, and device. I always err on the side of being a little more simplistic but at the same time not interfering with the core user experience, we see a lot of these sites breaking, a lot of the pretty themes being very stylish, but the moment you try to change a text it breaks and doesn’t render on tablet.

This is what can break user experience big time, just trying to go fancy, not testing for all possible resolutions, going outside of the grid, negative paddings, and lots of other things happening on the scene. So be careful when you work with any sort of sliders, carousels, transitions, test it extensively, go simple if and when you can, and don’t be surprised if an ad blocker actually blocks a core element on your website.

Karlijn Lowik: Just have your developers be a bit mindful about using a lot of JavaScript, it can make things look very pretty, but it’s very hard for browsers to render it, so it impacts a lot of your performance as well. But also, for a user, I don’t always want to slide everywhere, there’s a lot of research that sliders are bad, and never put any vital information on your second slide, especially in your hero, because no one will go there, that’s one of those things everyone has had discussions about but it’s very important.

Laura Ruczui: Just one small thing to add here, and it’s really small, don’t use text that is embedded on images, it’s something I see a lot, and if you do this it’s bad for SEO, it’s bad if you have users from other countries using Google Translate, and it’s bad for people with visual impediments that use screen readers, because they can’t figure out what that image does.

Jen Buzza: Love it. How can we personalize the user experience on our website in a scalable and manageable way for a small team?

Karlijn Lowik: I’m team page speed, I don’t have a lot of thoughts about that.

Laura Ruczui: Okay, so, in order to understand personalization, the best example I can think of is how people used to interact with the shop attendant in the past, you went into a shop on a regular basis, you got to know the shop attendant, they knew what you liked and gave you recommendations, and because you trusted them you actually bought whatever they suggested, that’s personalization made easy, that’s exactly what you need to do on your website.

It can be something really simple, like just saying “hello Laura” on the hero banner if you know my name and I’m a logged-in user, or you can do a custom carousel for users in a certain city, or a carousel if the weather conditions change, for example if it’s 40 degrees outside like it is here in Romania and you’re an online shop, you can show me ice cream and I will most likely buy it.

Basic basic, group your customers based on their behavior and preferences, we for example like to use the RFM segmentation, recency, frequency, and monetary, a way of grouping your customers based on how often they purchase, the value of their purchases, and when they made their last purchase. This way you have different groups you can target specifically, for example if you have people that used to love you and had a lot of orders but haven’t ordered from you in the past four weeks, then you can make a promotion just for them.

Karlijn Lowik: I actually do have something that I really like as an end user, when I have an email campaign coming at me to promote something and I click around and add things to my basket and then abandon it, an hour or so later I get an email saying, hey, you abandoned your cart, and sometimes that does make me buy it because I got distracted, I have a toddler at home. So if we’re going to talk conversions, that really works very well.

And about personalization, I did have a performance thingy, if you’re going to do the customized ads or tips, make sure you reserve some room for it, or at least have your developer do it, to not get a cumulative layout shift, it’s very easy, just reserve some room for it and then the Core Web Vitals don’t get mad at you, which is good.

Mario Peshev: And mentioning personalized ads, Clearbit now lets you personalize as best as possible when they feed B2B websites with enough information, not just location and name but sometimes company name, industry, or job title, so these are getting a lot more powerful. Right now we have other B2B services, let’s say Snitcher, RB2B, and a bunch of others that are identifying people in real time, and you can use this information to personalize.

Additionally, since Karlijn mentioned the abandoned cart approach, all this could be tied to AI automation, the moment you receive this information on the fly this can trigger an email outreach workflow or even sending a text if you have their number. I know we are crossing some lines, the EU GDPR type of thing, but it’s getting extremely common, particularly in the States, and if you’re not obnoxious and you’re actually helpful it could be pretty handy.

There are lots of cases when people are dealing with their toddlers at home or on the subway or losing coverage, so if they’re looking for an emergency service, right, a dentist office or something, then you better outreach them proactively because they’re definitely in need, you better interrupt them and try to help them as best as possible.

Jen Buzza: That’s fantastic, I love that. I want to shift a little bit over to A/B testing, I know, Karlijn, we talked about it a little bit in the beginning, but I want to hop into A/B testing because we always get lots of questions on this, so what are some of the most effective methods for conducting A/B testing?

Laura Ruczui: What I would start with is ensuring that most of the experiments you’re doing are based on data that you have, it’s always good to test on hunches because that’s the way you get creative, but ensure that most of the A/B tests are based on data you see in Hotjar or your heat map platform, data you’re seeing in Google Analytics, surveys, data you get from your customer support team.

Then try to make a list of all the ideas you have and build a testing roadmap, assess every idea and see how difficult it would be to implement, what the impact would be, and how much traffic you have for that test, because the number of people who see that page affects the sample size needed. Think of doing an experiment on the PDP, the product detail page, versus the about-us page, you’re going to have a lot more traffic on the first one, so it’s not worth, especially for a small company, investing in pages nobody reaches.

When you’re creating an A/B test it’s really important to set the important goals you want to track, don’t just focus on conversion rate and revenue per user, set secondary goals, if you have an experiment on the homepage measure the clicks, if you have one on the navigation banners measure those, if you have one on the product detail page measure add-to-carts.

Try to find each time goals that are important to test, because if you only measure conversion rate and revenue per user, when the test ends, if it’s inconclusive or losing, you won’t have enough data to go forward. And the last thing, if you have a losing or inconclusive experiment, try to drill into the data as much as possible, don’t leave it for dead in a corner, find what you can improve and retest until you find a winning variation.

Mario Peshev: I can double-click on everything Laura said, lots of great insights in terms of research and relying on data. Lots of people wonder where can I find data, so just looking into market research generally is great, we have primary and secondary research, using first-party sources versus industry reports, same goes for qualitative versus quantitative data, in some cases you can get insights on specific questions, in other cases you need a survey.

Where do you do research, there’s branding research, customer research, competitor research, product research, so just go creative in generating assumptions and test ideas. What we do is we have a backlog of tests we want to run over the next two months across most websites, and we’re always generating ideas, assessing, validating, and voting on what we need to test. Unless you know what to look for and go for all these different research paradigms, it’s really hard to come up with great ideas.

And because running tests may seem very expensive, that’s why I believe using even standalone tools that are not even WordPress, hope people are not going to kill me here, but like landing page builders such as Unbounce, Instapage, Leadpages, Carrd, whatever it is, you can run tests faster and run campaigns to copies and duplicates of these pages if you cannot afford building a full redesign. We run tons of these tests on third-party standalone builders, because out of 20 different landing page tests we may end up implementing one or two, so it’s just not worth implementing them for two or three weeks of design and front-end work unless it’s proven and can go into the roadmap.

Jen Buzza: So talking about this, how can businesses measure the impact of their UX improvements on conversion rates, how do we measure the success?

Laura Ruczui: Well, A/B test, because if you A/B test things it’s really easy to see the impact of each change, it’s the easiest way and you have the data right in front of you, it’s not debatable, well, it is a little bit debatable but less debatable than other things, so if you have a correct sample size it should be fine. Other than that, you can have NPS, customer satisfaction surveys, you can actually talk to your users, make a list of your best users and try to schedule a call, we do that sometimes with clients and it’s invaluable, actually speaking to your clients for one hour will yield great results.

Mario Peshev: And looking into data such as Hotjar or Clarity, looking at screencasts and heat maps, it’s normally pretty obvious when users tend to cancel mid-page, and then you implement improvements and they scroll through the rest of the page or there’s a larger pages-per-session, it’s pretty clear to tell when someone’s stuck. Conducting customer interviews is very important, we do ICP interviews at least every quarter, so just getting qualitative and quantitative data to make sure these improvements make sense.

In some cases like e-commerce, especially with page speed, it’s pretty straightforward to measure, but in other cases, using tools like Hotjar and Clarity, we’ve seen websites with contact forms that are failing, there’s a specific field where we see users stuck for 30 seconds wondering what to type, or an industry field that’s not a dropdown and people say, what’s the actual name of my industry, is it the classification or the slang term, and sometimes people are actually going to bounce because of that, so looking at these recordings is really helpful.

Jen Buzza: I love that we’re looking at this in a holistic way, you guys are throwing out these factors of, not just A/B test, we’ve got to talk to people, anything else that comes to mind on how we can impact our conversion rates overall and holistically?

Laura Ruczui: Social proof, so people don’t really trust brands anymore, if any of you buy a product you look at the reviews, right, if the reviews are horrible you don’t buy it no matter how much trust you put in the brand. So social proof is huge and you should use it in as many steps of the funnel as possible, if you’re on e-commerce and don’t have reviews for your products, clients won’t trust you, and it’s important even with software, that’s why people use the logos of the brands that bought the software.

You should build trust and credibility, if you don’t deliver on time or nobody answers the phone at customer service, people will hate you. And try to find ways to stand out from your competitors, have a unique value proposition, if you’re a family brand talk about how you started, people feel more in tune with a brand if they know the story behind it, especially younger generations, so go into detail and tell how you started because it creates a better relationship with your customers.

Mario Peshev: In addition to trust, obviously trust is the most important currency in the world, so you can’t fake it and it’s the most valuable one, two core problems I see, and I just sat on two prospect calls earlier today facing the same dilemma. Number one is poor offers, and Laura mentioned that earlier, you’re just trying to feed your customers something they don’t need, they have to go through features, then benefits, then solutions, it’s too long of a journey, they don’t understand the key components of building a great offer.

I would recommend people go look into some of the common great offer or sales books out there, such as Alex Hormozi’s $100M Leads or $100M Offers, or Sabri Suby’s Sell Like Crazy, there are a couple of books defining specific offer frameworks such as the Grand Slam Offer or the Godfather Offer. So putting your specific offer to the test is one of the best things you can do this year, probably 80% of our business is actually redefining offers and products and value props and testing this extensively, what worked two years ago is no longer working, with budget cuts and micro-recession, so just try to iterate as fast and as best as possible on offers.

One of the reasons A/B testing is so powerful is that having an established framework lets you test not just user experience elements but actual offers, personas, and markets, going into a completely different venture. If you were selling to a CEO of a 200-person B2B Texas business, you may now be selling to a 21-year-old AI crypto millionaire who needs your value proposition bundled and pitched in a completely different way.

And if you wonder how to do offers, once you go through these books and frameworks you can now use AI to feed that same framework, like, hey, Claude, give me a Godfather Offer for that, and it’s going to spit out 10 ideas of the seven-day framework for $9.99 with bullet points and specific value propositions, trust me, I’m using AI 80% of the time just because it’s smarter and faster than me, and it’s going to be a waste of potential not to use it.

Jen Buzza: I love it, and all this bleeds right into my last question, because we’re about to wrap up this amazing panel, but looking forward, we’re in 2024, what do you think is going to be most relevant in UX practices? I really think, Mario, you hit the nail on the head, but I want to open this up.

Laura Ruczui: So, besides AI, which obviously everybody is talking about, you have chatboxes, images generated in Midjourney, you can use it to analyze huge amounts of data a lot faster, and I think of those surveys with open questions that five years ago somebody had to read and analyze, and now AI has made that significantly easier, it groups the responses and tells you what you need to do, it’s chef’s kiss.

But other things would be user-generated content, think of how much brands are starting to invest in Instagram, if you’re a fashion brand and your customers are using Instagram, if you have pictures from your clients with those products they’ll be a lot more effective than anything you can do in the studio, customers trust other users more than they’ll trust you.

Then obviously sustainability, especially going into Gen Z, if you look at all the polls, sustainability is on the rise, people are looking for ethical brands that don’t destroy the planet, so you should have content on your web page and socials talking about what you’re doing to be sustainable, and if you have any social initiatives or activism or you’re donating to a charity, that helps a lot. And obviously, whenever something is becoming huge you also have the reverse, so if AI is getting huge, people start looking into things that are a little more traditional and homey and not so robotic, so based on what you’re selling you might want to take the second route and talk more about your family business instead of going into the AI and super-specialized route.

Jen Buzza: Wonderful, y’all, we are up on time, so thank you so much for being here, the three of you are spectacular, a lot of insight gained today. This is concluding our Web Growth Summit for 2024, we’ve got a lot of exciting things coming up. How was your experience, the three of you?

Laura Ruczui: Good experience being here today.

Jen Buzza: Wonderful, so happy to hear that. So we do have a winner, thank you all for being here, we’ve got a winner for the leaderboard, and I just want to throw this out there as a little secret, we’ve got another event coming up later this year, might it be around a Black Friday Cyber Monday, might it be called Prepathon, maybe, I’m just saying, possibly. For all of you out there, we’re going to announce the winner of the leaderboard right now, thank you so much. We’ve been running a contest this whole time for the leaderboard, and the winner is, it is Ron, congratulations, you get the $150 credit for Cloudways, thank you so much for participating.

Thank you everybody for participating today, this wraps up our session, the recordings of these will be under the schedule tab, and you can head over right now to the Cloudways booth Expo to ask questions and see the exciting offers Cloudways have for you. So thank you all, this is a wrap for our Web Growth Summit, thank you all for being here, until next time, be well.